In 1939, a group of Hungarian scientists that included emigre physicist Leó Szilárd attempted to alert Washington of ongoing Nazi atomic bomb research. The group's warnings were discounted.[65] Einstein and Szilárd, along with other refugees such as Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, "regarded it as their responsibility to alert Americans to the possibility that German scientists might win the race to build an atomic bomb, and to warn that Hitler would be more than willing to resort to such a weapon."[54]:630[66]
In the summer of 1939, a few months before the beginning of World War
II in Europe, Einstein was persuaded to lend his prestige by writing a letter with Szilárd to President Franklin D. Roosevelt
to alert him of the possibility. The letter also recommended that the
U.S. government pay attention to and become directly involved in uranium
research and associated chain reaction research.
The letter is believed to be "arguably the key stimulus for the U.S.
adoption of serious investigations into nuclear weapons on the eve of
the U.S. entry into World War II".[67]
President Roosevelt could not take the risk of allowing Hitler to
possess atomic bombs first. As a result of Einstein's letter and his
meetings with Roosevelt, the U.S. entered the "race" to develop the
bomb, drawing on its "immense material, financial, and scientific
resources" to initiate the Manhattan Project. It became the only country to successfully develop an atomic bomb during World War II.
For Einstein, "war was a disease . . . [and] he called for resistance
to war." But in 1933, after Hitler assumed full power in Germany, "he
renounced pacifism altogether . . . In fact, he urged the Western powers
to prepare themselves against another German onslaught."[68]:110 In 1954, a year before his death, Einstein said to his old friend, Linus Pauling,
"I made one great mistake in my life — when I signed the letter to
President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there was
some justification — the danger that the Germans would make them..."[69]
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