Fiery Einstein letter warning of ‘dreadful danger for all mankind’ hits auction block
A letter that Albert Einstein Prison in 1952 for a Japanese newspaper was auctioned. Entitled “On my participation in the Project of Bomb Atom”, ” the document Details of Einstein’s reflections on the world’s nuclear weapon race after being invited to an editor -in -chief of magazine to defend its support for the American nuclear weapons program during the Second World War.
Einstein was not involved in the development directly of the atomic bomb, but in August 1939, he wrote a letter now infamous to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party were probably on the verge of atomic weapons. It prompted Roosevelt to launch a secret nuclear program in the United States, which has become known as Manhattan project.
Permanent pacifist, Einstein then felt remorse for his part by persuading the United States to deploy – and to deploy later – the atomic bomb. Towards the end of his life, he called his letter to Roosevelt his “a big mistake”.
“To kill in war time, it seems to me that it is by no means [sic] Better than common murder, “he wrote in the 1952 letter.
According to Bonhams, which sells the letter at auction, the missive was written in response to Katsu Hara, the longtime friend of Einstein and editor -in -chief of the Japanese magazine “Kaizō”, who sent the physicist a series of letters after the Second World War. In one, he asked frankly: “Why did you cooperate with the production of atomic bomb Although you are aware of its enormous destructive power? “”
Coming from a colleague whose country had so recently been devastated by two American atomic bomb strikes – the United States has exploded atomic bombs Hiroshima and Nagasaki On August 6 and 9, 1945, killing more than 100,000 people – the question seems to have struck a nerve with Einstein.
“I was well aware of the terrible danger for all humanity, if these experiences succeeded,” replied Einstein in the letter. However, “I haven’t seen any other outcome,” he wrote, adding that the prospect of building an atomic weapon first was too serious for him to ignore it.
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In the letter, Einstein continued to defend “the radical abolition of war”. He called the Mahatma Gandhi “the greatest political genius of our time” and congratulated the non -violent protest movement of Gandhi against British colonial domination over India as a model of liberation and political action.
Hara published the letter in her original German, as well as a Japanese translation in 1952. The letter on sale is the first English version, which was translated in 1953 by the theoretical physicist Herbert Jehle with the help of Einstein, according to Bonhams.
The document has the signing of Einstein at the bottom, as well as crumbled corrections on the typing of the text. Jehle published this version in the Newsletter Society for Social Responsibility in Science, of which he was editor -in -chief.
The auction ends on June 24 and the letter is expected to sell between $ 100,000 and $ 150,000.
