Szilard may have been amusing to children, but his behavior was not often appreciated by adults. In August 1943, Compton sent him a note dismissing him from the Met Lab.24 Now other scientists were “no longer authorized to discuss our work and other secret matters with you,” Compton said, and Szilard was to return all secret reports and notebooks and could not participate even as an unpaid consultant “until such time as the patent negotiations between yourself and the government have been completed. . . .”25
“Things are worse than semi-miserable (but not mousy), now,” Szilard wrote Trude the evening he was dismissed. “Mousy” in their shared jargon meant depressed or dejected.26 The next morning, Szilard began to fight back as he appeared at the downtown office of James Hume, a patent attorney whom the army had cleared to represent him. The two men formed a long and close association. “I was shocked when I learned what was going on,” Hume remembered years later. “Groves’s actions toward Leo were abominable. At that time we thought all the stiff-arm tactics were coming from the Nazis, but I soon discovered that Groves’s actions fitted right into that pattern. That’s the thing we’re supposed to be fighting, I thought.”27
Beating the Germans remained Szilard’s chief concern. He wrote Compton that “since I am sure you would not expect me to sacrifice, for the sake of financial gain, my potential usefulness for our work, however small it may be, you will realize that I really have no choice . . .” but to assign his patents to the army.28 The army offered Szilard $25,000 for all his nuclear inventions made before November 1940, when he was first employed at Columbia by the Office of Scientific Research and Development. This he refused, but agreed to negotiate for a higher fee.
Every few days, and sometimes more than once a day, Szilard dashed off notes to Trude, his constant support in this struggle. By mid-August, Szilard could write: “Things are still semimiserable here, and so I am ready for a vacation, but otherwise diversified and at times even funny.”29 He complained to her that “it is idiotic to live in a place where the weather is nice for only two months and otherwise it is too warm or too cold,”30 and from 1943 on, Szilard wrote and talked about living in California, to him a seemingly ideal locale. But it would be two decades before he finally moved there.
“I am loafing, which, in due course, is getting on my nerves,” he wrote Trude that fall. “If I would not be ‘broke’ at the moment, I would invite you for a visit.”31 He managed to pay his rent at the Quadrangle Club from savings and survived on the generosity of his colleagues, who often invited him home to dinner. Groves increased the pressure on Szilard in October when he demanded his signature to an Espionage Act pledge “that you will not give any information of any kind relating to the project to any unauthorized persons.”32 Szilard refused to sign.33
As negotiations for rejoining the Met Lab advanced, Szilard brought Hume to meet Compton.34 Szilard also met Hume at his office in the Loop and several evenings called at his apartment on North State Street in the city’s Gold Coast neighborhood. To maintain military secrecy, Szilard was never introduced to Mrs. Hume. Instead, the two men went right to Hume’s bedroom at the back of the third-floor apartment and shut the door. Szilard sat on a French antique chair; Hume perched on the edge of a French Empire bed with rolled pillows. Then they talked patents. (From the window they looked out to the picturesque mansard roof of Isham House, then a private mansion and later publisher Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion.) When their negotiations ended Szilard left the apartment silently.35
Throughout the ordeal over his patents, Szilard offered Trude advice that also helped him maintain his wits. She was reluctant to visit a male psychoanalyst, but he urged her to try, as long as he has a “suitable sense of humor.” This “is important in such cases,” wrote Szilard, “because one wants to learn to laugh about oneself, at least.”36
After many long meetings among Szilard, Hume, and Compton, Szilard limited the government’s payment to his actual expenses, $15,416.00, plus a customary $1.00 patent fee. A settlement for the value of the chain-reaction patent itself, Szilard insisted, would be worth much more.37
Groves was coming to Chicago in early December and proposed a meeting to have Szilard sign over his patents. With Hume out of town, Szilard was reluctant to negotiate, but eventually agreed. As soon as they met, Szilard complained to Groves that he felt “under duress” by signing this contract and asked the general to state clearly whether he would be reemployed at the Met Lab if he failed to sign. Groves refused to answer, saying that such a statement would constitute duress and then their agreement would not be legally valid. After all, Groves replied, in any employment negotiation there is always some “duress.” “Why, if Sears, Roebuck and Company offered me a million dollars a year as salary to be its general manager,” Groves said, “that certainly would be ‘duress’ on me.”38
But Szilard persisted, his anger veiled in sarcasm. He would only sign because in these circumstances he did not wish to be forced to desert his Met Lab work, Szilard said. If Groves said he had to sign to be rehired, Szilard explained, then “under these circumstances I would feel like a man who is accosted in the street by a man who draws a gun and asks for his money. In such a situation I would without hesitation surrender my money and report the case to the police. . . .” But today’s choice was different, Szilard continued.
