Forty-five lines that changed the history of the world: Albert Einstein’s letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to prevent Hitler’s atomic bomb will go up for auction at Christie’s at the end of the summer with an estimate of between 4 and 6 million dollars. The Nobel Prize winner signed it almost by chance and it was the trigger that triggered the Manhattan Project. In the message of August 2, 1939, the father of relativity informed Roosevelt that the Germans had discovered a form of uranium that could be used for a weapon of mass destruction.
It was on the impetus of Einstein’s letter that the White House set in motion the machine that led six years later to the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a process dramatized by Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer which won Oscars this year. Of the message (the text was actually written by the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard and the Nobel simply signed it, regretting the decision after seeing its apocalyptic consequences) there are two identical copies: the other is in the collection of the Presidential Library Franklin D. Roosevelt in Hyde Park, New York. he letter comes from the collection of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
