How a Refrigerator Led to Einstein’s Pleas for Atomic Bomb Research
Albert Einstein is perhaps most famous for introducing the world to the equation E=mc2. In essence, he discovered that energy and mass are interchangeable, setting the stage for nuclear power—and atomic weapons. His part in the drama of nuclear war may have ended there if not for a simple refrigerator.
In the 1920s, while living in Berlin, the physicist collaborated with Hungarian graduate assistant Leo Szilárd to develop and patent an energy-efficient fridge. While their design never went to market, the duo’s work ultimately embroiled Einstein—an avowed pacifist—in the race to create an atomic bomb during World War II.
Now, more than seven decades since nuclear explosions ripped through Hiroshima and Nagasaki, United Nations member states are negotiating the first-ever treaty to ban nuclear weapons worldwide. It’s something Einstein himself argued for vehemently in his later life, as he struggled with the deadly consequences of his scientific creation.
“His brilliance was also his downfall,” says National Geographic Fulbright Fellow Ari Beser. “The revolution that came with the splitting of the atom requires a moral one as well.”
CHAIN REACTION
Even after Szilárd and Einstein ended their partnership over appliances, the two scientists stayed in touch.
In 1933, the same year Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Szilárd discovered the nuclear chain reaction—the process that unleashes the energy locked in atoms to create enormous explosions. And by 1939, he had become convinced that German scientists might be using current scientific developments to develop an atomic weapon.
So he approached his one-time colleague—then the world’s most famous scientist—and asked him to warn U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Szilárd visited Einstein in New York with two fellow refugees, Hungarian physicists Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner. When they told him about the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction, Einstein was shocked at the danger posed by his 1905 special theory of relativity.
“He certainly was not thinking about this theory as a weapon,” says Cynthia Kelly, president of the Atomic Heritage Foundation, a nonprofit organization she founded to preserve and interpret the Manhattan Project and its broader legacy. But “he quickly got the concept.”
Together with the other scientists, Einstein drafted a letter to Roosevelt that warned of what might happen if Nazi scientists beat the United States to an atom bomb.
“It appears almost certain that [a nuclear chain reaction] could be achieved in the immediate future,” he wrote, sounding the alarm on “extremely powerful bombs of a new type,” and advising that Roosevelt fund an initiative to research atomic energy.
Roosevelt took the warning seriously. On October 21, 1939, two months after receiving the letter and just days after Germany’s invasion of Poland, the Roosevelt-appointed Advisory Committee on Uranium met for the first time. It was the forerunner of the Manhattan Project, the top-secret government project that eventually invented a working atom bomb.
Read more at National Geographic
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