The time was 3:53 P.M. No one cheered, but the excitement in that cold and shadowy room was felt and shared by all. With a rustle, Eugene Wigner stepped forward and pulled from a brown paper bag a large straw-bound bottle of Bertolli Chianti that he had clutched behind his back all afternoon. He handed it to Fermi, who pulled the cork and sent out for paper cups. Then the circle sipped quietly, solemnly, without toasts, as if partaking in a secret sacrament. Later, they penned their names on the bottle’s straw wrapper.
Compton shared his colleagues’ excitement over a long-distance call to his boss, James B. Conant, at Harvard.
“The Italian navigator has landed in the New World,” Compton said, hoping to code his message but unable to conceal his pride.
“How were the natives?” asked Conant.
“Very friendly.”57
The “New World” they had reached offered mankind the terrifying power of nature. From now on, a scientific speculation would be a wartime reality. And to Szilard, who had feared this moment for more than nine years—and had hoped all that time that it would not occur— his colleagues’ exuberance must have seemed unnerving. He had first conceived the chain reaction in 1933 in a burst of defiant creativity. He had restrained his ego and energies for more than two years while collaborating with Fermi to design and build the first reactor. And now Szilard had witnessed his vision come true. As he had feared from the start, the world would never be the same again.
After the experiment and the silent sipping of wine, as their colleagues filed from the squash court into the cold evening light, Szilard and Fermi found themselves standing alone. “I shook hands with Fermi,” Szilard remembered, “and I said I thought this day would go down as a black day in the history of mankind.”58
CHAPTER 17
Visions of an “Armed Peace”
1942–1944
A decade after the first nuclear chain reaction was created, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and their colleagues returned to Stagg Field to commemorate what they had achieved. Movie cameras rolled as Herbert Anderson paced the floor where the first pile had been built. Fermi and Szilard stood stiffly on the balcony: Fermi to describe the moment the reactor went critical; Szilard to recall the historic event with the crisp and smug assertion “I was here to say ‘I told you so’” But in December 1942, in the days just after that historic event, Szilard and his world seemed anything but confident. For after nine years of fear and frustration, the chain reaction he had first envisioned in 1933 was a reality, and the war he had expected was then in its fourth grisly year; a race with Germany for the A-bomb seemed graver than ever.
Just as in the early 1930s Szilard had looked ahead to war when the world was at peace, in the early 1940s he looked ahead to peace from the gloom of war: to a peace that must be secured in new ways because of the new weapon he was helping to create; to a peace that might also be more stable and enriched because of the new power source the atom could provide. Szilard thought about the atom’s peaceful uses the day after the Stagg Field experiment. He told Compton he wanted to “create a clear situation” with his chain-reaction patent rights and had doubts about whether to claim separate or joint patents with Fermi.1
But Szilard could rarely fret about just one problem at a time. He also worked to restore his security clearance.2 And he worried about problems that were years away.
“Szilard was politically preoccupied at the time about the future of humanity and the organization of a proper type of republic,” recalled nuclear physicist Pierre Auger, then a visitor to the Met Lab. Szilard especially enjoyed chatting with the tall, lean Frenchman, and the two men shared many brisk walks through the campus and along the Midway Plaisance. “His idea was to have a normally elected government and at the same time a ‘shadow government’ whose only task was to criticize the working government.” In this, Szilard was seeking some balance between the critics and the workers, Auger explained; between power and reason. “And the important feature is that those who criticized could not take the power, but could only preside over new elections. He was always afraid of the trend to power, of people who were just after power and not after improving their world.”
As Szilard and Auger walked—to Jackson Park on Lake Michigan, along the shore, and back up the Midway to campus—their brainstorming gave Auger the idea for the book Discussions with Myself, a collection of forty dialogues published in 1987. Szilard also took an interest in Auger’s poetry and praised the power of English verse: Auger liked Blake; Szilard admired Shakespeare’s sonnets. The two men enjoyed reciting limericks and clerihews about people they knew. There was one Szilard favorite that Auger remembers:
In a notable Family named
Stein There was Gertrude, and Ep and then Ein.
