Addressing the conference on opening day, Szilard predicted that Russia would have A-bombs in a short time, suggested control arrangements with Moscow, and urged relocation of city populations as the only defense. And he discussed plans for an eventual world government to secure atomic-energy control. William Benton, who had just become Secretary of State Byrnes’s assistant for atomic-energy affairs, asked Szilard for a memo on his views, and the two corresponded throughout the fall, with Benton using some of Szilard’s ideas on Byrnes.11
As usual, Szilard worked more freely out of the formal sessions, buttonholing conferees, expounding his views, and sometimes even listening to theirs. After the Smyth report, Szilard believed, the only remaining secrets concerned the next stage of development, the hydrogen bomb, or the “super.” He warned that “we cannot rely on more and better bombs for more than a few years. . . . An armaments race in atomic weapons may well become the greatest single cause of a future war.”12
Szilard had the last word at the conference—and the first on record about the touchy topic of “verification”—when he said a necessary first step would be to “guarantee immunity to scientists and engineers everywhere in the world in case they should report violations of the [arms-control] arrangements agreed upon. . . .” With “a Bill of Rights for scientists and engineers . . .” they would become “the guardians of the international arrangements relating to the control of atomic energy.” Typically, Szilard carried his idea to its too logical conclusion, advocating that all countries revoke their espionage laws for scientific and engineering secrets.
The secrecy issue divided the Atomic Scientists of Chicago, and during an emotional debate about a declaration, Szilard finally persuaded the group to change the phrase that “secrecy is not advisable” and substitute that “secrecy is not possible.”13
The Chicago scientists also argued about the War Department’s bill to keep the atom’s control with the army, which Colonel Nichols had alluded to at his Shoreland luncheon. In the House, the bill would go to the sympathetic Committee on Military Affairs, but by the end of September, the Senate adopted a resolution by Senator McMahon to create a new committee to write all atomic-energy legislation.14
At about that time, Szilard was in New York to appear on “Round Table,” the University of Chicago’s weekly radio program. Discussing “The Atom and World Politics” with Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, William Fox, a research associate at the Institute of International Studies at Yale, and William Hocking, professor emeritus of philosophy at Harvard, Szilard said it was unlikely that there would be world government within three years but added that “this is the only solution for permanent peace.” One alternative, a “durable peace,” would require an agreement among nations not to stockpile atomic weapons, an accord verified by a widespread international detection system run by the scientists themselves.
If both inspections and “some international authority” fail, Szilard said, then, logically, the United States should consider a ten-year plan to relocate 30–60 million people. The cost of $15 billion a year was the price that must be paid if nuclear arms are not controlled, he said. Half a century later, Szilard’s relocation plans for the US urban population seems naive, but it does capture his mental and emotional spirit at the time. Frightened by Hiroshima, he longed to give the world a grand scheme that would counteract the A-bomb’s growing perils. He wanted to alert policymakers and the American public to the fundamental change that had occurred, and in his friendly way of shocking listeners this plan posed the jarring alternatives to the arms race he saw coming. He sometimes admitted not knowing for sure when he was kidding. But this time he seemed serious, logical, and to most who heard him, a slightly mad scientist.15
Around the time of his “Round Table” broadcast, Szilard stopped in Princeton to visit Albert Einstein—their first encounter since March. “Our conversation turned back six years to the visit on Long Island when we discussed the letter he might write to the president,” Szilard recalled.
