On August 1, worried that the bomb might soon be used and annoyed about his expulsion from the faculty club, Szilard stuffed his suitcases with papers and rumpled clothes and moved five blocks east, where he rented two back rooms from Dr. and Mrs. Paul A. Weiss in a three-story brick apartment house on South Blackstone Avenue. The view there was much less picturesque than Szilard enjoyed at the club; now he looked from large windows onto a back alley and garages instead of seeing through small leaded-glass panes the neo-Gothic spires of the Quadrangle and the divinity schools nearby.53
The day of Szilard’s move, Groves at last forwarded Szilard’s petition to Stimson’s office. But still in Potsdam with Truman, Stimson would not see the petition until his return later in August. Three US B-29s lifted from the Tinian airstrip the morning of August 6, one bearing the uranium bomb nicknamed “Little Boy,” one armed for aerial protection, and one along to photograph and film the mission. (Four cities had been spared conventional bombings so an A-bomb’s effects could be seen clearly: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki.) Over Hiroshima the single bomb fell to explode above the waking city at 8:15 A.M. A shock of light, a blast, heat, whirlwind firestorms. By sudden incineration and lingering death some 200,000 people died.54 In a flash, the villains of the Pacific war became its greatest victims.
News of the single blast reverberated around the world. At a small cabin on Saranac Lake, in the Adirondack Mountains of New York, Albert Einstein’s secretary heard a radio news item about the war in the Pacific that told of a new kind of bomb dropped on Japan. ‘Then I knew what it was,’ she recalled later, “because I knew about the Szilard thing in a vague way. . . . As Professor Einstein came down to tea, I told him, and he said, ‘Oh, Weh’ [‘Oh, woe’] and that’s that.” To a newspaper reporter that day Einstein could only say, “Ach! The world is not ready for it.”55
At Farm Hall, a seventeenth-century country house in England, ten eminent German scientists who the Allies thought had worked to build an A-bomb for the Führer were under house arrest: among them Otto Hahn, Werner Heisenberg, and Carl von Weizsäcker. Hahn, who was first to hear, was shattered by the news, said he felt responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and gulped several drinks to brace himself. Hahn’s colleagues were incredulous, then suspicious.
“If the Americans have an uranium bomb,” Hahn said to the others, “then you’re all second-raters. Poor old Heisenberg.” At first, Heisenberg thought the news a hoax. Their conversation, secretly taped by British intelligence, turned to moralizing.
After another radio announcement convinced the Germans that the bomb was real, they contemplated the magnitude of America’s effort and their own failure. Heisenberg recalled a time, in early 1942, when “we had absolutely definite proof that it could be done.” But Weizsäcker’s excuse— though not shared by everyone—closed that speculation: “I believe the reason we didn’t do it was because all the physicists didn’t want to do it, on principles. If we had all wanted Germany to win the war we could have succeeded.”
“I don’t believe that,” the gloomy Hahn replied, “but I am thankful we didn’t succeed.”56
In Chicago, Szilard “knew that the bomb would be dropped, that we had lost the fight,” he recalled later. “And when it was actually dropped, my overall feeling was a feeling of relief. . . . Suddenly the secrecy was dropped and it was possible to tell people what this was about and what we were facing in this century.”57
But first he had to tell someone special, and he sat down to write Trude Weiss. When she heard about the Hiroshima bombing on the radio, she later recalled, “Then I knew. Like a shock I knew. I was at my desk in New York, and I had to go home. Everything was suddenly out of proportion.”58 Szilard knew she was not prepared for the news that the A-bomb was her Leo’s doing and needed to explain. Nervously he shifted from the matter-of-fact report that he had moved to a casual query about a party to rare self-confession. In English and German and English again. From past to present to future.
THE QUADRANGLE CLUB
CHICAGO
Monday, Aug. 6, 1945
Dear Ch,
I report my new address: 5816 Blackstone Ave., c/o Weiss. Telephone: MIDWAY 0545.
How are things with you? How was the Calderon party?