Gert’s writings were hazy,
Ep’s statues were crazy,
And nobody understood Ein.
Auger had met Einstein in Paris in the 1920s and during the Chicago walks told Szilard about a tea party in the laboratory of the physicist and chemist Jean Baptiste Perrin. The poet Paul Valéry frequented these Monday afternoon affairs and asked Einstein, “What do you do when you have ideas? Do you write them down? I keep a notebook to write down my ideas,” and drew from his pocket a small book. Einstein looked at Valéry and his book. “Oh,” he said. “That’s not necessary. An idea. It’s so seldom I have one.”
3 Over the Christmas holidays Szilard saw Bambi and recommended the film to Trude. But despite the gaiety, he was disturbed by the new reality of the chain reaction and still tense about his ambiguous place in the project. “Although everybody is quite nice,” he wrote to Trude the day after Christmas, “I am not too happy with the situation and I will take a vacation as soon as I can and think about the world.” He ended 1942 writing to Trude, “Since it is New Year’s Eve today, I will go to bed early. . . .”
4 Szilard’s Met Lab contract expired at midnight.
Although off the payroll until his patent claim could be resolved5 and clearly “impatient” with his plight, Szilard enjoyed a burst of creative energy. Within six weeks of witnessing that his chain-reaction concept worked, Szilard drafted the first of several proposals to Compton for a new kind of fast-neutron reactor.6 In this ingenious design, fast neutrons from a radioactive core would bombard a surrounding blanket of uranium238, turning it into plutonium239. This plutonium would then be refined as new fuel for reactors or used as the explosive in A-bombs. Later that spring, Szilard was strolling by Eckhart Hall, in the university’s main quadrangle, with Wigner and physicist Alvin Weinberg as they discussed his new machine.
“What should we call this process, this new reactor?” asked Wigner. Szilard thought for a few seconds and smiled with satisfaction.
“Let’s call it ‘breeding”’ he said. “Let’s call it a breeder.” By the spring of 1945, Szilard would complete rough calculations and designs for three breeders.7
“I am again very busy (such a busy spell), and I am also a little bit tired because I wake up during the nights with strange ideas,” Szilard wrote Trude in mid-January 1943. “Then I read in a book by [Baltasar] Gracian (300 years old, Spanish Jesuit). . . .” A satirist and epigrammatist, Gracian had the kind of biting wit that Szilard enjoyed. Gracian was a kindred spirit; like Szilard, he, too, often ran afoul of his superiors.8
Physicist Hans Bethe arrived in Chicago for two weeks’ consultation on reactor designs, and during the visit he met with Szilard several times. The two friends discussed work at the Met Lab. “The things that were done and even more the things that were left undone disturbed me very much,” Szilard later recalled, especially because he believed the Germans were ahead in the race for an A-bomb—a few days earlier he had proposed to Compton spying on the German nuclear program with Swedish and Danish scientists.9
“Bethe,” Szilard said, “I am going to write down all that is going on these days in the project. I am just going to write down the facts—not for anyone to read, just for God.”
“Don’t
you think God knows the facts?” Bethe asked.
