Genius in the Shadows

by William Lanouette

  Just after midnight, Szilard received a four-page telegram from Chicago, with support from the Oak Ridge and Met Lab scientists. Now certain of his colleagues’ backing, Szilard worked through the night, dictating his statement to a hotel stenographer who had to operate a switchboard as she took shorthand.39 When he arrived on Capitol Hill on Thursday morning, October 18, Szilard was tired and uneasy about the state of his prepared text but eager to declare his views.

  Below the tall ceiling of the committee’s hearing room were walls trimmed with marble columns. Flags, plaques, and other military gear decorated the chamber. The spectators who packed the room gazed past the tables for the press and the witnesses to a raised, semicircular dais and to a wall behind where three flags were splayed.40 The committee members appeared pompous and remote as they peered from the dais. A showdown was at hand.

  Promptly at 10:00 A.M. Chairman May rapped a wooden gavel. The hearing, he said in a voice smoothed with a Kentucky drawl and trimmed with sarcasm, was to allow “a group of interested people, known as scientists.” to state their views. May denied that his “committee was trying to rush things” and vowed to give “patient consideration” to the witnesses. He stared across the press table at Szilard, who seemed stiff as he sat in a leather chair, his dark suit buttoned tightly around his belly. “We have as our first witness,” May said, “a Dr. Sighland.”41

  “My name is Leo Szilard,” he began, pointedly correcting the chairman. Cameras flashed as Szilard recited his background, saying twice he was a naturalized American citizen. Szilard thanked the committee for this moment. Then, matter-of-factly, he explained that the government’s atomic facilities can make two substances, uranium235 and plutonium, which can be used for generating electricity or “for manufacturing bombs.” Szilard declared “the hope of all physicists” that plutonium would be used for power rather than bombs. Now out of physics and into politics, he was ready to reorganize the US government along the way.

  Szilard strode to a portable blackboard to make his next point: how to administer the postwar nuclear enterprise. He sketched three large circles representing new government-owned corporations—one for uranium and plutonium production; another for scientific research and development; a third for the manufacture, research, and development of bombs. Typically, Szilard spelled out details for selecting the three-member boards for each corporation. He also proposed a policy-making commission to coordinate national and foreign policy, with the secretaries of state, commerce, interior, and war as members.

  The policy choice ahead, Szilard declared, was between short-term nuclear power development on a small scale, with plants operating in perhaps three to five years, and long-term development on a large industrial scale in a decade. Szilard also proposed clever ways to divide research among five or six laboratories, dotted around the country near large universities and institutes of technology.42

  Several committee members seemed eager to embarrass Szilard in the question-and-answer session that followed his testimony. Rep. R. Ewing Thomason of Texas asked about Szilard’s nationality, and that of Wigner, Teller, and Fermi, but changed the subject when he learned that all were naturalized US citizens. Thomason also asked about Szilard’s dispute with the army over patent rights. Szilard held fast, responding with a calm precision that soon showed Thomason he had little to gain. When Rep. Leslie C. Arends, an Illinois Republican, asked Szilard about defense against the A-bomb, his answer was direct.

  “There is no military defense,” Szilard said. “I think our vulnerability will be much less if we relocate 30 million to 60 million of our population. It may be necessary to do that unless the international picture improves.”

  Can atomic energy be developed for peaceful uses? Rep. Charles H. Elston of Ohio wondered: “Can it be used to run locomotives and steamships and automobiles?”

  “When you produce atomic power, you also produce radiations,” Szilard explained. “You have to protect the driver and the passenger against those radiations. That might mean that an automobile would have to carry 50 tons of shielding material, and that would be rather on the heavy side.” Ships might be atom powered, but locomotives are doubtful, said Szilard. For now, he said, “stationary power plants” are the first likely application, although very large airplanes “might be a possibility.”

