How did a lifelong pacifist end up launching the race for the most destructive weapon in human history? In 1939, Albert Einstein signed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning that Nazi Germany might be developing an atomic bomb. That letter set off a chain of events that would ultimately lead to the Manhattan Project. Discover the story of the refugee physicists who panicked when the atom was split in Berlin, the frantic search for Einstein's summer cottage, and the bureaucratic battle in Washington that nearly halted the project before it could even begin. This is the story of a warning that changed the course of world history.
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:09 Chapter 1: The Secret of the Atom
04:17 Chapter 2: The Conspirators in the Oldsmobile
07:58 Chapter 3: The Pacifist's Signature
10:26 Chapter 4: The Courier and the President
13:29 Chapter 5: The Bureaucratic Brake
17:52 Chapter 6: The Race Begins
21:10 What happened next
Featuring: Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, Alexander Sachs, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Otto Hahn
Dialogue is dramatised from the historical record. Voices are synthetic.
Maps: historical-basemaps (A. Ourednik, GPL-3.0) and Natural Earth.
Music: original, made for A Story Called History.
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