Genius in the Shadows

by William Lanouette

  After their meeting, Szilard suggested a division of labor: Compton would be “official investigator,” while Fermi and Szilard would be “in direct charge of laying out researches and overseeing them.”2 A search for larger work areas and a remote location led Herbert Anderson to look for a place to conduct their “egg-boiling experiment” within commuting distance of New York City. He found seven, and Szilard flew to Chicago to report to Compton. There he met with Compton, and Ernest O. Lawrence and Luis Alvarez from Berkeley, but after one meeting Compton simply announced that the uranium work would move to his laboratory in Chicago. Period. Szilard was miffed to learn that Compton had already told Conant where the site would be and drafted a protest letter complaining that he had abandoned orderly consultation among the scientists.3 Gradually, the scientists who had begun chain-reaction research were being pushed aside, and Szilard resented it. But by the end of January, Szilard had returned to New York, packed up his bags and papers at the King’s Crown Hotel, said farewell to Bela and his family and to his friend Trude Weiss, and moved to Chicago.

  The University of Chicago campus reminded Szilard of Oxford. Gray stone neo-Gothic buildings spread in clusters and quadrangles along the broad Midway Plaisance, the main esplanade of the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. There was no hotel close by, but Szilard quickly found the next best thing, the Quadrangle Club, the cozy English Tudor-style faculty club. There he could rent a small room with maid service, take all his meals in the large dining room, and generally enjoy the camaraderie of this new academic community. He was first appointed visiting research associate, later chief physicist, at the university’s Metallurgical Laboratory, the code name for government nuclear operations on campus. The move for Szilard also meant a raise, from $4,000 to $6,600 a year.4

  The Met Lab’s mission was to prepare plutonium239 for A-bombs. But their first task was to prove that the nuclear chain reaction needed to produce that plutonium could actually work, a challenge Fermi and others still thought had little bearing on the outcome of the war.5 The physicists moved into Eckhart Hall, a Gothic-style three-story building on the edge of the university’s main quadrangle and in view of Szilard’s room at the club. From the start, Szilard disliked Chicago’s bitter-cold winter weather. And, increasingly, he resisted the bureaucracy imposed first by the university and then by the federal government. Soon there were armed guards at Eckhart Hall’s doors. Passes. Scientific papers marked SECRET.

  The tree-shaded, urbane Met Lab was destined to become just one of four secret sites in the S-l program. Soon the largest factory building on earth would be laid out in the Clinch River valley of eastern Tennessee, near the tiny town of Clinton, by a rise called Black Oak Ridge. At that site, uranium235 would be separated from uranium238; enough by July 1945 to make the single atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The Hanford Reservation, the third location, on a desert plateau in western Washington by the broad Columbia River near the town of Richland, replaced abandoned farms with squat, steaming power plants and soaring canyons of concrete. In the plants, which housed scaled-up uranium-graphite piles, uranium238 would be bombarded by neutrons to make plutonium239, enough by July 1945 to make three bombs a month: one for the first test in New Mexico that month, another to destroy Nagasaki, and a third intended for Kokura on about August 20. The fourth site, a mesa near Santa Fe called Los Alamos, would later siphon brainpower from the Met Lab and collect the uranium and plutonium from Oak Ridge and Hanford to create—at first theoretically, then with elegant calculations and crude craftsmanship—the world’s first atomic bombs.

