Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson
When he first arrived in Princeton, Einstein had been impressed that America was, or could be, a land free of the rigid class hierarchies and servility in Europe. But what grew to impress him more—and what made him fundamentally such a good American but also a controversial one—was the country’s tolerance of free thought, free speech, and nonconformist beliefs. That had been a touchstone of his science, and now it was a touchstone of his citizenship.
He had forsaken Nazi Germany with the public pronouncement that he would not live in a country where people were denied the freedom to hold and express their own thoughts. “At that time, I did not understand how right I was in my choice of America as such a place,” he wrote in an unpublished essay just after becoming a citizen. “On every side I hear men and women expressing their opinion on candidates for office and the issues of the day without fear of consequences.”
The beauty of America, he said, was that this tolerance of each person’s ideas existed without the “brute force and fear” that had arisen in Europe. “From what I have seen of Americans, I think that life would not be worth living to them without this freedom of self expression.”26 The depth of his appreciation for America’s core value would help explain Einstein’s cold public anger and dissent when, during the McCarthy era a few years later, the nation lapsed into a period marked by the intimidation of those with unpopular views.
More than two years after Einstein and his colleagues had urged attention to the possibility of building atomic weapons, the United States launched the supersecret Manhattan Project. It happened on December 6, 1941, which turned out to be, fittingly enough, the day before Japan launched its attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the nation into the war.
Because so many fellow physicists, such as Wigner, Szilárd, Oppenheimer, and Teller, had disappeared to obscure towns, Einstein was able to surmise that the bomb-making work he had recommended was now proceeding with greater urgency. But he was not asked to join the Manhattan Project, nor was he officially told about it.
There were many reasons he was not secretly summoned to places like Los Alamos or Oak Ridge. He was not a nuclear physicist or a practicing expert in the scientific issues at hand. He was, as noted, considered by some a security risk. And even though he had put aside his pacifist sentiments, he never expressed any desire or made any requests to enlist in the endeavor.
He was, however, offered a bit part that December. Vannevar Bush, the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which oversaw the Manhattan Project, contacted Einstein through the man who had succeeded Flexner as the head of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Frank Aydelotte, and asked for his help on a problem involving the separation of isotopes that shared chemical traits. Einstein was happy to comply. Drawing on his old expertise in osmosis and diffusion, he worked on a process of gaseous diffusion in which uranium was converted into a gas and forced through filters. To preserve secrecy, he was not even allowed to have Helen Dukas or anyone else type up his work, so he sent it back in his careful handwriting.
“Einstein was very much interested in your problem, has worked on it for a couple of days and produced the solution, which I enclose,” Aydelotte wrote Bush. “Einstein asks me to say that if there are other angles of the problem that you want him to develop or if you wish any parts of this amplified, you need only let him know and he will do anything in his power. I very much hope that you will make use of him in any way that occurs to you, because I know how deep is his satisfaction at doing anything which might be useful in the national effort.” As an afterthought, Aydelotte added, “I hope you can read his handwriting.”27
The scientists who received Einstein’s paper were impressed, and they discussed it with Vannevar Bush. But in order for Einstein to be more useful, they said, he should be given more information about how the isotope separation fit in with other parts of the bomb-making challenge.
Bush refused. He knew that Einstein would have trouble getting a security clearance. “I do not feel that I ought to take him into confidence on the subject to the extent of showing just where this thing fits into the defense picture,” Bush wrote Aydelotte. “I wish very much that I could place the whole thing before him and take him fully into confidence, but this is utterly impossible in view of the attitude of people here in Washington who have studied his whole history.”28
Later, during the war, Einstein helped with less secret matters. A Navy lieutenant came to visit him at the Institute to enlist him in analyzing ordnance capabilities. He was enthusiastic. As Aydelotte noted, he had felt neglected since his brief flurry of work on uranium isotopes. Among the issues Einstein explored, as part of a $25-per-day consulting arrangement, were ways to shape the placement of sea mines in Japanese harbors, and his friend the physicist George Gamow got to come pick his brain on a variety of topics. “I am in the Navy, but not required to get a Navy haircut,” Einstein joked to colleagues, who probably had trouble picturing him with a crew cut.29
Einstein also helped the war effort by donating a manuscript of his special relativity paper to be auctioned off for a War Bond drive. It was not the original version; he had thrown that away back when it was published in 1905, not knowing it would ever be worth millions. To re-create the manuscript, he had Helen Dukas read the paper to him aloud as he copied down the words. “Did I really say it that way?” he griped at one point. When Dukas assured him that he had, Einstein lamented, “I could have put it much more simply.” When he heard that the manuscript, along with one other, had sold for $11.5 million, he declared that “economists will have to revise their theories of value.”30
Atomic Fears
The physicist Otto Stern, who had been one of Einstein’s friends since their days together in Prague, had been secretly working on the Manhattan Project, mainly in Chicago, and had a good sense by the end of 1944 that it would be successful. That December, he made a visit to Princeton. What Einstein heard upset him. Whether or not the bomb was used in the war, it would change the nature of both war and peace forever. The policymakers weren’t thinking about that, he and Stern agreed, and they must be encouraged to do so before it was too late.