I suppose you have seen to-day’s newspapers. Using atomic bombs against Japan is one of the greatest blunders of history.
—Both from a practical point of view on a ten-years scale and from the point of view of our moral position.—I went out of my way (and very much so) in order to prevent it but, as today’s papers show, without success. It is very difficult to see what wise course of action is possible from here on. Maybe it is best to say nothing; this is what I suggest you do.
I hope you do not feel like a little mouse anymore. [This sentence is in German.] Maybe I’ll come East for a visit soon, now that the cat is out of the bag.
Yours L.59
“I always thought it was his way of apologizing,” Trude said after Leo’s death. “It was one of the most important letters he ever wrote to me.”60
Relief at being free to discuss the bomb was tempered by Szilard’s horror at early reports from Hiroshima, a horror that roused him to new thinking, writing, telephoning, buttonholing and berating his colleagues—and anyone else who would listen. For months he rushed around the campus, around the city, around the country, in a frenzy of activity.
His first stop on the day he heard about Hiroshima was Robert Hutchins’s office because he needed a sympathetic person to talk to about the tragic news. He asked if the Met Lab staff might wear black mourning bands on their arms, but Hutchins thought the gesture “a little Hungarian” and suggested Szilard find some less dramatic way for the scientists to demonstrate their grief. A few days later, Szilard enlisted Hutchins to head a Chicago scientists’ group to meet with President Truman, but this White House visit was never arranged.61
American B-29s took off from Tinian Island again on the morning of August 9, this time to drop a single plutonium bomb, nicknamed “Fat Man,” on Kokura. But bad weather there sent the bomber to Nagasaki. The bomb killed only 70,000 because hills deflected the blast and radiation. “Dropping the bomb on Hiroshima was a tragic mistake,” Szilard quoted his colleague Samuel K. Allison as saying. “Dropping the bomb on Nagasaki was an atrocity.”62
On Saturday, August 11, Szilard asked a University of Chicago chaplain to hold a special prayer service for the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and offered to transmit the prayer to the Japanese survivors.63 Szilard’s petition to the president three weeks earlier had been based on moral principles, and he was upset that political and religious leaders seemed to be silent about these concerns. Szilard enlisted philosophy professor Charles Hartshorne for a taxi ride uptown to call on Chicago’s Roman Catholic cardinal. When ushered into the churchman’s presence, Szilard began at once to spout his views about the import and dangers of atomic energy. The cardinal listened patiently as Szilard demanded that the church confront the morality of the A-bomb, then replied briefly.
“God had locked up the energy in question so securely that only after thousands of years has it been unlocked,” he intoned. “Surely there was a reason for this long delay.”
“What was the reason?” Szilard demanded.
“The church will consider the matter and in due time will make a statement about it,” the cardinal announced. End of discussion. Szilard and Hartshorne left disappointed and, riding back to campus, agreed they now wished the atom’s energy had been locked up still more securely. Szilard called on other religious leaders but found them just as unconcerned.64
When a prayer service was held at the university’s Rockefeller Chapel, Szilard attended with Met Lab physicist Alexander Langsdorf and his wife, Martyl—the artist who would design the “minutes to midnight” clock for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. As the three walked out, Szilard noticed that he had forgotten his hat in the pew, and Langsdorf offered to fetch it.<
br />
“No, no,” Szilard said. “General Groves will know where I am and it will get back to me.”65
Groves may not have been watching Szilard quite so closely, but he did worry about any publicity he might create. Once Groves learned that Manhattan Project officers had agreed to allow Szilard to publicize the scientists’ petition to Truman, the general ordered it classified “Secret,” blocking Szilard from releasing it to Science magazine. An army officer explicitly forbade Szilard from publishing the petition anywhere and threatened to fire him from the Met Lab if he did.66
Quoting a letter sent to justify classification, Szilard complained to Hutchins how “the Manhattan District’s definition of ‘Secret’ includes ‘information that might be injurious to the prestige of any government activity,’ which is, of course, very different from the definition adopted by Congress in the Espionage Act.”67
He also complained directly to a Met Lab officer about what a “big mistake” it would be to publish the Smyth report. When it appeared, Szilard said, he would be known to the world as a “war criminal.” Szilard insisted that for his own protection the army should furnish him with “a personal bodyguard and an automobile.” This was ignored by the army but reported matter-of-factly by the FBI.68
