Eniola Olorundare
Everybody is prone to making mistakes; they just differ in action and reaction.
The world’s iconic physicist, Albert Einstein, who ranks as one of the greatest minds the world has ever seen, also had his own fair share of mistakes.
Sometimes, it’s unbelievable to say that a man so smart in fact, that his theories and ingestion didn’t just change the world, they keep changing the world even decades after his death would make the mistake of supporting one of the world’s most deadliest weapon of made destruction.
Einstein was a passionate supporter of atomic bomb.
As History reports, “Einstein was not directly involved in the development of these deadly weapons, but like many who were, he was shocked and appalled by the use of atomic bombs. According to Haaretz, he would later tell chemist Linus Pauling, who visited his home shortly before Einstein’s death in 1955, “I made one great mistake in my life — when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made.”
According to a report by Business Insider, Einstein left his home country just before the declaration of the Second World War, he moved to the United States of America, where he began his career as a great scientist.
He was a close friend to another fellow brilliant scientist, Leo Szilard.
According to Business Insider, it was noted that scientists in Germany had succeeded in splitting the atom and unleashing the energy therein (nuclear fusion), and this discovery could pave the way for weapons the likes of which humankind had never seen before. “Extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed,” this was in a warning letter written by Einstein.
The letter reads, “In the course of the last four months, it has been made probable … that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated,” the letter states, per U.S. Department of Energy: Office of History and Heritage Resources.
Eintein further stated the huge level of danger humanity’s contemporary scientific developments were putting the world in.
