Oppenheimer, the movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, is a great film, extraordinary, as most movie reviews are accurately saying, and so, so important.
Causing the formation of the Manhattan Project was a letter from Long Island, New York to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was signed by Albert Einstein who spent summers in New Suffolk on Long Island.
It was 1939 and the splitting of the atom fission had been done the year before in Germany. The Einstein letter said: "This phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable though much less certain that extremely powerful bombs of this type may thus be constructed."
The aim of the Manhattan Project was to fight fire with fire to use fission to create an atom bomb before Hitler and the Nazis did.
Einstein in the end regretted the letter. "If I had known that the Germans would not succeed in constructing the atom bomb, I never would have moved a finger," he wrote in his 1950 book Out of My Later Years.
I first saw the two-page letter as a boy on a family trip to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, next to what was FDR's home, in Hyde Park in upstate New York. It was there in a glass display cabinet. My sense: what an important letter!
Written on its upper right: "Albert Einstein, Old Grove Road, Nassau Point, Peconic, Long Island, August 2nd, 1939." Below and to the left was to whom it was addressed: "F.D. Roosevelt, President of the United States, White House, Washington, D.C."
On a personal note, Nassau Point is seven air miles from where my wife and I have lived for nearly 50 years, a hamlet on the South Fork of Long Island called Noyac across Little Peconic Bay from New Suffolk.
Oppenheimer takes place largely in Los Alamos, New Mexico where the main work of the World War II crash program was done. Why then was it called the Manhattan Project? Its initial headquarters in 1942 was in Manhattan at the North Atlantic Division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. General Leslie Groves, its director, was in the Corps.
The story of how several scientists, like Einstein refugees from the Nazis, found Einstein on the North Fork of eastern Long Island is amazing. It has been told by the late British journalist Alistair Cooke. Cooke gave this account over BBC radio as part of his "Letter from America" series. (Cooke incidentally had a home in Cutchogue on the North Fork.)
"Well, it began, on a drenching hot day in midsummer 1939 with two men, two refugees getting up in the morning and getting out a map and deciding to drive to the end of Long Island," Cooke related. He said these "these two refugees, both Hungarians who had been run out of their labs in Germany, heard through the underground of their old friends who'd fled to various countries of Europe, two things. One was that there had been a secret meeting of German physicists, in Berlin, and that Germany had, quite suddenly and secretly, forbidden all exports of a certain kind of ore from the occupied country of Czechoslovakia."
The "ore" was uranium.
"These two refugees wondered, if the American State Department had any notion what the coincidence of these two items could signify." But they were concerned that "if they had gone in person to the State Department or the White House they would quite likely have been waved away, or locked up as nuts."
One of the scientists "remembered the old man, another refugee, but better known."
This was Einstein.
"He might carry a little weight," Cooke went on. "That was it, get to the old man, tell him what was meant by the equation: one secret meeting plus one export ban. But where was the old man? Well, one of them had heard that he was down at the end of Long Island, summering in a cottage rented from a local doctor. Doctor... doctor... wait a minute, Moore that was it? But now the place."
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