  The Met Lab scientists spent most of February 1942 getting settled and acquainted. Herbert Anderson offered to renovate the attic of a carriage house behind the Quadrangle Club in exchange for living there at low rent, and his aerie soon became a place for the scientists to meet and party. To Trude in New York, who had just begun an internship and residency at Willard Parker Hospital, Szilard scribbled a note reporting that he was “Very, very busy”6 But soon after Szilard began work in Chicago his enemy alien status forced Compton to remove him from the Met Lab payroll, although he continued to work, anyway.7

  Compton raised three alternatives with the military for handling Szilard: transfer the navy’s approval for his work at Columbia to Chicago; complete the clearance process from scratch; or consider “internment or otherwise keeping him under close surveillance. . . .” Compton reviewed Szilard’s key role in starting the bomb project in 1939 and concluded:

  His work, while perhaps not indispensable, is really very helpful to us. If dropped from the project, he would have reason to be so dissatisfied that his loyalty to the country might be shaken. As it now stands, however, I have every reason to believe that he will work on this project with devotion to the welfare of the United States.8

  But Szilard’s devotion included an irrepressible desire to speak his mind, and as the Met Lab received more and more directives from Washington, he retaliated. Szilard wrote to Bush in May to complain “about the slowness of the work on unseparated uranium,” a problem caused by a “division of authority along the wrong lines.” Szilard complained that Bush’s reorganization in the fall of 1941, creating four different divisions, compartmentalized a scientific effort that could thrive only by intellectual interchange. “We knew in August 1939 how to make a power plant with graphite and uranium,” Szilard wrote. “By June 1940 we knew how to make ‘copper’ [plutonium] and bombs sufficiently light to be carried by airplane.” Szilard sent along the memo he wrote with Einstein’s first letter in August 1939 and a second memo (the A-55 Report) to the uranium committee chairman, Lyman J. Briggs, in October 1940. Both had proposed ways to organize the uranium research. “I wonder,” he asked Bush, “whether, if you read the enclosed copies, you might not think that the war would be over by now if those recommendations had been acted upon.”

  With the first Einstein letter in mind, Szilard concluded:

  In 1939, the government of the United States was given a unique opportunity by Providence; this opportunity was lost. Nobody can tell now whether we shall be ready before German bombs wipe out American cities. Such scanty information as we have about work in Germany is not reassuring and all one can say with certainty is that we could move at least twice as fast if our difficulties were eliminated.9

  Bush had assumed in 1941 that a large-scale bomb-making operation must involve the army, and with that in mind he proposed to reorganize the S-l Committee in the spring of 1942. At first, money for research was siphoned informally by the budget director, but as plans swelled, a convenient cover was needed. Bush found one in the budget of the Army Corps of Engineers. So Szilard’s ideas for reforms within the program came at a time when major changes were already under way. But the tone of Szilard’s letter did not help his cause. Conant urged Bush to “acknowledge Dr. Szilard’s letter and ask him to come and see you if you can take the time to listen to him”10 Compton, too, wrote Bush from Chicago to praise Szilard’s efforts.

  As you know Szilard was the first in this country, perhaps anywhere, to advocate trying to secure a chain fission reaction using unseparated tube alloy [uranium]. He has perhaps given more concentrated thought on the development of this project than has any other individual. As an experienced physicist and engineer and a man of unusual originality, his thoughts have been of great value in determining the direction of our work. He has likewise been from the beginning, actively concerned with the more far-reaching problems of organization and civil and military uses of the process. Even though not all of his ideas are practical, I consider him one of the most valuable members of our organization.

  Compton described Szilard as “an independent individualist, vitally and I believe unselfishly concerned with the effective progress of our program. You will, if I am not mistaken, find a half-hour discussion with him to be time well spent.”11

  On June 1, the day Compton wrote that praise to Bush, Szilard thought up a way to monitor German nuclear activities: Use Swiss
scientists as observers. He proposed to Compton that K. C. Cole, a physiologist at Columbia Medical School, act as a possible intelligence agent. Then came a grimmer thought. “It might be argued, of course, that if we are going full speed ahead, anyway, there is not much point in trying to find out what the Germans are doing, since there is no possibility of any defenses anyway.”12