  After more than an hour on the stand Szilard began showing signs of his sleepless night as he became testy. Admonished by Chairman May for failing to answer a question directly, Szilard asked permission “to give a correct answer rather than a short one.”43

  Holifield asked questions to put on the public record Szilard’s opposition to the Smyth report’s release, his complaints about wartime compartmentalization, and his charge that penalties in the May-Johnson bill for violating secrecy would delay research but would not deter spies.44 But while Holifield and Szilard enjoyed their colloquy, a uniformed aide to Groves huddled with Representative Thomason behind the dais. Suddenly, Thomason broke in to ask again about Szilard’s nationality, to question his refusal to sign over eight patents, and to challenge his delay in taking an oath about these patents. The hesitation about the oath, Szilard explained, was over questions of “sole” or “joint” invention, an especially delicate point of law. At this point, Chairman May complained that “Dr. Sighland” had “consumed” an hour and forty minutes and ended his testimony.45

  Herbert Anderson spoke for the younger scientists in the Manhattan Project (he was thirty-one), repeating Szilard’s criticisms about security driving away talented researchers. And he read the telegram from the Chicago and Oak Ridge atomic scientists, which criticized eight points in the May-Johnson bill. The morning session complete, the atomic scientists walked across Capitol Hill to Union Station, to eat at the Savarin Restaurant and to plan for the afternoon.46

  After lunch, the May committee heard Compton and Oppenheimer speak for the bill. Compton, who by this time was sympathetic to the Chicago scientists’ views, criticized the civil-liberties problems that the bill raised and suggested amendments but would not ask for the bill’s defeat. Oppenheimer followed, asking that the bill be passed in order to permit continued scientific work.

  “Oppenheimer’s testimony was a masterpiece,” Szilard recalled later. “He talked in such a manner that the congressmen present thought he was for the bill but the physicists present all thought that he was against the bill.” Asked if he thought it was a good bill, Oppenheimer said that Bush and Conant thought it was a good bill and he had very high regard for them. “To the congressmen this might mean that Oppenheimer thinks this is a good bill,” Szilard recalled, “but no physicist believes that Oppenheimer will form an opinion on the basis of his good opinion of somebody else’s opinion.”47

  Ignoring protests from Urey, a scheduled witness who was not called, the Military Affairs Committee ended its hearings after Oppenheimer’s testimony. Still, Szilard and Condon knew by now that May’s committee would not abandon the War Department’s bill and could not amend it enough to correct the basic military bias. But they also knew from their many visits around town that almost no one but the War Department liked the bill. “We did not have very much more to do than tell everybody what everybody else thought of the bill” in order to kill it, Szilard recalled. Szilard complained later that for many on May’s committee the only decision seemed to be “whether to make the bombs and blast hell out of Russia before Russia blasts hell out of us.”48

  That weekend, Szilard, Condon, and Urey left Union Station by train, followed by FBI agents. In New York, Urey attended a luncheon for Nobel laureates at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where he called for international control of atomic energy and attacked the May-Johnson bill. Szilard and Condon probably met with Einstein, as he soon joined associates in denouncing the May-Johnson bill in a telegram to President Truman.49

  Besides lobbying for Senator McMahon’s resolution to create a special atomic-energy committee, Szilard followed votes in the May committee, which split seventeen to ten when
it reported its bill to the full House.50 Szilard attended another dinner for scientists and senators and joined in the organizing meeting for the Federation of Atomic Scientists, later to become the Federation of American Scientists, a research and lobbying group active in public policy debates ever since.

  After McMahon became chairman of the Senate’s nine-member Special Committee on Atomic Energy, he hired Newman as an assistant and prepared to hold hearings on legislation. Condon ended the frantic lobbying pace he had maintained with Szilard when President Truman nominated him to succeed Lyman Briggs as director of the National Bureau of Standards, but before accepting that post he served briefly as a scientific adviser to McMahon’s committee.51 With these two allies working in the Senate, Szilard could turn his attention back to the House, where eleven of the May committee’s members now opposed their chairman’s bill and a floor fight was certain. Szilard’s first attempt to stop the army seemed to be succeeding.