“Maybe he does, but not this version of the facts.”10
Military security agents, on orders from General Groves, were gathering their own version of the facts about Szilard, a suspicion he confirmed when a relief postman accidentally delivered surveillance instructions for opening Szilard’s mail—and Fermi’s.11 After discovering that, Szilard openly joked about being watched, in one letter to Trude even chiding the “censor” for taking candy he had mailed to her.12 All the agents read in Szilard’s letters—if they could decipher his German scrawl—were comments about her health and complaints about his own, general remarks about his mood and fatigue, and accounts of his latest reading. At the time, Szilard was enjoying Tom Jones, whose short chapters he read in snatches during the day and just before nodding off at night. Trude knitted Szilard a long wool ski cap, which he could tug down over his eyebrows. Like the broad-brimmed felt hat of his adolescence, this cap made him feel “different,” and he wore it with pride around the cold and windy campus. “We have a big snowfall today,” Szilard wrote in March. “We had a few very cold days and the hood was admired by everybody. Somebody asked me ‘did your mother knit it?’ ‘To the contrary’ I told him. . . .”13
FBI agents tailed Szilard that March as he rode the Broadway Limited to New York and became a naturalized US citizen at the Southern District Court in Manhattan. They followed him in May to Washington, where he met with his former supervisor at Oxford, Frederick A. Lindemann, then Churchill’s science adviser, with the title Lord Cherwell.14Although the war would not end for more than two years, Szilard argued to Cherwell about the need for strong international controls to prevent a postwar nuclear arms race. He also urged British intelligence to expand its spying on the German nuclear program.15
Furious when he learned about Szilard’s travels and meetings, Groves urged even more spying. In June 1943 he informed a security officer that
. . . the investigation of Szilard should continue despite the barrenness of the results. One letter or phone call once in three months would be sufficient for the passing of vital information and until we know for certain that he is 100% reliable we cannot entirely disregard this person.16
Szilard’s return to Washington in June kept FBI agents hopping.17 From their reports we know that an agent in the Pentagon read Szilard’s security file, where he learned:
The surveillance reports indicate that the Subject is of Jewish extraction, has a fondness for delicacies and frequently makes purchases in delicatessen stores, usually eats his breakfast in drug stores and other meals in restaurants, walks a great deal when he cannot secure a taxi, usually is shaved in a barber shop, speaks occasionally in a foreign tongue, and associates mostly with people of Jewish extraction. He is inclined to be rather absent minded and eccentric, and will start out a door, turn around and come back, go out on the street without his coat or hat and frequently looks up and down the street as if he were watching for someone or did not know for sure where he wanted to go.18
In fact, Szilard usually knew exactly where he wanted to go, but he became so annoyed by his followers that he deliberately tried to trick them. The FBI agent’s twelve-page report on Szilard’s Washington visit reads like a script for the Marx Brothers. At 5:00 P.M. on Sunday, June 20, five FBI agents met at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington to await Szilard’s arrival from New York. They must have been conspicuous from the start because, as one agent admitted later, in this residential hotel there were few people in the lobby. When Szilard walked in at 8:30, “he had with him at the time one portable typewriter, one black leather suitcase, and one brown leather Gladstone Bag,” the agents later reported.
Subject’s description is as follows: Age, 35 or 40 years [at the time he was 45]; height, 5 ’6”; weight 165 lbs; medium build; florid complexion; bushy brown hair combed straight back and inclined to be curly, slight limp in right leg causing droop in right shoulder and receding forehead. He was wearing brown suit, brown shoes, white shirt, red tie and no hat.
After twelve minutes in his room, Szilard was “observed leaving the elevator in the lobby . . . and carrying a Newsweek magazine, which he proceeded to read while walking through the lobby of the hotel.” He “walked through the entire front lobby of the hotel,” along an interconnected passage, around the tennis courts, “and paused a moment to observe the Shoreham Hotel” across the street, then returned to the lobby “and left by the main entrance, walking down the driveway to the drug store in one of the wings of the hotel.”
Eight minutes later, “interested in finding a place to eat” but frustrated with the crowd in the drugstore, Szilard left and walked “on the various sidewalks in the grounds” and down the hill to Connecticut Avenue. There he “paused momentarily” at the White Tower, Peoples Drug Store, and Chin’s Chinese Restaurant, but chose a fourth, Arbaugh’s Restaurant, where he ate dinner alone. Back at his hotel by 9:45, Szilard read his Newsweek in the lobby for twenty-five minutes before going to his room.
Four FBI agents were at the Wardman Park for Szilard’s 8:00 A.M. wakeup call on Monday morning. He took a taxi to the Carnegie Institution of Washington and met with Captain Lavender, a Manhattan Project specialist on patents and legal affairs.19 Three hours later, Szilard returned to the hotel, where he paced in the lobby, ate lunch in the drugstore, and after 2:00 P.M.met Eugene Wigner, who had just checked in. Unable to find an empty chair in the hotel barbershop, Szilard and Wigner (who was “approximately 40 years of age, medium build, bald head, Jewish features and was conservatively dressed”) asked the hotel clerk how far Union Station was and took a taxi. “Due to adverse traffic conditions” the FBI agents lost Szilard’s cab.