“In the absence of a clear statement by you, General, I feel like a man who is accosted in the street by somebody who demands my money while he keeps his hand in his pocket in such a manner that it is not quite clear whether he is holding a gun or just holding a pipe. Finding myself in a similar situation, I find it difficult to decide on a course of action.”
Szilard told Groves that he would sign only because he was convinced, rightly or wrongly, that “the Germans have caught up with us and I do not wish to leave the project even though I can at present contribute very little to its success.”39 A year and a day after the first chain reaction had occurred, Szilard signed over his patents to the army and the next day wrote Hume with questions about the “fairness” of this agreement— questions that would haunt Szilard to the end of his life.40
As soon as he signed, Szilard was back to criticizing the project He wrote Bush with new “concern for the progress of our work” and reported “dissatisfaction” from most of the Manhattan Project laboratories.41 Bush and Conant wondered how to deal with these renewed complaints. “I understand Szilard has now signed off on his patents,” Bush wrote Conant. “You have been the buffer on this business once. Should Szilard see you?”42 “My guess,” Conant replied, “is Szilard will not be satisfied with seeing me, he thinks I am one of the evil ones. I suggest you offer me as a substitute, however, to take a load off your back. Say I shall be coming to Chicago in about a month or I will see him in Washington sooner.”43
Just before Christmas, 1943, Szilard signed an employment contract with the University of Chicago Met Lab to be “Chief Physicist” at a salary of $950 a month, with back pay for the year, which left him feeling “temporarily very rich.”44 When he had money, Szilard carried bills in his vest and coat pockets, ready for any contingency or move. Physicist Frederick Seitz remembers that “on one occasion when a group of us were dining at the Quadrangle Club he came to us in a rather excited way, saying that he had to go to New York City and wondered if we could lend him enough money to buy a train ticket. We agreed to do what we could but asked him how much he needed. He started delving into his various pockets and turned up with several times more money than he needed for a round trip. . . .”45
At the Met Lab, Szilard and his colleagues had less to do than a year earlier. The physicists and engineers had agreed on a design for the huge reactors then being built at Hanford in the Washington desert. While Szilard was left behind, many of his colleagues were packing up for the train ride to Lamy, New Mexico—the nearest station to the secret Los Alamos Laboratory, where A-bombs were being designed and built under J. Robert Oppenheimer’s direction. “Nobody could think s
traight in a place like that,” Szilard warned as his colleagues departed. “Everybody who goes there will go crazy.”46 That left Szilard and others to ponder new power-plant designs, the “breeder” reactor among them, both to produce plutonium for bombs and, someday, to generate electricity. But now, Szilard complained, the atomic scientists “no longer consider the overall success of this [A-bomb] work as their responsibility.” Lab morale “could almost be plotted on a graph by counting the number of lights burning after dinner in the offices of Eckhart Hall. At present the lights are out.”47
For Szilard, too, physics gave way to the politics of atomic energy, which seemed more pressing than ever. In January 1944, when complaining to Bush about the Manhattan Project’s compartmentalized operations, Szilard confessed why he worried so much. He predicted a postwar nuclear arms race unless some international control scheme could be created. And in what may be the first suggestion of a preemptive war to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, Szilard proposed controlling all the world’s uranium deposits, “if necessary by force, and it will hardly be possible to get political action along that line unless high efficiency atomic bombs have actually been used in this war and the fact of their destructive power has deeply penetrated the mind of the public. This for me personally is perhaps the main reason for being distressed by what I see happening around me.”48 Now, ironically, Szilard feared that the bomb he did not want to use to win the war must be used to win the peace.
