Einstein-Szilard letter is one of the most influential letters of the 20th century | Christie's

All personnel prepare for countdown. Five, four, three, two, one. The Einstein-Zillard letter is arguably one of the most influential letters written in the 20th century. This letter led to the birth of the nuclear age, which has reconfigured the world order, as well as medicine, power, all sorts of scientific pursuits. This letter is signed by Albert Einstein and addressed to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, warning him of the German efforts to develop an atomic bomb. The writing of this letter resulted in the Manhattan Project, a $2 billion secret program under the direction of Dr. Robert Oppenheimer. Einstein came to this project via a Hungarian-born physicist by the name of Leo Zillard. Zillard had a reputation for being a very, very impassioned person. He was absolutely brilliant. Zillard and others had learned that scientists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute managed to split a uranium atom. He was determined to prevent the Germans from developing an atomic weapon first. But being a very little-known physicist, he could not use his own influence to affect this. So he turned to his famous mentor, Albert Einstein. Einstein quickly understood what the German nuclear research could unleash. Einstein, of course, was very famously a vocal pacifist, an anti-militarist, so this was a departure for him. But he saw Nazi Germany as such a threat to the world order and to his own people, Einstein dictated the core of the letter that we have today to Franklin Roosevelt, giving him the same warning in clear and simple terms. The letter reads, It may be possible to set up a chain reaction in a large mass of uranium and thereby to liberate considerable quantities of energy. A single bomb exploded in a port might very well destroy the port together with the surrounding territory. This letter represents the beginning of something extraordinarily profound in human history. It did so fundamentally change science, it changed how the government funds science, it unleashed so much technology that indirectly helped influence what Paul Allen was doing 30 years later. The idea of nuclear fission encompasses all of the possibilities of what science can bring.