[FirstClassSkeptic]

Some say it may have actually been Szilard who wrote the letter. Written in the office of Alexander Sachs, at Lehman Brothers bank, correct?

F.D. Roosevelt
President of the United States
White House
Washington DC

Sir:


Some recent work by E Fermi and L Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration. I believe therefore that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations:

In the course of the last four months it has been made probable through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America - that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.

This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable - though much less certain - that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.

The United States has only very poor ores of uranium in moderate quantities. There is some good ore in Canada and the former Czechoslovakia, while the most important source of uranium is Belgian Congo. In view of the situation you may think it desirable to have more permanent contact maintained between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America. One possible way of achieving this might be for you to entrust with this task a person who has your confidence and who could perhaps serve in an unofficial capacity. His task might comprise the following:
to approach Government Departments, keep them informed of the further development, and put forward recommendations for Government action, particular attention to the problem of securing a supply of uranium ore for the United States;
to speed up the experimental work, which is at present being carried on within the limits of the budgets of university laboratories, by providing funds, if such funds be required, through his contacts with private persons who are willing to make contributions for this cause, perhaps also by obtaining the co-operation of industrial laboratories which have the necessary equipment.

I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over. That she should have taken such early action might perhaps be understood on the ground that the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, von Weizsäcker, is attached to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in Berlin where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated.
Yours very truly,

Albert Einstein

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A13481651

[FirstClassSkeptic]

http://books.google.com/books?id=4AUAAA ... ce&f=false

Benard Baruch was another candidate to deliver the letter to FDR.

[rerevisionist]

Einstein's English was pretty much non-existent - watch newsreel film of him, for example.

I'm currently reading up on these Hungarian Jews (Edward Teller was another) and it's curious that many studied engineering and only turned to physics later. I'm working on the idea that they formed a group, basically to make themselves comfortable (they were all refugees, after all). Szilard seems to have been an engineering type (he later studied thermodynamics, important in chemical engineering; and invented the cyclotron, and a refrigerator of all things, along with Einstein, a patent clerk). My best guess is that Sachs would arrange public money to them, as an intermediary of someone like Rothschild; Szilard thought up the fantasy - he was a fan of H G Wells, one of whose novels (pubd. 1914) has an atomic bomb of a tame sort. Teller seems to have been the admin type and his unpleasant character was a sort of camouflage which allowed him to sack non-Jews without people noticing the pattern - they just thought he was being typically nasty. There were a few mathematicians to dress up the ideas - Einstein had a tame mathematician to write up stuff and look convincing. I think the group of them, between themselves, rigged up frauds, one after the other, and the process is still going on. The letter to FDR (and the earlier letter on fission) were I think part of this process. I also think a few awkward customers were killed. Lindemann in England (science advisor to Churchill - renamed 'Lord Cherwell' to sound British) was the same type. In fact I wonder if Sakharov was also a Jew. Herman Kahn was a technological publicist type - inventing assorted things like cobalt bombs. It's not credible to me that Kahn and Teller were serious about their bomb scares - Kahn wrote on the next 200 years, Teller said he wanted fairly free publication of nuclear ideas.

[Note on Lindemann/ Cherwell: David Irving is his 2015 talk on Churchill's bombing of Germany stated Lindemann wasn't Jewish, or even German. His source was a biography, The Prof by Roy Harrod. Another Harrod biography was of Keynes; it's possible Harrod was a Robert Jungk type, charged with the task of producing seemingly independent books to 'sanitise' history - Rerev 4 Aug 2015]

[rerevisionist]

Keywords for atom bombs and nuclear weapon scams @mooninquirer - good point re keywords such as atom bomb, nuclear bomb, nuclear bomb fraud, nuclear bomb hoax and so on; we've done our best on this issue, but it's difficult - for one thing, the opposition pro-nukes lobby has vast numbers of sites & need only change a few keywords or change emphasis to swamp our site. I don't think we're doing too badly - we show up on the first page of some google searches, such as 'nuke lies' 'inventing H bomb' 'Hiroshima fraud' 'nuclear bomb lies' 'H bomb fake'. With proper names we do perhaps better - 'James Randi nuke' 'Oppenheimer nuclear fraud' 'Bertrand Russell nuke' 'Gen Groves fake bomb' 'submarines nuclear codes' 'Do Catholics rule' ....

For some reason, Bing is less good (but it doesn't have the absurd antipodean hoax).
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Einstein: ... A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air. ...

I don't know if you noticed this bit. 'Too heavy for transportation' must mean many tons. And he must have been thinking of uranium isotopes. Now, uranium is dense, but, even so, planes at that time could carry a lot. Einstein must have been thinking that a critical mass was huge. This would make it unusable as a weapon except maybe carried by ship, as he says in that letter.

Now the question I want to ask is: many scientists, including Rutherford, J B S Haldane, Bohr and for that matter Admiral Leahy, all thought a chain reaction simply couldn't happen. There are quite a few possible reasons: perhaps the nucleus was too small, or perhaps the length of time neutrons would take in total was too large, or perhaps the chance of the nucleus splitting, even if hit, was too small; perhaps the mass might start melting or evaporating; perhaps there just wasn't enough U235 in the world; perhaps as Einstein's letter suggests the critical mass would be enormous; perhaps the heat generated was over-estimated ... there are quite a few reasons why an atomic explosion might be impossible. BUT no calculations are ever shown! My book collection including pre-1945 books has no mathematical proof of the impossibility, with, presumably, a later correction showing where it went wrong. And yet these people MUST have had some reason for their claim! They were accustomed to calculations; it's simply incredible that they didn't play around with mathematical models of putative nuclear explosions. I'd suggest these calculations and reasons existed, but have been suppressed and ignored as part of the atom bomb propaganda.

[FirstClassSkeptic]

If you go to that second link I posted, it goes to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and discusses the letter, and a few others. I think it says Szilard wrote the letter. Anyway, Sachs only read the first and last paragraph of the letter to FDR.

Also, you might notice in that article that is says Szilard spend a lot of time talking to graphite manufacturers in order to get pure graphite, with no boron. Because, the article says, a moderator was needed in order to have a chain reaction.