When we talk of nuclear power our minds often go to one of the world’s greatest scientist the Jewish born Albert Einstein. The international magazine Newsweek did a cover story on him, with the headline “The Man Who Started It All.” This was a perception fostered by the U.S. government. It had released an official history of the atom bomb project that assigned great weight to a letter scientist Einstein had written to the then United States President Franklin Roosevelt warning of the destructive potential of an atomic
chain reaction.
At the start of his scientific work, scientist Einstein realised the inadequacies of Newtonian mechanics and his special theory of relativity stemmed from an attempt to reconcile the laws of mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. He dealt with classical problems of statistical mechanics and problems in which they were merged with quantum theory.
All of this troubled Einstein. “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb,” he told Newsweek, “I never would have lifted a finger.” He pointed out, correctly, that he had never actually worked on the bomb project. And he claimed to a Japanese publication, “My participation in the production of the atom bomb consisted in a single act: I signed a letter to President Roosevelt.” Neither the public image nor the personal protests capture the true, complex story of scientist Einstein and the bomb. Contrary to common belief, scientist Einstein knew little about the nuclear particle physics
underlying the bomb.
The story begins with Leó Szilárd, a charming and slightly eccentric Hungarian physicist who was an old friend of scientist Einstein’s. While living in Berlin in the 1920s, they had collaborated on the development of a new type of refrigerator, which they patented but were unable to market successfully. After the scientist Szilárd fled the Nazis, he made his way to England and then New York, where he worked at Columbia University on ways to create a nuclear chain reaction, an idea he had conceived while waiting at a stoplight in London a few years earlier. When he heard of the discovery of fission using uranium, scientist Szilárd realized that the element might be used to
produce this phenomenon.
Scientist Szilárd discussed the possibility with his friend Eugene Wigner, another refugee physicist from Budapest, and they began to worry that the Germans might try to buy up the uranium supplies of the Congo, which was then a colony of Belgium. But how, they asked themselves, could two Hungarian refugees find a way to warn the Belgians? Then scientist Szilárd recalled that his friend Einstein happened to be friends with that Commonwealth country’s Queen Elizabeth.
So it is clear that scientist Einstein had little to do with the atom bomb and nuclear development for war purposes. Indeed scientist Einstein has said “Concern for people and their fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.’
This clarification of Albert Einstein’s role is important as the United Nations later this month marks the international day against nuclear tests. In a statement the UN says since nuclear weapons testing began on 16 July 1945, nearly 2,000 nuclear tests have taken place.
In the early days of nuclear testing little consideration was given to its devastating effects on human life, let alone the dangers of nuclear fallout from atmospheric tests. Hindsight and history have shown us the terrifying and tragic effects of nuclear weapons testing, especially when controlled conditions go awry, and in light of the far more powerful and destructive nuclear weapons that exist today.
The UN has called for increasing awareness and education about the effects of nuclear weapon test explosions or any other nuclear explosions and the need for their cessation as one of the means of achieving the goal of a nuclear-weapon-free world.
For the past few years Pope Francis has been having a dialogue with leaders of other religions to push for a ban on nuclear weapons. The hundreds of billions of dollars saved by such a ban could help find a sustainable solution to the world’s biggest crises such as poverty alleviation and climate change issues.
