Christie's auction house will auction a letter from Albert Einstein to US President Franklin D .Roosevelt, in which the scientist warns of the possible use of a nuclear bomb by Nazi Germany. This letter can be sold for 4 million dollars, reported the newspaper The Guardian.
In a message to Roosevelt, the scientist wrote that the Nazis were actively conducting nuclear research and could create an “extremely powerful new type of bomb”. In this context, Einstein urged the American government to begin developing such weapons. According to the publication, after receiving the letter, Roosevelt decided to launch the Manhattan Project to create a nuclear bomb.
The newspaper specified that the letter was written in duplicate on August 2, 1939, a month before the German invasion of Poland. The first sent version is kept at the Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in New York. The second, shorter one, signed by a physicist, was previously in the private collection of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. According to the newspaper, his price is estimated at 4 million dollars.
Albert Einstein is one of the founders of modern theoretical physics, author of more than 300 scientific articles. He developed special relativity in 1905, general relativity in 1907-1916, and worked on problems of cosmology and general field theory. In 1921 he received the Nobel Prize for Physics.
In 1933, after the Nazis came to power in Germany, Einstein emigrated to the United States. In the postwar period, Einstein became one of the founders of the Pugwash movement of scientists, advocates for peace, disarmament and international security, prevention of global thermonuclear war, and scientific cooperation.