Nuclear Energy - Albert Einstein

Nuclear Energy - Albert Einstein

ALBERT EINSTEIN and NUCLEAR ENERGY for WAR and PEACE

Albert Einstein and Nuclear Fission: Between 1905 and 1915, Albert Einstein published several scientific articles detailing previously unexplained physics problems and observed phenomena. The two most important of those scientific contributions concerned Special Relativity and General

Relativity, which revolutionized our understanding of gravity, time, space, and which introduced the equivalence of matter and energy (Clark 1984), as expressed in the infamous formula, E=mc2.

One of the implications of the equivalence of mass and energy is that a very small amount of the radioactive isotope Uranium235 could potentially release a tremendous amount of energy in the form of heat and radiation under the right circumstances through the process of nuclear fission (Clark 1984). By the outbreak of World War II in 1939, nuclear physicists around the world were researching both the possible civilian and military applications of nuclear fission. Several German physicists who, like Einstein, escaped from Nazi Germany before the Holocaust realized that Germany was actively pursuing a program to develop a fission bomb whose destructive power could determine the outcome of the war, and quite possibly, the future of most of the civilized world.

They drafted a letter to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt to warn him of the need to develop a fission weapon before the Axis powers did so, and they recruited Albert

Einstein to sign it to give it the appropriate credibility (Clark 1984). The letter persuaded Roosevelt to authorize the largest developmental program of the war era to develop the world's first atomic weapon (Clark 1984).

The Manhattan Project: In 1939, the Army Corps of Engineers established the Manhattan Project at Los

Alamos, New Mexico, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Richland, Washington. Under the direction of physicist Robert J. Oppenheimer, the three research facilities initiated a coordinated accelerated research into purifying natural Uranium238 into weapons grade

Uranium 235 and irradiating Uranium 238 to produce Plutonium239 for use in two different types of fission weapons (Rennie 2003). The other major component of the project was research dedicated to designing a mechanism for reliably detonating a sufficient quantity of fissionable purified uranium and plutonium to produce an instantaneous chain reaction for use as a weapon. The Manhattan Project culminated in the first nuclear detonations in 1944 tests in New Mexico, and by the detonation of a uranium bomb and a plutonium bomb over Imperial Japan to end World War II in August of 1945.