JNS
The typed letter, which the Jewish physicist corrected and signed by hand, addresses “my participation in the atom bomb project.”
A one-page letter that Bonhams calls Albert Einstein’s “most thorough and direct statement” about his connection to the development of the atomic bomb is to be sold on June 24, when the global auctioneer expects it to fetch $100,000 to $150,000.
The Jewish physicist signed the typed manuscript “A. Einstein” by hand and corrected a word in the last paragraph. In the document, he refers to his 1939 letter to then-U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt that using “uranium made it probable that large amounts of power could be produced by a chain reaction and that, by harnessing this power, the construction of ‘extremely powerful bombs’ was conceivable,” the U.S. Department of Energy states.
“Einstein believed the German government was actively supporting research in this area and urged the United States government to do likewise,” per the department. “Einstein drafted his famous letter with the help of the Hungarian émigré physicist Leo Szilard, one of a number of European scientists, who had fled to the United States in the 1930s to escape Nazi and Fascist repression.”
The English letter, which Bonhams is offering, belongs to the heirs of Einstein’s friend Herbert Jehle (1907-1983), a physicist and editor of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science newsletter.
Einstein first published the English translation of a prior statement that ran in a Japanese journal in Jehle’s newsletter.
After Japan lifted a ban on publishing images of the bomb’s destruction, Katsu Hara, who edited the magazine Kaizō, sent Einstein “a series of questions on the destructive power of the atomic bomb and its implications, ending with the direct address, ‘Why did you cooperate with the production of the atomic bomb although you were aware of its tremendous destructive power?’” according to Bonhams.
“Einstein responded in German with this statement, aware that it would be for publication,” the auctioneer stated. It added that the “heavily corrected” German draft is at the Einstein Archive at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“During his final decade, Einstein was often questioned about his role in the atomic bomb’s creation,” the auctioneer said. “Despite being linked to it since 1945, this statement clearly refutes that association while acknowledging the letter he sent to Roosevelt, explaining he had no other choice.”
“My participation in the production of the atom bomb consisted in a single act,” Einstein began the letter, which is also up for auction. “I signed a letter to President Roosevelt.”
“I was well aware of the dreadful danger for all mankind if these experiments would succeed. But the probability that the Germans might work on that very problem with good chance of success prompted me to take that step,” he wrote. “I did not see any other way out, although I always was a convinced pacifist.”
“To kill in war time, it seems to me, is in no ways better than common murder,” he added.
But “as long, however, as nations are not ready to abolish war by common action and to solve their conflicts in a peaceful way on a legal basis, they feel compelled to prepare for war,” he wrote.
