The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by Greg Mitchell

Author:Greg Mitchell [Mitchell, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620975732
Google: xahjxwEACAAJ
Amazon: 1620975734
Publisher: New Press
Published: 2020-07-06T23:00:00+00:00

14

Dr. Einstein, I Presume?

While turning aside requests from MGM to sign a release, Albert Einstein’s efforts to control the military uses of splitting the atom only grew. From Princeton he sent a telegram far and wide seeking $200,000 in funds for his new Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists. It would contain one of the most oft-quoted sentences of the century: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

Einstein confessed that he and other scientists “who released this immense power have an overwhelming responsibility in this world life-and-death struggle to harness the atom for the benefit of mankind and not for humanity’s destruction. Bethe, Condon, Szilard, Urey, and the Federation of American Scientists join me in this appeal, and beg you to support our efforts to bring realization to America that mankind’s destiny is being decided today—now—at this moment…. Urgently request you send immediate check to me as chairman…. We ask your help at this fateful moment as a sign that we scientists do not stand alone.

In an interview a few days later for The New York Times Magazine, Einstein said:

Today the atomic bomb has altered profoundly the nature of the world as we know it, and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking…. Before the raid on Hiroshima, the leading physicists urged the War Department not to use the bomb against defenseless women and children. The war could have been won without it. The decision was made in consideration of possible future loss of American lives—and now we have to consider the possible loss in future atomic bombings of millions of lives. The American decision may have been a fatal error, for men accustom themselves to thinking that a weapon which was used once can be used again…. To the village square we must carry the facts of atomic energy. From there must come America’s voice.

Time magazine would soon feature an illustration of Einstein on its cover—next to an elongated mushroom cloud. But hopes around international control of the atom had plunged with Truman’s appointment of Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch to “translate” the recent proposals by Acheson, Lilienthal, and Oppenheimer in exchange for White House backing. Oppenheimer told a friend they had “lost.” He despised Baruch and considered him a fool.

The FBI, which had maintained for years a thick file on Einstein and his ties to left-leaning groups, now stepped up its monitoring. Back in January, agents had proposed tapping the phones of Einstein and his secretary but the bureau declined, fearing a backlash if this was revealed. Nevertheless, agents tracked his mail and phone numbers of those who called him. Agents monitored his writings, speeches, broadcasts and his role with political or science groups, sometimes via informants who attended meetings. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was known to have called Einstein an “extreme radical.”

So on May 27, for example, an agent reported that the San

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