So Einstein decided to write to Niels Bohr. They had sparred over quantum mechanics, but Einstein trusted his judgment on more earthly issues. Einstein was one of the few people to know that Bohr, who was half Jewish, was secretly in the United States. When the Nazis overran Denmark, he had made a daring escape by sailing with his son in a small boat to Sweden. From there he had been flown to Britain, given a fake passport with the name Nicholas Baker, then sent to America to join the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos.
Einstein wrote to Bohr, using his real name, in care of Denmark’s embassy in Washington, and somehow the letter got to him. In it Einstein described his worrisome talk with Stern about the dearth of thinking about how to control atomic weapons in the future. “The politicians do not appreciate the possibilities and consequently do not know the extent of the menace,” Einstein wrote. Once again, he made his argument that it would take an empowered world government to prevent an arms race once the age of atomic weaponry arrived. “Scientists who know how to get a hearing with political leaders,” Einstein urged, “should bring pressure on the political leaders in their countries in order to bring about an internationalization of military power.”31
Thus began what would be the political mission that would dominate the remaining decade of Einstein’s life. Since his days as a teenager in Germany, he had been repulsed by nationalism, and he had long argued that the best way to prevent wars was to create a world authority that had the right to resolve disputes and the military power to impose its resolutions. Now, with the impending advent of a weapon so awesome that it could transform both war and peace, Einstein viewed this approach as no longer an ideal but a necessity.
Bohr was unnerved by Einstein’s letter, but not for the reason Einstein would have hoped. The Dane shared his desire for the internationalization of atomic weaponry, and he h
So upon receiving Einstein’s letter, Bohr hurried to Princeton. He wanted to protect his friend by warning him to be circumspect, and he also hoped to repair his own reputation by reporting to government officials on what Einstein said.
During their private talk at the Mercer Street house, Bohr told Einstein that there would be “the most deplorable consequences” if anyone who knew about the development of the bomb shared that information. Responsible statesmen in Washington and London, Bohr assured him, were aware of the threat caused by the bomb as well as “the unique opportunity for furthering a harmonious relationship between nations.”
Einstein was persuaded. He promised that he would refrain from sharing any information he had surmised and would urge his friends not do anything to complicate American or British foreign policy. And he immediately set out to make good on his word by writing a letter to Stern that was, for Einstein, remarkable in its circumspection. “I have the impression that one must strive seriously to be responsible, that one does best not to speak about the matter for the time being, and that it would in no way help, at the present moment, to bring it to public notice,” he said. He was careful not to reveal anything, even that he had met with Bohr. “It is difficult for me to speak in such a nebulous way, but for the moment I cannot do anything else.”33
Einstein’s only intervention before the end of the war was prompted again by Szilárd, who came to visit in March 1945 and expressed anxiety about how the bomb might be used. It was clear that Germany, now weeks away from defeat, was not making a bomb. So why should the Americans rush to complete one? And shouldn’t policymakers think twice about using it against Japan when it might not be needed to secure victory?
Einstein agreed to write another letter to President Roosevelt urging him to meet with Szilárd and other concerned scientists, but he went out of his way to feign ignorance. “I do not know the substance of the considerations and recommendations which Dr. Szilárd proposes to submit to you,” Einstein wrote. “The terms of secrecy under which Dr. Szilárd is working at present do not permit him to give me information about his work; however, I understand that he now is greatly concerned about the lack of adequate contact between scientists who are doing this work and those members of your Cabinet who are responsible for formulating policy.”34
Roosevelt never read the letter. It was found in his office after he died on April 12 and was passed on to Harry Truman, who in turn gave it to his designated secretary of state, James Byrnes. The result was a meeting between Szilárd and Byrnes in South Carolina, but Byrnes was neither moved nor impressed.
The atom bomb was dropped, with little high-level debate, on August 6, 1945, on the city of Hiroshima. Einstein was at the cottage he rented that summer on Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, taking an afternoon nap. Helen Dukas informed him when he came down for tea. “Oh, my God,” is all he said.35
Three days later, the bomb was used again, this time on Nagasaki. The following day, officials in Washington released a long history, compiled by Princeton physics professor Henry DeWolf Smyth, of the secret endeavor to build the weapon. The Smyth report, much to Einstein’s lasting discomfort, assigned great historic weight for the launch of the project to the 1939 letter he had written to Roosevelt.