  Through California Democrat Jerry Voorhis, Szilard organized a meeting for House members to hear the atomic scientists’ views. More than seventy representatives filed into the spacious Caucus Room of the Old House Office Building (now the Cannon Building) on Thursday afternoon, November 8, and latecomers, congressional staff, and the press packed the long, high-ceilinged chamber. With practice, Szilard’s delivery was becoming more personal, more precise, and more persuasive. He plumped for international cooperation to avoid an arm race and said the only defense against it was massive city relocation. Szilard’s remarks to the caucus appeared in the Congressional Record and were reported by the New York Times.52

  But for Szilard and his scientific colleagues the most memorable event that fall was an Armistice Day tea sponsored by former Pennsylvania governor Gifford Pinchot and his wife, Cornelia, on the grounds of their fifty-four-room mansion on Scott Circle, a few blocks from the White House. An ardent naturalist, conservationist, and advocate of public power who had founded the Progressive party with Theodore Roosevelt, Pinchot actively supported federal control of atomic energy. Mrs. Pinchot considered that the scientists’ youth and political inexperience made them “ideally inefficient” for the lobbying task at hand.53

  Szilard and Lyle Borst from Oak Ridge were featured speakers at the tea, and other colleagues who circulated around the elegant grounds included Condon, Higinbotham (by now a May-Johnson opponent), and Daniel Koshland, an Oak Ridge biochemist who had signed Szilard’s petition to Truman in July. The scientists chatted with members of Congress, among them Representatives Jerry Voorhis and Franck Havenner of California, and Clare Boothe Luce, a Connecticut Republican and Military Affairs Committee member who opposed the May-Johnson bill. As a maid moved around the lawn with a tea tray, she approached a group that included Higinbotham and Szilard.

  “Would you like cream or sugar in your tea?” she asked.

  “Cream and sugar,” Szilard replied, “and no tea.”54

  Conversation that afternoon focused on congressional politics; on various international-control schemes; and on the recent proposal by navy captain Harold Stassen, a US delegate to the UN conference in San Francisco, to place twenty-five American-made A-bombs under the control of a UN air force. Talk was so lively that it continued throughout the mansion until 9:00 P.M.55

  That same Armistice Day afternoon, talk about control of atomic energy was taking place on a higher level as President Truman and Secretary Byrnes, with British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, Canadian Ambassador Lester Pearson, and others, sailed down the Potomac past Mount Vernon on the elegantly old-fashioned yacht Sequoia. After rounds of negotiations on shore, the following week, Truman, Attlee, and Canadian Prime Minister W. L. Mackenzie King issued a Three-Nation Declaration on Atomic Energy. Acknowledging that “there can be no adequate military defence” from atomic weapons, and that “no single nation can in fact have a monopoly,” the three leaders pledged to exchange basic scientific information for peaceful uses with any nation that would reciprocate. They also asked that a UN commission draft proposals for ways to assure peaceful uses of atomic energy and to eliminate nuclear weapons from all military stockpiles.56

  By November, Szilard had decided to stay in Washington and wrote the Met Lab in Chicago for a leave of absence without pay.57 Although impatient (and inept) with the details of legislation, Szilard did enjoy brainstorming with Newman, Thomas I. Emerson, general counsel to the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, and Emerson’s assistant Byron Miller. And Miller engaged Szilard in more practical problems. Szilard and his friend Eugene Wigner were at Miller’s house for dinner one night when the furnace shut off. Miller had no idea what to do, but the two Hungarian physicists doffed their jackets and poked around in the basement to examine the situation. There they fiddled with some dials and valves and stoked the coal pile in the furnace, relit the fire, tended it until sure the flame was going again, and then proudly returned upstairs. “Very high grade combustion engineering help,” Miller later boasted.58

  Back in New York City the third week of November, Szilard appeared at a WQXR radio forum on “What Would You Do with the Atomic Bomb?” with New York Times science reporter William L. Laurence, who had written the Manhattan Project’s official press releases about the bomb. On the air Szilard criticized as futile “international bargaining” to forestall a nuclear arms race if it involved making and storing A-bombs in the United States.59 Celebrity continued for Szilard during that week as the New York Post featured him in its “Closeup” column, describing his 1933 escape from Germany to England and the 1939 approach to Roosevelt through Einstein’s letter. The article described Szilard as a “somewhat rotund man of five feet six, weighing 170 pounds,” and the large photograph showed him looking younger than his forty-seven years, with hair short but with lips—obviously touched up by an artist—that seemed about to purse into a kiss. “I am satisfied I could reduce if I wanted to eat less.” he was quoted as saying, “but I have never put it to a test.”