In a memorandum for discussions with other Met Lab scientists, Szilard predicted that if A-bombs spread, US cities “will be threatened by sudden annihilation within ten years. The outbreak of a preventive war will then hang over the world as a constant threat.” He also fretted about other threats “for the large-scale extermination of human beings” from “biological methods,” conceding that his latest speculation—city dispersal schemes—would be useless against this warfare. Only “moral inhibition” might work. And, he grieved, “Hiroshima shows that moral inhibitions can no longer be counted upon. . . .”69
The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on August 8 and this, with the two A-bomb attacks, convinced Japan to surrender on August 14, a US national holiday called V-J day. Autos with their horns blaring paraded through cities and towns across the country, and the movie newsreels showed jitterbug dancing and a whirl of embraces. But Szilard appeared depressed that night when he visited Hartshorne’s wood-frame house on East Fifty-seventh Street, near the university, and his spirits were little improved the next day, after the Smyth report’s release. The press described Szilard’s role in the early development of the bomb and pictured him along with Einstein, Fermi, and other well-known scientists. Good company, Szilard probably thought, but a sorry way to gain celebrity. Back at Hartshorne’s for the family’s traditional Friday afternoon tea, Szilard was still in a sour mood.
“Well,” a young philosopher said to Szilard, referring to the Smyth report, “I hear you have become a great man.”
“I’ve always been a great man,” Szilard replied.70
Later that month, Szilard boarded an overnight train for Buffalo (tailed, as usual, by the FBI) and there met with his cousin, city planner Laszlo Segoe. Szilard wanted to know what dispersing urban centers—to defend against atomic attack—would cost: in land area, transportation, capital investment. Thanks to Segoe’s advice, Szilard was able to spout elaborate statistics about city dispersal, although this line of pragmatic brainstorming seemed more fantastic with each telling.71
Japan formally signed documents of surrender on September 2, and to most Americans peace had come about because of the A-bomb. Without this weapon, they thought, the war would have dragged on for months. But recent scholarship suggests that Japan was about to surrender before the A-bombs were used and would have before the US invasion planned for November 1945 and March 1946.72
The United States was victorious and seemed invincible with its new weapon. Now the atom that had ended the war could also enrich the peace. Just after V-J day a Scripps-Howard news service feature on the “Era of Atomic Energy” predicted that “no baseball game will be called off on account of rain” because atom-generated heat would dispel bad weather. Artificial “suns” would assure clear skies at resorts and heat “indoor farms,” using uranium cores. “There is no reason why an internal combustion engine cannot be developed” using “tiny explosions of uranium235.”73
Such fantastic optimism was just what Groves and his engineers had hoped for during the weeks that followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But for the atomic scientists, who knew better and feared worse, the new technology they had created was still principally a weapon of mass destruction. Somehow, Szilard believed, something had to be done to stop the army from using it again. By the fall of 1945, the only solution he could imagine was to disarm the military and establish civilian control of the atom.
CHAPTER 19
. . . And Two to Stop the Army
1945
At a press luncheon on September 1, 1945, at the Shoreland Hotel on Lake Michigan, University of Chicago chancellor Robert M. Hutchins announced that physicist Samuel K. Allison—the Met Lab’s associate director—would head a new Institute of Nuclear Studies. Allison gave the reporters something more stirring to write about. “Scientist Drops A-Bomb: Blasts Army Shackles,” the Chicago Tribune reported about his remarks. “We are determined to return to free research, as before the war,” he said, warning that if military regulations hampered the free exchange of scientific information, researchers in America “would leave the field of atomic energy and devote themselves to studying the color of butterfly wings.”1
Incensed by this, Col. Kenneth Nichols, assistant to Manhattan Project director Leslie R. Groves, flew from Oak Ridge to Chicago the next day for a swiftly arranged luncheon of his own at the Shoreland, where he told Allison, Enrico Fermi, Harold Urey, and chemist Thorfin Hogness to halt all banter about butterflies. The War Department was preparing a bill for Congress to restructure postwar control of atomic research, Nichols said, and cracks like Allison’s might hurt the chance of passage. Besides, he said, there would be ample opportunity for the scientists to speak when Congress held hearings on the bill.