Between the influence imputed to that letter and the underlying relationship between energy and mass that he had formulated forty years earlier, Einstein became associated in the popular imagination with the making of the atom bomb, even though his involvement was marginal. Time put him on its cover, with a portrait showing a mushroom cloud erupting behind him with E=mc2 emblazoned on it. In a story that was overseen by an editor named Whittaker Chambers, the magazine noted with its typical prose flair from the period:
Through the incomparable blast and flame that will follow, there will be dimly discernible, to those who are interested in cause & effect in history, the features of a shy, almost saintly, childlike little man with the soft brown eyes, the drooping facial lines of a world-weary hound, and hair like an aurora borealis . . . Albert Einstein did not work directly on the atom bomb. But Einstein was the father of the bomb in two important ways: 1) it was his initiative which started U.S. bomb research; 2) it was his equation (E = mc2) which made the atomic bomb theoretically possible.36
It was a perception that plagued him. When Newsweek did a cover on him, with the headline “The Man Who Started It All,” Einstein offered a memorable lament. “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb,” he said, “I never would have lifted a finger.”37
Of course, neither he nor Szilárd nor any of their friends involved with the bomb-building effort, many of them refugees from Hitler’s horrors, could know that the brilliant scientists they had left behind in Berlin, such as Heisenberg, would fail to unlock the secrets. “Perhaps I can be forgiven,” Einstein said a few months before his death in a conversation with Linus Pauling, “because we all felt that there was a high probability that the Germans were working on this problem and they might succeed and use the atomic bomb and become the master race.”38
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
ONE-WORLDER
1945–1948
Portrait by Philippe Halsman, 1947
Arms Control
For a few weeks after the dropping of the atom bomb, Einstein was uncharacteristically reticent. He fended off reporters who were knocking at his door in Saranac Lake, and he even declined to give a quote to his summer neighbor Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, when he called.1
It was only as he was about to leave his summer rental in mid-September, more than a month after the bombs had been dropped, that Einstein agreed to discuss the issue with a wire service reporter who came calling. The point he stressed was that the bomb reinforced his longtime support for world federalism. “The only salvation for civilization and the human race lies in the creation of world government,” he said. “As long as sovereign states continue to have armaments and armaments secrets, new world wars will be inevitable.”2
As in science, so it was in world politics for Einstein: he sought a unified set of principles that could create order out of anarchy. A system based on sovereign nations with their own military forces, competing ideologies, and conflicting national interests would inevitably produce more wars. So he regarded a world authority as realistic rather than idealistic, as practical rather than naïve.
He had been circumspect during the war years. He was a refugee in a nation that was using its military might for noble rather than nationalistic goals. But the end of the war changed things. So did the dropping of the atom bombs. The increase in the destructive power of offensive weaponry led to a commensurate increase in the need to find a world structure for security. It was time for him to become politically outspoken again.
For the remaining ten years of his life, his passion for advocating a unified governing structure for the globe would rival that for finding a unified field theory that could govern all the forces of nature. Although distinct in most ways, both quests reflected his instincts for transcendent order. In addition, both would display Einstein’s willingness to be a nonconformist, to be serenely secure in challenging prevailing attitudes.
The month after the bombs were dropped, a group of scientists signed a statement urging that a council of nations be created to control atomic weaponry. Einstein responded with a letter to J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had so successfully led the scientific efforts at Los Alamos. He was pleased with the sentiments behind the statement, Einstein said, but he criticized the political recommendations as “obviously inadequate” because they retained
Oppenheimer politely pointed out that “the statements you attributed to me are not mine.” They had been written by another group of scientists. He did, nevertheless, challenge Einstein’s argument for a full-fledged world government: “The history of this nation up through the Civil War shows how difficult the establishment of a federal authority can be when there are profound differences in the values of the societies it attempts to integrate.”3 Oppenheimer thus became the first of many postwar realists to disparage Einstein for being allegedly too idealistic. Of course, one could flip his argument by noting that the Civil War showed in gruesome terms the danger of not having a secure federal authority instead of state military sovereignty when there are differences of values among member states.
What Einstein envisioned was a world “government” or “authority” that had a monopoly on military power. He called it a “supranational” entity, rather than an “international” one, because it would exist above its member nations rather than as a mediator among sovereign nations.4 The United Nations, which was founded in October 1945, did not come close to meeting these criteria, Einstein felt.
Over the next few months, Einstein fleshed out his proposals in a series of essays and interviews. The most important arose from an exchange of fan letters he had with Raymond Gram Swing, a commentator on ABC radio. Einstein invited Swing to visit him in Princeton, and the result was an article by Einstein, as told to Swing, in the November 1945 issue of the Atlantic called “Atomic War or Peace.”5