  In the Post interview Szilard first revealed two points he would make in later statements and writings. He had no hobbies, he said, “except possibly baiting brass hats.” And he mentioned that The Tragedy of Man by Madách had “influenced my whole life.” The moral he recalled from it was that no matter how gloomy the human condition, we must maintain a “narrow margin of hope” and take action.60

  Senator McMahon’s hearings on atomic energy opened on Tuesday, November 27, with Alexander Sachs as the first witness. He recounted, in tedious detail, his 1939 approach to President Roosevelt with Einstein’s letter that led to the Manhattan Project.61 The next day, the McMahon committee heard Urey’s familiar call for international inspection and control and Groves’s rejoinder that international inspections could endanger sovereignty, the sanctity of the home, and private commercial enterprise.62

  That evening, in New York, Szilard watched as McMahon publicly challenged the army’s supremacy in atomic-energy control at an “Atomic Age Dinner” at the Waldorf sponsored by the Americans United for World Organization, a group working for legal restrictions on the atom through the UN Charter. Other speakers included toastmaster Raymond Swing, whose popular national radio programs that fall had publicized the efforts of Szilard and Einstein; Henry DeWolf Smyth, author of the official report on the Manhattan Project; physicist Ernest O. Lawrence, Gen. Carl Spaatz of the Army Air Force, who had directed the bombing of Japan; and Col. Paul W. Tibbetts, Sr., the pilot “who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.”63

  In New York a few days later, Szilard attended a gathering that would be one of his best public events of the year: the Nation Associates’ three-day forum on “The Challenge of the Atomic Bomb” at the Astor Hotel in Times Square. This well-publicized event celebrated the liberal magazine’s eightieth anniversary and the six hundred participants included many people Szilard already knew or would work with, including Smyth; Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas; physicists Louis Ridenour and Victor Weisskopf; and Harold Laski, an acquaintance from his work on the Academic Assista
nce Council, a politics professor at the London School of Economics, and chairman of Britain’s Labour party.

  At the concluding dinner, Szilard made a stirring speech that he had revised and rehearsed for days. After brief remarks by Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Szilard began by recalling the moment in 1939 when he and Walter Zinn had first detected extra neutrons from uranium fission: “That night there was very little doubt in my mind the world was headed for grief.”64

  From this dramatic opening Szilard recounted the bomb’s development, his July 1945 petition to Truman, the army’s effort to muzzle the scientists and pass the May-Johnson bill, and the scientists’ lobbying against the army. He proposed educating public officials about the A-bomb by staging “a demonstration” for them.

  To avoid a nuclear arms race, Szilard called for a treaty prohibiting atomic bombs—backed up by inspection under the United Nations Organization (UNO). Then, with a Szilardian idea that must have baffled many listeners, he proposed amending the Espionage Act to allow scientists and engineers to vacation for four weeks a year as guests of the UNO. “Those vacations abroad would give an opportunity to all those who wish to report [on their own country’s] secret [arms-control] violations to secure immunity by staying abroad rather than returning home after delivering their report.” This scheme Szilard would propose in years to come, with added inducements and $1 million rewards. Although farfetched, the scientists’ vacation proposal struck at the question of verification that still confounds arms-control negotiators.65

  Early in December Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Paramount both announced plans to make feature-length films about the A-bomb. And Time-Life planned a film in its March of Time series in which the atomic scientists—Bush, Conant, Einstein, Szilard, and others—would play themselves in a dramatization of the bomb’s development.