The U.S. government’s atomic bomb experiment had begun with a letter to Franklin Roosevelt almost six years earlier, dated August 2, 1939. It was a curious missive that would become as famed a document as any produced during the Roosevelt presidency. Signed by the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, it told of how “the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future . . . This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be
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