“You see now,” Einstein said to him, “that the ancient Chinese were right. It is not possible to foresee the results of what you do. The only wise thing to do is to take no action—to take absolutely no action.”16
But Szilard disagreed and left the white frame house on Mercer Street determined to continue his arms-control crusade. In Washington he met William Benton at the State Department and attended a dinner at his house with some of the department’s top desk officers. Physicist Edward Condon was also invited and matched Szilard’s puckish humor with good-natured repartee of his own. The two men enjoyed each other’s company and together that fall enlivened any gathering they attended. They were a match in another important way: As a vice-president of the American Physical Society, Condon was a scientific insider; Szilard, still a creative and quirky outsider.17
In October, President Truman proposed to Congress that total control over “the use and development of atomic energy” be vested in a new Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), empowered to operate all existing facilities, acquire minerals, and conduct research for both peaceful and military uses. The AEC would also license other researchers “under appropriate safeguards” and establish security regulations for “the handling of all information, material and equipment under its jurisdiction.” International control, Truman proposed, should begin with talks by the United States, Britain, and Canada, “and then with other nations,” seeking an “agreement on the conditions under which cooperation might replace rivalry in the field of atomic energy.”18
The same day Truman’s message was sent to Capitol Hill, the army’s allies introduced identical versions of their bill: in the House by Andrew Jackson May, a Kentucky Democrat who was chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee; in the Senate by Edwin C. Johnson, a Colorado Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Military Affairs Committee. The May-Johnson bill proposed a nine-member, part-time AEC, empowered to select a full-time administrator. The House bill was referred to May’s committee, but in the Senate a two-day fight erupted over jurisdiction between the Military Affairs and Foreign Relations committees.19 Still in Washington after the Benton dinner, Szilard “picked up more or less accidentally” a copy of the May-Johnson bill and took it with him to Chicago.20
Back on campus, Szilard walked the bill across the university’s tree-shaded Quadrangle to the law school and handed it to Edward Levi, an acquaintance who had been advising the Chicago scientists. In particular, both men were alarmed that national and international policies for atomic energy would be set and supervised by a part-time board.21 At an Atomic Scientists of Chicago meeting on campus, Condon and Szilard stressed the bill’s security restrictions. “If this bill passes, we have no choice but to get out of this work,” Szilard said.22 When Arthur Holly Compton, the Met Lab’s director, returned to Chicago the next morning, he told his fellow scientists that the War Department had asked them to keep silent not because of delicate international talks but to pass an atomic-energy bill in Congress without “unnecessary discussions.”
“I got mad at this point,” Szilard remembered. He rose to his feet and declared that no bill would be passed without discussion if he could possibly help it. It was their “duty,” he said, to fight any attempt to “smuggle” a bill through Congress.
Szilard was even more angry the next day when he read in the newspapers that while Compton was talking with them, May’s committee had held a five-hour, closed-door hearing on the bill and was about to report it to the full House for passage. A chance telephone call from Hutchins gave Szilard the opening he needed: a Chicago Sun request for an interview.23 Szilard’s complaint about the army made the front page, and the Washington Post reported the scientists’ call for a joint congressional committee and public debate on atomic policy, alerting politicians in the capital to a growing struggle.24 The fight was on.
Szilard enlisted two allies when he persuaded Hutchins to free Dean Robert Redfield from some university duties to con
centrate on the “political implications of the atomic bomb,” and asked Redfield to “persuade” sociologist Edward Shils to drop some classes and work against the May- Johnson bill. Then he left Chicago for Washington aboard the Liberty Limited, tailed—as usual—by the FBI.
