Genius in the Shadows

by William Lanouette

  In Washington representatives from the many Manhattan Project laboratories came together at George Washington University to officially create the Federation of Atomic Scientists (FAS). Under Willie Higinbotham’s direction, the younger men were forging an organization that would supplement, and eventually replace, the early lobbying efforts by Condon and Szilard. For his part, Szilard met with many of these scientists and always seemed to be plotting some new scheme on his own. “He was a great objector to other people’s statements,” Higinbotham recalled, “but he seldom consulted us about his own. It became a byword around the [FAS] office that to reduce the Russians to helpless confusion it would only be necessary to parachute Szilard into Moscow.”66

  Szilard fashioned a rambling six-part statement for the McMahon committee that surveyed most of the day’s issues: fissionable material production, weapons development and manufacture, “preparedness” for nuclear war, the time left until another country develops the bomb, international control schemes, and remarks on secrecy.67 He was still editing this on Monday morning, December 10, as he arrived at the Senate Office Building just before 10:00 A.M.—marking paragraphs he might omit when reading the text, drawing slashes under sentences for phrasing—eager to begin his second attempt to stop the army.

  In the large caucus room, he met Newman and Condon, who encouraged his viewpoints. Unlike his hostile reception by the May committee, Szilard received a gracious welcome from McMahon, who introduced him as “one of the most eminent of the pioneers in the science of uranium fission.”68 Szilard began by describing the production of uranium and plutonium, including his wildly optimistic plans for the breeder reactor, as he wove together some possible economic, political, military, and diplomatic consequences of the atom’s development. He even speculated that atomic energy might help to stabilize the US economy: “When a depression threatens, electrification of our railroads, based on atomic power plants, may be pushed with the support of the federal government, whereas in boom periods an expansion of atomic-energy power projects might be discouraged. . . .”

  But in answer to a question, Szilard said that if an international security system could be set up by giving up peaceful uses of atomic energy, he would “gladly renounce” it. Besides, he said, making bigger and bigger bombs holds little interest “from a scientific point of view and will be pursued only if it is necessary for political reasons.”

  “The bombs already made are big enough, aren’t they?” asked Sen. Eugene D. Millikin, a Colorado Republican.

  “They are big enough for my taste,” Szilard replied.69

  Speaking about what “preparedness” in a nuclear arms race might entail, Szilard posed this ironic analysis: “We are afraid of Russia, not because she has atomic bombs; we are afraid of Russia because we have atomic bombs.” But in such a race the United States “would lose ground steadily,” Szilard argued, citing city-dispersal studies by economists Jacob Marschak and Lawrence Klein at Chicago to demonstrate that those who talk to the American people about “preparedness” should mention a peacetime expenditure of more than $20 billion a year. With these calculations Szilard was trying to dramatize that the alternatives to effective international arms control involve unacceptable financial, political, and social costs. Szilard’s rare ability to analyze a problem rationally, then pursue in interlocking detail the results and options, led his inquisitive mind to conclude that being “prepared” for a nuclear arms race demands profound (even absurd) upheavals. Clearly—at least to him—the best way to be prepared is to prevent the arms race itself.

  The New York Times the next day called his presentation “astonishing and challenging.” Responding to his answers, the senators asked him how many suitcases would be needed to smuggle a disassembled A-bomb into the country; how much time the United States had before Russia could build a bomb; how an international-control treaty would punish a transgressor; and why the Germans failed to build a bomb. Szilard had lucid and accurate answers for each but in the end returned to his complaint that the May-Johnson bill would perpetuate compartmentalization to maintain secrecy—and as a result stifle science. It was self-censorship by scientists, not the result of compartmentalization, he said, that kept details about plutonium production a wartime secret. And self-censorship would continue to work as long as scientists saw a need for it.

  Through the morning hearing Szilard made critical remarks about the army, General Groves’s limited scientific understanding, and “the incompetence of military intelligence. . . .”

  Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado, the Senate sponsor of the May-Johnson bill, showed no hostility toward Szilard, although he did complain to another hearing witness, “You scientists have got the world in a mess and now you want the politicians to straighten it out.”70 Johnson seemed delighted with Szilard’s city-dispersal ideas, wondering how to relocate Connecticut’s rich industries to Colorado.

