The letter stays in the drawer

Peconic, Long Island, 2 August 1939. Leo Szilard, who conceived the nuclear chain reaction crossing a London street in 1933, has drafted a letter to President Roosevelt: uranium may yield bombs of a new type, Germany has uranium and physicists, America should hurry. To make a president read it, he needs a signature with gravity, and drives out to the summer cottage where Albert Einstein is sailing. Einstein, hearing the chain reaction explained, says the famous sentence, I had not thought of that at all, and signs. The letter reaches Roosevelt in October; a uranium committee is born with a first budget of six thousand dollars; and the committee, through British prodding and Pearl Harbor, becomes the Manhattan Project, two billion dollars and the fire of August 1945.

In the timeline recorded here, the sail matters more than the street. Einstein listens on the porch, understands in ten minutes as ours did, and then sits with it for a day instead of an hour. The pacifist who spent 1914 to 1918 signing the other kind of letter reads Szilard's draft again at dawn and hands it back. If the thing is possible, he says, it will be found without my name; if it is impossible, my name will have frightened a president toward it. He will not be the alarm bell for a weapon. Szilard argues, as Szilard argued with everyone, and loses. The letter goes back in the briefcase, and the briefcase goes back to Manhattan, and the drawer it ends in is ordinary office furniture, which is how the atlas likes its hinges.