The Chicago scientists enlisted their Manhattan Project colleagues around the country, hoping to bring pressure on Congress from all directions. At Oak Ridge, support was strong; 90 percent of those working on the bomb agreed that no hearing on atomic energy should be held until a bipartisan committee was created to consider the matter. But at Los Alamos, where the A-bomb was designed, built, and tested and where work continued on the “super,” support was minimal. Seeking to influence his distant colleagues from Chicago, Herbert Anderson, Fermi’s assistant at the Met Lab and at Los Alamos, criticized the bill in a letter to William Higinbotham, a founder of the Atomic Scientists of Los Alamos. The bill’s security provisions “are frightening,” he warned. “They place every scientist in jeopardy of a jail sentence or a large fine.” But more disturbing, said Anderson, was his conclusion that their “leaders” on the Interim Committee—Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Compton, and Fermi—”were duped” when they urged the scientists to keep silent about the army’s bill. “Let us beware of any breach of our rights as men and citizens. The war is won, let us be free again!”25
The Chicago scientists were eager to educate the American public as well as Congress, and Katharine Way, a chemist at the Met Lab who became the group’s publications director, urged a few colleagues to write a book. In October she journeyed to New York with an outline, where she sold the idea to editors at McGraw-Hill. Compton would write the introduction, Niels Bohr the foreword. Physicist Philip Morrison, who was among the first Americans to survey Hiroshima, would compare that city’s destruction to a similar attack on New York. Wigner would write a history of the atomic age. Oppenheimer would describe the new weapon. Physicist Louis Ridenour would emphasize that there is no defense against the A-bomb, while physicists Frederick Seitz and Hans Bethe would describe how other countries might build a bomb. Urey would analyze the politics of arms control. Szilard would give a plan for international inspection. Columnist Walter Lippmann would propose an international-control scheme. And Einstein would offer a rationale for nuclear disarmament.26
Arriving in Washington on Friday, October 12, Szilard and Condon checked into the elegant Mayflower Hotel, on Connecticut Avenue near the White House. The Mayflower was too expensive for their budgets, but Anderson’s brother, who worked for Schenley distillers, had interested his company’s owner, Louis Rosensteil, in the cause of the atomic scientists. To help, Rosensteil had offered Anderson and his colleagues use of his company suite. Once in the spacious rooms, Szilard and Condon began to place telephone calls. For several minutes they called congressional offices, dictated telegrams to their allies in Chicago and Oak Ridge, and arranged meetings of scientists for the following week. Assuming their phones might be bugged, they ended each call, sarcastically, with “And God bless General Groves!”27
From his calls Szilard learned that May’s committee planned to meet the following Tuesday, vote out a bill on Wednesday, and bring it to the House floor for passage by Thursday.
As Szilard and Condon chatted away, a key clicked in the door, and a well-dressed man stepped into the suite. Surprised to find the two men there, he bustled into the room and announced: “I’m Mr. Strauss, president of Schenley! And who are you?”
“I’m the bastard son of Louie Rosensteil,” answered Condon.28 His real explanation made little difference after that quip, and the two physicists picked up their papers and bags and moved out, this time up Connecticut Avenue to the Wardman Park, a stately brick-and-white-columned structure near Rock Creek Park. This was Szilard’s favorite hotel, and his room there quickly became a center for planning the scientists’ assault on Capitol Hill. Colleagues recall it as strewn with clothes and papers; the hotel operators remember the bursts of calls, day and night, plugged through the switchboard to all parts of the country.
From the Wardman Park, Szilard taxied about the city impulsively, his erratic movements an endless challenge for the FBI agents on his trail. Caught by a downpour on one outing, Szilard snapped up an umbrella he was toting, paused, turned, and with a graceful thrust of the arm offered shelter to the agent at his heels. The agent declined and was soaked during the rest of the walk.29 His followers must have been confused by Szilard’s frequent calls at a town house on Vermont Avenue near McPherson Square: the office of the Independent Citizens Committee for the Arts, Sciences, and Professions. In fact, this committee had offered two small rooms there to physicist John Simpson as temporary quarters for the Atomic Scientists of Chicago.30
Condon and Szilard persuaded Representatives Chet Holifield, a member of the Military Affairs Committee, and his close and respected fellow Californian George Outland to oppose the May-Johnson bill. Holi-field arranged for the two physicists to talk with May, but he was not impressed and on Saturday told newspaper reporters that his hearings would remain closed.31 By now, however, telegrams protesting the bill were reaching congressional and Senate offices from scientists’ groups in Chicago and Oak Ridge. The scientists’ views attracted congressional interest quickly, and those who ventured to Capitol Hill found it easy to meet their representatives and senators. “Mention to a senator’s secretary at the door that you’re a ‘nuclear physicist’ and you come from ‘Los Alamos,’” recalled Szilard’s assistant and collaborator Bernard T. Feld, “and you were ushered right in to see the senator. We were celebrities, and the lawmakers wanted to learn about the bomb—right from the horse’s mouth.”32
Szilard had his own weird ideas about lobbying and was “flabbergasted” when he met chemist Charles Coryell on Capitol Hill one day and learned he had appointments with Senators William Knowland of California and Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee. “How did you get this?” Szilard asked. “You don’t meet congressmen this way. You go to a friend who has a friend who knows someone to take you there.” Szilard could not believe that it was possible to arrange a meeting just by asking.33
When riding in a taxi near the Capitol one day, Szilard noticed Seitz walking along the sidewalk, stopped the cab, and asked him to join with a few other scientists on their way to call on a senator.
