This week, I don’t have anything new for you. Instead, we have a guest submission — an old essay my boyfriend, Dario, wrote and found this week. He writes!
In August 1939, physicists Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, with the help of Albert Einstein’s approval and signature, informed President Franklin D. Roosevelt that Nazi Germany might be funding programs for research on atomic weapons. Of course they notified Roosevelt. Even if it was just a hunch, it was the only thing to do. Three of the world’s leading scientific minds came to a conclusion derived from both personal experience and external observation regarding Germany’s plans of developing atomic technology.
The letter was written, Einstein signed off on it, and it was sent to FDR’s desk. Two years later, the President began U.S.’s own program, known as the Manhattan Project, in defense. The scientists had done well. They felt a need to advise the powers that be of ways to save the most number of people. FDR did what he felt needed to be done as well. In order to protect the American people, its interests, and the prosperity of the entire world, a global superpower like the United States, with its abundant resources, had an obligation to follow the advice of this good-natured warning.
Almost exactly six years after the letter was sent outlining ways the Nazi’s might use this technology during wartime, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs, one on Hiroshima and a second on Nagasaki, taking a total of 220,000+ lives. Six days passed, Japan surrendered to the Allies and all is well, right? They had a responsibility. The physicists, Albert Einstein, FDR, all wanted to prevent destruction by doing something many of us would’ve done given the same knowledge. Countless lives were spared because of the abrupt surrender of one of Germany’s primary supporters and the accelerated ending of WWII. In order to achieve this, though, the actions of several men had to decide the fate of these weapons, the war and the lives of over 200,000 innocent people. They bombed two major Japanese cities, killing an abhorrent number, with the hopes of saving even more.
It’s also interesting how the scientists mention in the letter three potential countries for harvesting uranium ore: Canada, former Czechoslovakia and Belgian Congo. It should be noted Germany’s involvement in halting ore exports out of Czechoslovakia at the onset of WWII and the United States intervening during the Congo Crisis during the early ‘60s.
Oh, the agendas of world powers, what could be more sinister, deceitful and common all at once. [See: Charlie Chaplin’s final speech in The Great Dictator].
Everything in this world is connected; through greed, hunger for control and perceived protection, everything is related. A person’s life simply isn’t worth as much as it should be, especially to the most harsh decision-makers.
If that doesn’t scream of humanity’s brutal irony I don’t know what does.
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To 70 degree Saturdays,
xx KT