Is it true that Einstein helped invent the atomic bomb?
No. In 1939, when he learned that scientists in Berlin had figured out how to split a uranium atom, Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt urging him to do whatever it took to make sure American scientists were the first to build an atomic bomb. (He was a committed pacifist, but the prospect of nuclear weapons in the hands of the Nazis was so terrifying, he later wrote that “I did not see any [other] way out.”) However, because of his left-wing political beliefs, the U.S. Army denied Einstein the security clearances he needed to be a part of the Manhattan Project, and so his role in the development of this deadly technology was an indirect one.