  Indeed, Szilard’s alarmist instincts kept anxiety high around the Met Lab. In June, Szilard warned Compton that the Germans might soon be capable of raining bombs or radioactive reactor debris on US cities. At one time during his work at Chicago he reported hearing that G. Dessauer had come from Germany to Switzerland with a warning about the Nazi nuclear program.13 On another occasion he spread word about receiving a cable from Switzerland, sent by Dr. Fritz Houtermans, the brilliant physicist whom Szilard had first met in London in 1933. “Hurry up. We are on the track” Houtermans’s cable warned. “Since it was sent to the Chicago project” Wigner said, “we also realized that they knew about our ‘secret’ work.”14

  On June 1, Szilard’s formal status on the project was clarified when the navy wrote Compton with authorization for employment. But his informal status among project leaders remained ambiguous. Bush wrote to Compton on June 3 that he was trying to schedule a conference with Szilard. An internal routing slip from this time, undated and unsigned, tells a different story. “Following our conversation of yesterday, I understand you will see Szilard after the reorganization, say, the end of this month.” At the project’s highest levels Szilard was becoming a nuisance.15 Briggs complained that Szilard was trying to usurp Compton’s authority. “He is brilliant, enthusiastic, aggressive,” Briggs told Bush, “but he is not a project leader.”16 Fermi recalled this uneasy time when he said that Szilard had done “a marvelous job” organizing uranium and plutonium procurement, “which later on was taken over by a more powerful organization than was Szilard himself. Although to match Szilard it takes a few able-bodied customers.”17

  Later in June, Szilard wrote a string of memos about cooling nuclear power plants by using helium and liquid bismuth.18 And he filed a petition to become a naturalized US citizen. But by month’s end his mind again scrambled physics and politics; he cited in a memo examples of what “we could do if we had an organization that could act with the freedom of an industrial corporation,” then went on to report his negotiations with the Brush Beryllium Company in Cleveland about making “fused uranium ingots as a direct production of electrolysing uranium tetrafluoride.”19 Szilard was also perfecting an electromagnetic pump to cool a reactor with liquid bismuth.20 His thinking and working hard on several projects meant that by evening he was “usually terribly awfully tired.”21

  Fears of a German A-bomb kept Szilard working hard, but they did not curb his wry humor. In a letter to Trude in July 1942, he urged her to consider entering pediatrics. “I hear that there are many babies being born these days. Probably because of a rubber shortage,” and later that month, from a hotel in Cleveland, he reported that “at a certain place . . . it was written in pencil: ‘Our aim is to keep this place clean; your aim will help.’”22

  Szilard was in Cleveland with Edward Creutz and David Gurinsky to visit Brush Beryllium, where he wanted to investigate his idea for recovering uranium from its salts by using magnesium as a chemical reductant. In the factory they watched as technicians added chunks of magnesium metal to molten uranium salt. As the salt heated above magnesium’s boiling point, Creutz remembered, “A minor explosion filled the lab with burning magnesium vapor and noise. But faster than the reaction was Szilard’s exit. Possibly he had anticipated the result and vanished completely for several minutes. But the process worked.”23

  On the day of the beryllium explosion, August 20, 1942, two chemists back at the Met Lab were performing some stunning metallurgy of their own: Louis B. Werner and Burris Cunningham were isolating the world’s first pure sample of plutonium.24

  Szilard passed his first summer in Chicago working hard during the day on varied problems and most evenings returned to his cozy room exhausted, with barely the time to read a few pages of fiction or scribble a letter before nodding off. One letter reported, with amusement, a local crime. “The papers are full of a murder story,” he wrote Trude. “A girl has shot her boyfriend, who was untrue to her. Today she gave an interview and said: sure I loved him; you do not go around shooting men whom you do not love. The rival, on the other hand, said: no man is worth so much.”25

  September 17 brought to the Met Lab scientists a new challenge as the army assumed command of the S-l bomb project, which they still considered their own creation and domain. Herbert Anderson was the first to respond, in a memorandum that day on “Organization of the Metallurgical Project” in which he urged that a five-member executive committee be created to “have the final decision in all matters of actual procedure.” Secrecy and bureaucracy have produced delays and difficulties, he said. Szilard’s memorandum two days later ranged far beyond the management problems to consider “winning the peace after war with Germany.” In this draft Szilard wrote that “at some future time, when the war is won or lost, the history of this chapter of The Tragedy of Man may perhaps be pieced together”—a reference to the Hungarian epic that had shaped his fears and hopes since childhood.26 In two more days of thinking and editing Szilard drafted one of his most challenging documents on the war and the bomb: “What Is Wrong with Us?,” an eleven-page report raising the problems at the Met Lab and warning about a postwar race for peace.