Leo Szilard had not attended either luncheon2 but on his own kept quiet about the bomb in public because Manhattan Project officials had asked the scientists to remain silent while important international negotiations were under way. Szilard worried about more than restrictions on research. Once his three attempts to prevent the A-bomb’s use on Japan had failed, his next task was to stop its use entirely by placing this weapon under civilian control at home and international control abroad.
Behind the scenes, however, Szilard was typically plotting political tactics and always eager to speak to politicians personally. His September 7 memo on “An Attempt to Define the Platform for Our Conversations with Members of the US Senate and the House of Representatives” became a seminal document for the atomic scientists’ lobbying efforts as well as a basis for their public statements and for atomic-energy policy in general. An Atomic Power Commission, perhaps with a permanent committee of its own, should be created, which Congress should supervise. But recalling his own troubles with the chain of command, Szilard insisted that “the scientists ought to be free” to communicate to members of the congressional committee.3
Military secrecy was sure to thwart scientific work, as it had during the war, Szilard warned, creating the “intolerable situation” in which scientists might be intimidated by the officials who controlled their research funds. Congressmen should also be warned, Szilard wrote, that the A-bomb creates the danger of a preventive war if an arms race develops. Only international inspections could keep such mistrust from occurring.4
Szilard urged Hutchins to convene a small, private conference on atomic-energy policy at the university and helped to attract influential participants. At this time, Sen. Brien McMahon of Connecticut proposed that the UN Security Council be licensed to conduct nuclear research, and physicist James Franck and sixty-four other scientists and academics from the university sent President Truman a petition urging him to share atomic secrets with other nations as a way to avoid a nuclear arms race.5 Also on campus, th
e Atomic Scientists of Chicago was formally established to work for international control of the atom.6
Within the Truman administration, Secretary of War Stimson urged the president to contact the Russians for an agreement to limit the use of atomic weapons, arguing that “if we fail to approach them now and merely continue to negotiate with them, having this weapon rather ostentatiously on our hip,” they would undertake “an all-out effort to solve the problem,” making any agreement dubious.7
Unable to muzzle the atomic scientists who were trying to debate this issue in public, the War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations sent the press a “Confidential—Not for Publication Note to Editors” in the presi dent’s name. “In the interest of the highest national security,” the memo warned, editors and broadcasters were requested to consult the War Department before printing any atomic information, except for official releases. Groves also tried to pressure Hutchins directly, warning about “grave security hazards” at the planned atomic-energy conference and enclosing the War Department’s note to editors. Groves also reminded Hutchins of the War Department’s secret contract with the university. As far as he was concerned, Groves said, “the limits of discussion are the Smyth Report and other authorized public releases.”8
Insulted and angered by this tactic, Hutchins replied to Groves that the conference was in response to the Smyth report’s call for public discussion of atomic energy. He had told the Manhattan Project office on campus “some days ago” that the conference would be private, with no public or press at the discussions, so the War Department’s note “has, of course, no application to a conference at which no editors or broadcasters will be present.”9
The Atomic Energy Control Conference on September 19 and 20 attracted economists and political scientists from several universities. Beardsley Ruml, treasurer of the R. H. Macy department store and chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, offered the scientists public relations advice. Commerce Secretary Henry A. Wallace and Census Bureau director Philip Hauser attended, unofficially, as did David Lilienthal, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority (and by 1947 the first chairman of the new US Atomic Energy Commission). Also present was Chester Barnard, president of the New Jersey Bell Telephone Co., who would soon draft the State Department’s proposal for international control of atomic energy.10
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