“What’s the subject of your meeting?” Seitz asked, and when told, protested that he knew little about this topic.
“No matter,” Szilard insisted. “I understand that when you call on a senator, it is a good idea to have a tall person in the group.”34 Seitz was tall, and that was enough. When Szilard met with James Newman, the Truman administration’s adviser on atomic-energy legislation, he joked that he had brought Condon along because he had an honest, farm-boy face—a reassurance to those uneasy with Szilard’s pudgy features, Hungarian accent, and blunt speaking style.35 In fact, Szilard and Condon made an amiable and successful team—so successful that they had to schedule their time: “We would keep cabinet members waiting one day, senators for two days, and congressmen for three days before we’d give them an appointment,” Szilard recalled.
Busy and bumbling he may have been, but Szilard managed to collect and use whatever details he gleaned from his Washington contacts. Commerce secretary Henry Wallace, an internationalist who liked Szilard and Condon, introduced them around Washington. Interior secretary Harold Ickes complained that he had not read the May-Johnson bill because the War Department had loaned him a copy for only a few hours. From Rear Adm. Lewis Strauss, an associate interested in atomic energy since the late 1930s, Szilard learned that the Navy Department had no views of its own about the bill, nor did the president’s top assistants. Clearly, this was not an administration bill but a War Department bill. President Truman had no designated adviser on atomic-energy legislation until, in mid-October, he named Newman head of the science section in the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion. Szilard, Condon, and Newman all agreed that the May-Johnson bill did litt
le more than extend General Groves’s wartime powers and practices and worked together to defeat it.36
Pressured by Holifield and other colleagues, May reopened hearings on his bill for one day. Szilard was invited, with less than two days’ time to prepare. He urged that Anderson speak against the bill for Oak Ridge and Chicago scientists. The War Department asked Oppenheimer and Compton to endorse the bill.
All the day before, Szilard scribbled notes for his testimony, stopping only in the early evening to attend a dinner for a few senators with Fermi, Condon, Urey, and Oppenheimer, who had resigned that day as director of Los Alamos.37 This was the first of several meals, arranged by Watson Davis of the Science Service news agency, for “educating” senators, and that night’s guests included Brien McMahon, the vigorous and astute Connecticut Democrat who was reported to have said the A-bomb was “the greatest event since the birth of Jesus Christ.”38 From the administration came two Szilard allies, James Newman and Henry A. Wallace. Republican Charles W. Tobey of New Hampshire set the tone for his colleagues when he glanced around the table and said, “It looks as if we have a nonpartisan issue.”
But as the meal progressed, it became clear that the scientists themselves were at odds. Oppenheimer and Szilard both supported international control of atomic energy but disagreed about how to bring it about. Now representing different factions in American science and government—Oppenheimer the agile political insider, Szilard the restless agitator from outside—the two men must have sensed that their differences might destroy the common goal. They agreed to talk after dinner, and with Urey as their mediator and Newman as adviser, the two met first at Szilard’s room at the Wardman Park, then downtown at Oppenheimer’s at the Statler Hotel. But neither man would yield, and Szilard walked out, taking Urey and Newman back to the Wardman Park to help draft his testimony.
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