Although Szilard told the hotel’s taxi starter he was headed for Union Station—and two FBI agents went there to head him off—he asked the driver to take them to the Supreme Court. But a few blocks from the court, Szilard asked for the nearest barbershop and was dropped with Wigner at the Plaza Hotel on First Street NW. FBI agents surmised that the two men went to the hotel barbershop, then walked to the Supreme Court, where they joined a public tour. The two were back at their hotel by 6:10 P.M., where seven FBI agents now awaited them. Then Szilard and Wigner walked to the Shoreham Hotel’s Terrace Gardens for cocktails, ate dinner at Arbaugh’s, and at 8:45 returned to the Wardman Park. After more wanderings they sat on a bench by the tennis courts, “where both pulled off their coats, rolled up their sleeves and talked in a foreign language for some time.”
After Wigner retired at 9:30 P.M., Szilard walked to the hotel drugstore, where he read a newspaper and ordered grapefruit juice and a sandwich. Szilard retired at 10:55, but at 11:15 Isidor I. Rabi appeared at the front desk. Himself a hotel guest, Rabi called on Szilard in his room and talked for some time.
Six agents crowded into the hotel drugstore on Tuesday morning to watch Szilard eat breakfast. Next he visited the barbershop, took three aspirin at a drinking fountain, and caught a taxi to a temporary navy building at Seventeenth Street and Constitution Avenue NW. There Szilard “told one of the ladies that he wished to see Commander Lewis Strauss . . . and was interested in getting into a branch of the navy.” Szilard and Strauss walked up Seventeenth Street to the Metropolitan Club for lunch and back to the navy building. Next, Szilard checked out of his hotel, cabled Trude “ARRIVING KINGS CROWN ABOUT 8:30 P.M.,” and caught the Congressional Limited to New York.
The “Agent’s note” that accompanies this surveillance report points out that Szilard “could easily leave the impression that he was conscious of being followed.” He appeared to be “highly nervous and very absent-minded,” the agent noted. “On one occasion he got off the elevator a short distance from his room, entered the room, came out in the hall about five minutes later and asked the maid where the elevator was located.” Szilard’s
actions are very unpredictable and if there is more than one entrance or exit, he is just as apt to use the most inconvenient as not. It was found necessary to
cover all possible exits to insure not losing him. It was also the observation of the Agents in Washington that he has very poor eyesight.
While the agent reporting this assumed that Szilard did not notice the surveillance, Szilard often joked with friends at how clumsily he was followed. On one trip to New York, he became so annoyed with his “tail” that he entered a building—probably the King’s Crown or Trude’s apartment—and stayed inside for three days. But on other occasions he pitied the agents and turned to invite them for a taxi ride or a cup of coffee.20 He even used the army’s security to hide his own lifelong fear of water. One stifling summer day, Szilard wore a heavy overcoat when he and physicist Katharine Way visited friends from the Met Lab on Chicago’s north shore. For relief, the party walked to Glencoe Beach on Lake Michigan for a swim, but Szilard sat on the sand and refused to remove his coat because, he said, “it contains secret papers.”21
Szilard managed to maintain his puckish sense of humor despite tensions at the lab. In July, two Met Lab scientists, John Marshall, Jr., and Leona Woods, were married, and when Szilard attended, he told the groom’s mother that he was responsible for this match—because he had hired Marshall at Columbia.22 And over the July Fourth weekend, at a lake in the country with a colleague’s family, Szilard “flirted with his daughter.” Szilard confessed this in a letter to Trude, adding, “She is a little younger than you, exactly 3½years [old]. ‘I like you,’ she told me. ‘You are funny.’”23
Genius in the Shadows Page 35