Science · Government & military
Leo Szilard
Physicist and nuclear-policy advocate
Also known as Szilárd
Photograph · Image credit
Who they are
Leo Szilard helped prepare the 1939 letter that Albert Einstein signed to President Franklin Roosevelt. The letter connected emerging research on uranium chain reactions to possible weapons and proposed closer government contact with physicists. Szilard appears at the point where laboratory knowledge became an urgent matter of public policy.
His connection is the documented effort to alert the U.S. government to nuclear possibilities in 1939.
Selected contributions
Primary records
Correspondence · 1939
Letter from Albert Einstein to FDR, 8/2/39
Warns Roosevelt that uranium chain reactions might produce both energy and powerful bombs, and proposes government contact with researchers. Einstein signed the letter; Szilard helped prepare it.
Reading scope & citation
Entire PBS transcription inspected; drafting role supported by existing DOE chronology.
In the timeline
Biography sources & portrait credit
- Timeline of Events: 1938–1950 ↗Department of Energy
- Letter from Albert Einstein to FDR, 8/2/39 ↗PBS American Experience; transcription credited to Argonne National Laboratory
Portrait credit
U.S. Department of Energy; crop by Furfur. CC BY-SA 3.0 (source photograph public domain). Via Wikimedia Commons.
Photograph. Cropped to 4:5, resized to 320 × 400 and converted to WebP.
Image source & identification ↗ · CC BY-SA 3.0 (source photograph public domain) ↗