  These lines are primarily addressed to those with whom I have shared for years the knowledge that it is within our power to construct atomic bombs. What the existence of these bombs will mean we all know. It will bring disaster upon the world even if we anticipate them and win the war, but lose the peace that will follow. . . . One has to visualize a world in which a lone airplane could appear over a big city like Chicago, drop his bomb, and thereby destroy the city in a single flash. Not one house may be left standing, and the radioactive substances scattered by the bomb may make the area uninhabitable for some time to come.

  It will be for those whom the constitution has entrusted with determining the policy of this country to take determined action near the end of the war in order to safeguard us from such a “peace.” . . .

  Perhaps it would be well if we devoted more thought to the ultimate political necessities which will arise out of our present work. You may feel, however, that it is of more immediate concern to us that the work which is pursued at Chicago is not progressing as rapidly as it should.

  Szilard went on to complain about the “compartmentalization of information” as the cause of delays and confusion.

  I am, as a rule, rather outspoken, and if I do not call a spade a spade I find it rather difficult to find a suitable name for it. It may be that in talking to Compton I am overplaying a delicate instrument. This is, by the way, an opportunity to apologize to all members of our group for my outspokenness and to ask them to consider it as one of the inevitable hardships of war.

  Next Szilard recounted the confusion and mixed signals over a decision about the reactor’s cooling system; ultimately, a clash between physicists from the university and engineers hired from industry and conscripted by the Army Corps of Engineers. The scientists felt they were losing control of key decisions. And they were. Sarcastically, Szilard noted how “pleasant” life would be for those who sat back and simply followed orders—delegated from the president to Bush to Conant to Compton.

  Compton delegates to each of us some particular task and we can lead a very pleasant life while we do our duty. We live in a pleasant part of a pleasant city, in the pleasant company of each other, and have in Dr. Compton the most pleasant “boss” we could wish to have. There is every reason why we should be happy and since there is a war on, we are even willing to work overtime.

  Alternatively, we may take the stand that those who have originated the work on this terrible weapon and those who have materially contrib
uted to its development, have, before God and the World, the duty to see to it that it should be ready to be used at the proper time and in the proper way.

  I believe that each of us has now to decide where he feels that his responsibility lies.27

  Two days after Szilard wrote this memorandum, on September 23, 1942, the recently promoted brigadier general Leslie R. Groves took command of the Manhattan Engineer District, the corps’ code name for the S-l work it had been performing for Bush and Conant since the spring. The name came from an office on Broadway in Manhattan where procurement orders were handled. At the war’s end this guise would become the nickname for the entire bomb-making operation, the Manhattan Project. Groves had craved an overseas combat assignment and grudgingly accepted this deskbound Washington appointment as a necessary but unpleasant duty that would do little to advance his career.

  General Groves first visited the Met Lab on Monday, October 5, where, as he wrote in his history of the Manhattan Project, he met Compton and his assistant, Norman Hilberry, Fermi, James Franck, and “the brilliant Hungarian physicists Eugene Wigner and Leo Szilard. . . .” After the meeting, Groves and Compton “resumed a discussion we had begun earlier with Szilard on how to reduce the number of approaches which were being explored for cooling the pile. Four methods—using helium, air, water, and heavy water—were under active study.”28 This is the only mention Groves made of Szilard in his book, perhaps because it recounted the only time when they were not in direct conflict. The two men took a quick dislike to each other and personified the Manhattan Project’s struggles between scientist and soldier.