In March 1944, Szilard met Bush in Washington for “a long conference” that Bush told Conant “lasted practically all day” and at later encounters proposed various postwar control schemes for atomic energy.49 He also wrote about diverse nuclear-physics projects.50 But by 1944, Szilard’s scientific curiosity veered toward biology, as it had more than a decade before. In April he bought a college zoology text, but found the reading “discouraging.” “A protozoan is almost as complicated as a human being,” he wrote Trude, “an analogy which carries very far: protozoans do not learn from experience either.”51 Reading Macleod’s Physiology, Szilard noted several significant differences from an earlier edition he had seen.52 Szilard later speculated to Trude about the chemical makeup of individual cells and about genetic mutations.53 And that fall he attended “a nice presentation on genetics” by Sewall Wright, who founded at Chicago the mathematical discipline now called population genetics. Wright’s talk, Szilard lamented to Trude, “made me homesick for genuine science.”54
Looking to world government as a way to control the spread of the A-bomb after the war, Szilard believed that “in spite of this hope being slim, it would I believe be necessary at least to make an attempt in this direction.” He could not forsake his “narrow margin of hope.” At the same time, Szilard predicted an “armed peace” if several countries acquired nuclear weapons, the stalemate that became the cold war.55
Szilard’s imagination led him to predict problems that few contemporaries could see: some, like the cold war, were serious; others were silly. To allow Met Lab scientists in Ryerson Hall access to a library of secret documents in the adjacent Eckhart Hall, the army built a passageway connecting the two. His colleague Charles Coryell recalled that this worried Szilard, because he “was afraid that somebody would get lost in the passage ways connecting various secret parts with others. He had heard that if you were ever lost in the mountains, if you could find a porcupine and kill it, you could have food. So he proposed that the army put some porcupines around there in case somebody got lost.”56
Knowing Szilard, he was probably serious about this danger, although no one mistook what Fermi said at one seminar for anything but fun. “The universe is vast,” Fermi began, “containing many stars like our own sun . . .” and he spun a shaggy-dog story about the probability that air and water and chemical compounds elsewhere might resemble those found on earth. On and on he conjectured, about self-reproducing biota and primitive life-forms and evolution more advanced than our own. The overly intelligent creatures would surely explore other galaxies, he concluded, and “could hardly overlook such a beautiful place as our earth, with its ample supply of water and organic compounds, its favorable temperature range and all its other advantages.”
Fermi paused. “And so,” he said, at last posing his question to the group, “if all this has been happening, they should have arrived here by now, so where are they?”
“They are among us,” Szilard declared, “but they call themselves Hungarians.”57
This joke, in many variations, regenerated throughout the Manhattan Project. In a popular retelling, the Hungarians were Martians. After all, four Hungarians—Szilard, Wigner, Teller, and von Neumann—were among the brightest scientists in a stellar gathering. Like Martians, the Hungarians were said to have superhuman intelligence and to speak an unearthly language. Were Hungarians really Martians? Whenever Szilard was asked, he smiled, and answered: “Perhaps.”
As he was devising ways to make international control of the atom more palatable to both the American public and foreign statesmen, Szilard proposed sharing the atom’s peaceful benefits. He suggested irradiating cobalt disks in the Hanford reactors and offering them “as a present to other nations for hospital use” to replace X-ray machines. This might signal US intentions “to refrain from monopolizing the humanitarian applications of atomic power.” Compton liked this “good idea” and urged Szilard to send it on to Bush. Szilard did and in the same letter raised a theme that would drive his thinking for the rest of his life.