  “Let us get away from the horrible hypothesis that you propose,” said McMahon of Connecticut.

  “It is horrible, I suppose,” admitted Johnson, “horribly good.”

  Indeed, as the long hearing drew to a close that morning, the senators seemed to be mulling over Szilard’s perverse ideas about “preparedness” and its international alternatives.

  The CHAIRMAN. Doctor, I assume that if you had a voice in the election you would view the dispersal of our cities with the consequent cost and general transferring from one part of the United States to another of thirty to forty million people to be far less preferable than some sensible international agreement, for the control of this thing, on which we can rely?

  Dr. SZILARD. It is certainly less sensible; yes, provided we can get the arrangement. I am not advocating dispersal, but it is a necessary step within the framework of a policy which is merely based on “preparedness.” No preparedness makes any sense without it. If we have to anticipate an attack of this sort, we have to disperse.

  Senator TYDINGS. If we get into a war of that type, just having a big navy, army, or air force, while they are essential, as compared to previous wars, without the ability to carry on and supply them by the dispersal of plants all over the country, preparedness is only an illusion?

  Dr. SZILARD. Exactly.

  But Szilard and his fellow scientists still had a long struggle ahead before civilian control of the atom could be assured, and their crusade for international control would persist for years. Szilard himself, despite his impressive blend of science and social engineering, left some listeners bewildered. After the session, Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations and the Atomic Energy committees, asked Condon: “Who was that guy Lizard you had in here yesterday?”71

  Throughout 1945, Szilard had come from quiet discontents about the future of the postwar world, through three failed initiatives to stop the bombing of Japan, to finally play a leading role in shifting control of the atom from military to civilian hands. This was achieved first by opposing the army’s continued management of the atom, then by supporting creation of a civilian Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). McMahon introduced his bill to create the AEC on December 20, about the time Szilard’s imagination rushed on to another idea.72 He approached his friend Chancellor Hutchins at the University of Chicago and through him proposed to Assistant Secretary Benton in the State Department an arms-control technique that would come to dominate Szilard’s life: Let the scientists themselves solve the problem they had created. At the time, Byrnes of the United States, Ernest Bevin of Great Britain, and Vyacheslav Molotov of the Soviet Union were in Moscow, where, two days after Christmas, they would issue a communiqué recommending that the UN General Assembly create a commission on atomic energy.73 During that conference, Benton in Washington cabled Conant, a member of the US delegation in Moscow:

  22 December 1945

  Hutchins telephoned today querying the advisability of inviting five or ten Russian physicists to the United States, bringing them in under private auspices to visit Harvard, Universi
ty of Chicago, and other institutions. He felt such joint discussions of atomic physics between scientists of the two countries might promote a basis for international cooperation and control. Such discussions would of course be private and unofficial without governmental comments. I told him I would cable you this suggestion for possible exploration by you in Moscow.

  “Politics” has been defined as “the art of the possible.” Szilard had told his distinguished audience at the celebration dinner for The Nation magazine in December. “Science might be defined as the art of the impossible. The crisis which is upon us may not find its ultimate solution until the statesmen catch up with the scientists and politics, too, becomes the art of the impossible.

  “This, I believe, might be achieved when statesmen will be more afraid of the atomic bomb than they are afraid of using their imagination, because imagination is the tool which has to be used if the impossible is to be accomplished.”74

  Photo Insert 2

  Leo Szilard, with an unidentified girl and dog, photographed by Trude Weiss at a picnic in Wading River State Park, near Brookhaven, Long Island, June 1948

  (Egon Weiss Collection)

  Founders of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists meeting at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, November 1946. Back row (left to right): Victor F. Weisskopf, Leo Szilard, Hans A. Bethe, Thorfin R. Hogness, and Philip M. Morse.Seated: Harold C. Urey, Albert Einstein, and Selig Hecht. (AP/Wide World Photos)

  From left: Max Delbrück, Aaron Novick, Leo Szilard, and James D. Watson at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, June 1953 (Photograph by Norton Zinder. Courtesy of the James D. Watson Collection, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives)

