Nuclear weapons are unique among weapons systems – they are capable of destroying civilization and possibly the human species. Nuclear weapons kill massively and indiscriminately. They are powerful. They are also illegal, immoral and cowardly. They are long-distance killing machines, instruments of annihilation. They place the human future in jeopardy. In spite of all of this, or perhaps because of it, these weapons seem to bestow prestige upon their creators and possessors.
Nuclear weapons were first created by scientists and engineers working in the US nuclear weapons program, the Manhattan Project, during World War II. The project began simply and, ironically, with a letter to President Roosevelt from a great man of peace and humanitarian, Albert Einstein, who also happened to be the greatest and most celebrated scientist of his time. Later, after the use of the US nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Einstein would lament having written the letter to Roosevelt.
By examining the subsequent responses of three leading scientists whose earlier work had involved them in significant ways with the creation of nuclear weapons, I will show how they set an example for scientists today. I will seek to answer these questions: Do the scientists who created nuclear weapons have special responsibility for these weapons? Do scientists today continue to have responsibility for nuclear weapons?
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein is one of great men of the 20th century, and one of the men I most admire. His penetrating intellect changed our view of the world. His understanding of the relationship between mass and energy, as contained in his famous formula E=mc2, gave the original theoretical insight into the power of mass converted to energy. Einstein, however, for all his theoretical brilliance, did not foresee the potential power that might be released by the atom and give rise to nuclear weapons.
By 1939 Einstein was living in the United States, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, and had a position at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. A fellow physicist and friend, Leo Szilard, a Hungarian refugee from Nazi Germany, became concerned that the Germans would develop an atomic weapon and use it to defeat the Allied powers fighting against Hitler. Szilard came to Einstein, explained his fear, and asked Einstein to sign a letter explaining the danger to President Franklin Roosevelt. The letter that Einstein sent said that “uranium may turn into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future,” and that, while not certain, “extremely powerful bombs of a new type may be constructed.” The letter called upon the President Roosevelt to have his administration maintain contact with “a group of physicists working on chain reactions in America.” The letter led Roosevelt to take the first steps toward what would become the Manhattan Project, a very large US government program to create atomic weapons. President Roosevelt set up an Advisory Committee on Uranium, headed by Lyman J. Briggs, to evaluate where the US stood with regard to uranium research and to recommend what role the US government should play.
Einstein never worked on the Manhattan Project to make the atomic bomb, and was deeply disturbed and saddened when the bombs were used on Japan. He was reported to have said later, “If only I had known, I would have become a watch maker.” Einstein would join and lend his name to many organizations working to control and eliminate nuclear weapons during the final ten years of his life after the bombs were used. He was also outspoken in his condemnation of atomic weapons. He fought against the development of the hydrogen bomb. In 1946, Einstein joined a group of atomic scientists that formed the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists. Einstein and his fellow trustees of the Emergency Committee released a statement at the end of a conference held in Princeton in November 1946 that included the following “facts…accepted by all scientists”