The Manhattan Project
A Milestone Documents E-text
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Abstract

On August 2, 1939, Albert Einstein signed a letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The letter, written almost entirely by Einstein's former graduate student Leó Szilárd, warned Roosevelt about the imminent development of a German atomic bomb that relied upon a chain reaction of a large mass of uranium and urged him to sponsor his American research, with the goal of beating the Germans. The letter pointed out that the Germans had already restricted the sale of uranium, presumably to divert it toward military purposes.

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