Clearly, the existence of atomic bombs and their effect on the organization of the world will overshadow every other practical application for the next twenty-five or fifty years to come, but one might in the meantime try to keep up the faith in the ultimate peaceful applications of atomic power by putting into effect one by one such applications even though they are of minor importance.58
Around the Met Lab at that time, a small group headed by Zay Jeffries of General Electric drafted a “Prospectus on Nucleonics” that looked for peaceful applications not twenty-five or fifty years into the future but five or ten. The group argued for “setting up an international administration with police powers which can effectively control at least the means of nucleonic warfare.”59 Szilard had no direct role with Jeffries’s group. But what he overheard about it both convinced him that a postwar nuclear arms race was likely and scared him about who might start it. Szilard heard that Jeffries believed the army engineers wanted to keep the A-bomb a secret not only from the Russians but also from the American public. If US citizens learned about the bomb, the engineers were said to believe, then public opinion would prevent its use against Japan. And the engineers wanted to bomb Japan not just to help end the war but to test and improve their new weapon for use against their next enemy—Russia. Heard in 1944, this eerie rumor convinced Szilard that the most urgent task ahead was to improve US-Soviet relations.60
CHAPTER 18
Three Attempts to Stop the Bomb . . .
1945
By early in 1945, Leo Szilard had a place in the history of nuclear physics for his work in creating the world’s first chain reaction. He was not sure, however, what role he could play in deciding how his invention would be used. Those decisions were being made by military and political leaders in Washington, not at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, where Szilard worked, or at the secret Los Alamos site in New Mexico, where A-bombs were then being designed and built.
Isolated from both political and practical deliberations, Szilard had time to reflect on the admix of science, politics, and personality that had brought the United States into the atomic age. A dozen years earlier, the A-bomb had been little more than Szilard’s private obsession. Now he was part of a $2 billion nationwide enterprise and found it necessary to argue, in a series of memoranda, for a research and development program for the “breeder” reactor he had invented “and the part that, given favorable conditions, I might be able to play in it.” Believing that the breeder could yield
abundant nuclear fuel, Szilard speculated about plentiful atomic energy in a postwar world and on ways to assure its control. As he later recalled:
Initially we were strongly motivated to produce the bomb because we feared the Germans would get ahead of us and the only way to prevent them from drop ping bombs on us was to have bombs in readiness ourselves. But now, with the war won, it was not clear what we were working for.1
Arthur Compton, the Met Lab director, shared Szilard’s concern but, despite his access to the project’s leaders in Washington, had no say about the A-bomb’s use. Because the Manhattan Project’s strict secrecy left no intermediate level in the government to consider these issues, Szilard concluded that “the only man with whom we were sure we were entitled to communicate was the president.” Why not write to him?
In a memo on “Atomic Bombs and the Postwar Position of the United States in the World,” Szilard warned Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt that the choice facing US strategists was starkly simple: Strike an arms control agreement with the Russians or be forced to beat them in a nuclear arms race. With no direct knowledge of bomb-design work at Los Alamos, Szilard warned that “six years from now Russia may have accumulated enough [fissionable material] to make atomic bombs . . .” that would be so small they could be hidden in US cities for later detonation. Worse, he said that “. . . after this war it is conceivable that it will become possible to drop atomic bombs on the cities of the United States from very great distances by means of rockets.”
In a US-Soviet nuclear arms race, Szilard wrote, the “greatest danger” is “the possibility of the outbreak of a preventive war. Such a war might be the outcome of the fear that the other country might strike first, and no amount of good will on the part of both nations might be sufficient to prevent the outbreak of a war if such an explosive situation were allowed to develop.” Only a worldwide system of controls could avert this danger, Szilard warned: a system involving both Great Britain and the Soviet Union. By diluting and denaturing fissionable uranium and plutonium, the world powers could develop nuclear energy peacefully, free from the danger that this fuel might be diverted to weapons making.2
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