On this day: The Einstein - Szilárd letter

Whether in response to that plea or not – academics continue to debate the subject – US scientists did begin looking into nuclear technology.

Their research became the Manhattan project and the atomic bomb, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 in an attempt to prompt a Japanese surrender.

Einstein, who was 60 when he signed the letter, said later that it went against his

pacifist leanings and he regretted it. But he also said that the danger that the Germans would make them meant there was "some justification

What the JC said: The fates which have cast Jews into the so-called "free professions" were particularly active one day just seven months before the Second World War began, when Leo Szilard escorted a fellow-Hungarian Jew to drive him out to Peconic Bay on Long Island, a suburb of New York, to see another refugee…Albert Einstein. Dr Szilard, an outstanding scientist, had, like other physicists in America, learned that the Germans had succeeded in producing atomic fission. He, and they, were worried that from the laboratory to the atomic bomb would-be a short step.

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