Albert Einstein Quotes
In another war the bombs will be plentiful and they will be comparatively cheap. Unless there is a determination not to use them that is stronger than can be noted today among American political and military leaders, and on the part of the public itself, atomic warfare will be hard to avoid....
As the atomic bomb evolved to the hydrogen bomb and the test results were learned by political and military leaders, the perception of the danger became much greater, especially when the Russians and French also developed their nuclear weapons. After that, and Einstein’s predictions about the cost and quantity, leaders in the world all became conscious of the danger of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), most leaders realized that it was impossible see atomic weapons as anything but defense.
Albert Einstein, 1879-1955, Nobel laureate in Physics, "Atomic War or Peace", The Atlantic Monthly, November 1947
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
One new danger that nuclear powers add to the usual problems of conflict, is that a nuclear power, about to lose a war in a humiliating way, might just use his nuclear weapons in revenge. So much damage will be done that the victory turned out to have been a bad thing. So ironically, with a nuclear enemy. Your military dare not win to dominantly with conventional weapons.
This quotation is very important in helping to understand the 1950s in America with respect to nuclear weapons policy. McCormick was one the better educated, sophisticated, and influential Americans. Yet he appears to be a technological and nuclear ignoramous. Most people had not yet realized that atomic weapons were not just much larger traditional bombs. They could do terrible damage, but it would always be localized they thought. Chicago might be destroyed but the people out of range would be OK. He never got it that a dirty bomb could be dropped on Detroit and depending on which way the wind is blowing could wipe out Chicago and much of the Midwest as well. He knew nothing of the genetic effect the radiation, nor the implications for the environment of maintaining a large nuclear manufacturing industry. He and many like him did not realize that after the first bombs were created, how easy it would be for the Russians and others to also develop a nuclear arsenal. And 50,000 warheads was just a matter of effort. The implications of these things would inhibit our carrying out his and others ideological views of foreign policy. Oppenheimer and most nuclear scientists explained all this, but believing them and acting on those beliefs would have been too much of a change.
1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma
He was playing the part of Captain Mandrake.
Germany had some world class physicists. Our scientists, military intelligence people, and political leadership assumed that the Germans were also seeking to develop the Atomic Bomb. Ironically, it turned out that they were not, and what Truman reported in this quotation was untrue (although that was not fully known at the time.) Einstein and several of the scientists who were early pioneers in modern physics were Jewish, and Hitler referred to the study of nuclear fission and fusion as “Jewish Science.” As a result, the German government did not commit the resources to the development of an atomic bomb. Instead, they were betting on the development of the Jet Airplane which they succeeded in deploying against the Allies at the end of the war. But they did not have enough or enough pilots left alive to fly them, and Germany was overrun by the Allied Troops. Prior to Truman’s erroneous report about the German development of an atomic bomb, there had only been one piece of evidence that the Germans were not developing one. An OSS secret agent, Moe Berg, had talked with Werner Heisenberg, at a Swiss scientific conference during the war. He was going to assassinate the greatest of the German physicists if Berg thought he was working on a nuclear device. Berg concluded from his discussions that Heisenberg did not know enough about nuclear fission to have been working on that. Berg did not kill Heisenberg, and reported that he did not think the Germans were developing a bomb as if they were Heisenberg would have been deeply involved. However, the American intelligence people and the American scientists, did not trust Berg’s analysis and conclusion. Berg was not a trained scientist. He was a professional baseball player—the NY Yankee backup catcher to Bill Dickey. He was a college graduate, a brilliant guy and a very fast learner who had studied physics books and papers before his assignment. Berg turned out to have been right, but that was not confirmed until a few years after the war. Truman had relied on an incorrect intelligence estimate when he made this quotation. It was not the first such error of intelligence analysis in American history and it would not be the last.
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest physicists of all time. Einstein is known for developing the theory of relativity, but he also made important contributions to the development of the theory of quantum mechanics. Relativity and quantum mechanics are together the two pillars of modern physics. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which arises from relativity theory, has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation". His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory. His intellectual achievements and originality resulted in "Einstein" becoming synonymous with "genius".
