It was the forerunner of the Manhattan Project, the top-secret government project that eventually invented a working atom bomb. On October 21, 1939, two months after receiving the letter and just days after Germany’s invasion of Poland, the Roosevelt-appointed Advisory Committee on Uranium met for the first time. “It appears almost certain that could be achieved in the immediate future,” he wrote, sounding the alarm on “extremely powerful bombs of a new type,” and advising that Roosevelt fund an initiative to research atomic energy.
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Together with the other scientists, Einstein drafted a letter to Roosevelt that warned of what might happen if Nazi scientists beat the United States to an atom bomb. ( 10 things you probably didn't know about Einstein.) “He certainly was not thinking about this theory as a weapon,” says Cynthia Kelly, president of the Atomic Heritage Foundation, a nonprofit organization she founded to preserve and interpret the Manhattan Project and its broader legacy. When they told him about the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction, Einstein was shocked at the danger posed by his 1905 special theory of relativity. Szilárd visited Einstein in New York with two fellow refugees, Hungarian physicists Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner. So he approached his one-time colleague-then the world’s most famous scientist-and asked him to warn U.S. And by 1939, he had became convinced that German scientists might be using current scientific developments to develop an atomic weapon.
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In 1933, the same year Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Szilárd discovered the nuclear chain reaction-the process that unleashes the energy locked in atoms to create enormous explosions. “The revolution that came with the splitting of the atom requires a moral one as well.” Einstein's letter to RooseveltĮven after Szilárd and Einstein ended their partnership over appliances, the two scientists stayed in touch. “His brilliance was also his downfall,” says National Geographic Explorer Ari Beser.