The Jewish Nucleus of the Second World War’s Atomic Drama

The Marxist philosopher György Lukács disliked the West and Western civilization. He liked to ask: “Who will save us from Western civilization?” But in an amusing, roundabout way, one he was unaware of, he contributed to the salvation of Western civilization. How? By helping to set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the creation of the atomic bomb and the subsequent Allied victory in World War II.

Lukács fomented anti-Semitism with his active participation in the government of the Communist Hungarian Soviet Republic; as people’s commissar he pursued a policy later known as “cultural terror” for its brutal overturning of cultural norms and mores. The Hungarian Soviet Republic—which, like many in those days, was stocked with Jews, including Bela Kun, its leader—lasted 133 days in early 1919. After its overturning, the country plunged into an abyss of ultranationalist “white terror.” The population perceived the HSR to be a Jewish-run organization, and so the uprising against the Communists had a violent and bloody anti-Semitic character as Hungarians took revenge on ordinary Jews who had nothing to do with the revolutionary events. Many Jews fled for America, including, most notably for our purposes, a group of prominent Jewish physicists from wealthy families—Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, Leo Szillard, and Edward Teller. (Wigner and von Neumann went to the same Lutheran grammar school as Lukács.) Many years later, the Nobel Prize-winning Wigner told me—then a young physicist wearing the uniform of the Israeli army and armed with a machine gun while on leave from university—that the United States owed Bela Kun and the HSR its success in developing nuclear weapons. For without their revolutionary activities and the ensuing pogroms, he said, Hungarian Jews would not have come to the United States and would not have persuaded Einstein to sign the letter of August 2, 1939 to President Roosevelt that led to the creation of the nuclear project at Los Alamos.

Wigner was right. Central and East European Jews were the impetus behind the American nuclear endeavor. The Jews who worked on the project described in this essay sought to prevent the continuation of the Shoah. The “Protocols” of these atomic “Elders” are not written on paper, but in action.