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Albert Einstein, forced out of his homeland in Germany and Switzerland by an officially anti-Semitic Nazi regime and working in a world paranoid of the threat of fascism, provided the impetus to president Franklin Roosevelt to utilize the American government’s resources to research nuclear fission, specifically citing the possibilities of both energy generation and use in bombs. While Einstein was an ardent pacifist, he also feared the loss of Europe and possibly the world to the fascism that Germany and Italy were trying to implement by force in the 1940s.

However, even Einstein himself did not anticipate the full extent of the possible sheer destruction his suggestion would bring to modern warfare. What started as a nuclear suicide boat (Einstein thought that a nuclear device might be too heavy to drop by plane) capable of destroying a harbor and some surrounding terrain quickly emerged as a weapon capable of immense destruction; “The energy liberated by a 5 kg bomb would be equivalent to that of several thousand tons of dynamite” (Frisch, Peierls). The Frisch-Peierls memorandum also notes the devastation of fallout: The energy radiated by these active substances will amount to about 20% of the energy liberated in the explosion, and the radiations would be fatal to living beings even a long time after the explosion.

The fission of uranium results in the formation of a great number of active bodies with periods between, roughly speaking, a second and a year. The resulting radiation is found to decay in such a way that the intensity is about inversely proportional to the time. Even one day after the explosion the radiation will correspond to a power expenditure of the order 1,000 kW, or to the radiation of a hundred tons of radium. (Frisch-Peierls)

Despite this knowledge, the world could not anticipate the true horror of a nuclear attack until 1945, when in an effort to bring the war against Japan to an end that President Harry Truman ordered the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that the full extent of a nuclear attack was witnessed first-hand. Even the “pure intellect” (Time) of Einstein did not anticipate the sheer carnage of a nuclear attack.