Anthony Hall: From Nuclear Power Plant to Nuclear Weapon!

Albert Einstein, May 1946: "Our world is faced with a crisis that has never before been envisaged in its whole existence. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift towards unparallelled catastrophe." As the bad news gradually spreads that the debacle at Fukushima nuclear power plant #1 is becoming more perilous rather than less so, the words of Albert Einstein come to mind. Recall that the legendary physicist, Einstein, helped to set in motion the Manhattan Project, whose personnel designed and built the first atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In his letter to US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939, Einstein warned that if the United States did not enter and win the race to harness the destructive potential of atomic weaponry, Germany would almost certainly do so! The Manhattan Project became a primary prototype for the Research and Development, R and D partnerships linking the US government and for-profit corporations in what Dwight D Eisenhower would later describe as the military-industrial complex. Einstein himself did not directly participate in this huge initiative aimed at defeating the Axis powers, linking Japan with Germany and Italy. One of the twentieth century's most iconographic thinkers watched from the sidelines as other physicists and technologists applied many of Einstein's theories to the building of atomic weaponry. After Japan lay in ruins, not only from the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also from the massive carpet bombing of Tokyo and several other urban centers, Einstein went public with his fears and anxieties. In famous passages that have been subject to various translations and paraphrasing, Einstein observed, Our world is faced with a crisis that has never before been envisaged in its whole existence. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking!