NEW WORLD ORDER – I’VE GOT TO HAVE THE NUKE!

PART - 1

Routing my mind through history particularly regarding what has become dubbed as “nuclear proliferation” , I got to some point, paused for a moment and said to myself, “there it is; It’s the Germans! They started it all!”

This got me thinking about the World War II, the Cold War and the Deterrence Theory, and what have you, but one question that pricked my keen interest was, “what would the world be like if Russia had leaders such as Adolf Hitler and Uncle Saddam, or even Colonel Muammar Gaddafi during the Cold War era?” Well, you can go ahead and do the Calculus of that, but for now I’d like to share a little about how Albert Einstein, the Germans, and the United States plunged the world into this era of nuclear arms race…

Summer, July 1939:

Albert Einstein was on holiday at the coast outside of New York. He had fled the Nazi Germany. Einstein gets interrupted by a visitor, Leo Szilard, a friend who had also fled the Hitler’s Nazi. His news; German scientists had been able to split the atom, and the Nazi had seized some uranium deposits in Czechoslovakia. Hitler could be on his way to obtaining nuclear weapon, aka nuke!

It is quite understandable why Leo Szilard would seek the help of Einstein to help him write the letter to President Roosevelt warning him about the atomic bomb the Germans were developing and the need to do something before it was too late. Szilard definitely knew that the German bomb that he feared so much is a product of an idea that Einstein himself discovered, and hence, his option to seek Einstein’s assistance to get the message across to Roosevelt.  Einstein published his equation, E=mc², in 1905. 

Interestingly, Einstein himself remained dismissive of the possibility of releasing the energy in atoms according to his equation. "The likelihood of transforming matter into energy is something akin to shooting birds in the dark in a country in which there are only very few birds,” Albert Einstein was reacting to the question, whether it was possible to release the energy in an atom, during a press conference in Pittsburgh, 1935.

But Szilard and a colleague Fermi would later discover that if the neutron was used to split an atom, not just energy would be released but also some other neutrons which could sustain the process in what scientist came to call CHAIN REACTION. This means Einstein’s equation could be harnessed to make nukes! Szilard then approached Einstein again, but this time with his discovery, wondering what would happen if the German scientists get to discover what he had just found. But not just that; what if the Nazi dropped one such weapon in the center of New York? And that is a thing great minds feared Hitler could do without thinking twice!

White House, October 11, 1939:

Einstein’s letter gets to the office of President Roosevelt. Roosevelt studies the letter and decides that something should be done! This then sets up a very competitive race between the Nazi and the U.S.A. It was a question of “who gets to have the nuke first!”