  Leo Szilard jokes with financier Cyrus Eaton on a cruise during the first Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, off Pugwash, Nova Scotia, July 1957

  (Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs)

  Aaron Novick and Leo Szilard in the biology laboratory they created in the basement of a synagogue near the University of Chicago (University of Chicago)

  Leo Szilard sits “botching”—his term for creative daydreaming—in the Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, in the 1950s. (Photograph by Trude Szilard/Egon Weiss Collection)

  While attending a January 1957 biology conference at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Leo Szilard and Jonas Salk discuss ideas for what would become the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. (Photograph by Karl Maramorosch)

  Leo Szilard as sketched in the late 1950s by his longtime friend Eva Zeisel (Sketch by Eva Zeisel)

  Leo Szilard on the Atlantic City boardwalk, March 1948 (Photograph by Gertrud Weiss/Egon Weiss Collection)

  From left: Leo Szilard with Matthew Meselson and Leslie Orgel at a biology conference in Boulder, Colorado, 1958 (Photograph by Gertrud Weiss Szilard/Egon Weiss Collection)

  Leo Szilard with his wife, Trude, at Memorial Hospital in New York City, 1960

  (Courtesy of John Loengard)

  Leo Szilard and Jerome Wiesner, at left, join in Soviet aircraft designer Andrei W. Tupolev’s toast at a Pugwash Conference banquet in Moscow, November 1960. In the foreground are the wife of Soviet physicist E. K. Federov and Manhattan Project physicist William Higinbotham. (Egon Weiss Collection)

  Leo Szilard with Inge and Giangiacomo Feltrinelli at Castello di Villadeati, near Asti, Italy, December 1960 (© Inge Schoenthal Feltrinelli)

  Leo Szilard “lobbying from the lobby” at a desk in the Dupont Plaza Hotel, Washington, DC, 1961 (Photograph by Esther Bubley, © Jean Bubley)

  Microbiologist Jacques Monod and Leo Szilard at a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory biology conference in June 1961 (Photograph by Esther Bubley, © Jean Bubley)

  Leo Szilard reading to a young girl. He enjoyed the company of children, praised their innate wisdom, and wrote animal stories to amuse them. (Egon Weiss Collection)

  Robert Grossman caricature of Leo Szilard for the cover of the New York Times Book Review, January 24, 1993. A bathtub dreamer, Szilard’s thoughts are on the A-bomb and a dolphin, the subject of his popular 1961 political satire about arms control, The Voice of the Dolphins. (Courtesy of Robert Grossman)

  Harvard professor Henry Kissinger, Leo Szilard, and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientistseditor Eugene Rabinowitch chat during a break at the fifth Pugwash Conference at Stowe, Vermont, September 1961. (Photograph by Trude Szilard/Leo Szilard Papers, Mandeville Department of Special

  Collections, University of California, San Diego, Library)

  Leo Szilard with Michael Straight, former publisher of the New Republic, at Straight’s Green Spring Farm in Fairfax County, Virginia, May 1961 (Photograph by Esther Bubley, © Jean Bubley)

  Francis Crick, Jonas Salk, and Leo Szilard in La Jolla,

  California, spring 1964 (Courtesy of the Salk Institute)

  Eleanor Roosevelt and Leo Szilard at a 1961 seminar in Washington, DC (Photograph by Ike Vern)

  Szilard speaking at a Salk Institute seminar, February 1964 (Photograph by D. K. Miller, courtesy of the Salk Institute)

  Leo Szilard’s tombstone at Lake View Cemetery in Ithaca, New York

  (Photograph by William Lanouette)

  Leo Szilard’s ashes are interred at Kerepesi Cemetery in Budapest on the 100th anniversary of his birth, February 11, 1998. (Barnabas Szabo, Nepszabadsag)

  PART THREE

  1946–1964

  CHAPTER 20

  A Last Fight with the General

  1946–1964

  In The Ascent of Man, a popular television series and book in the 1970s, the mathematician and social scientist Jacob Bronowski praised Leo Szilard’s “integrity” in renouncing nuclear physics after Hiroshima and adopting a new career in biology.1 Historian Max Lerner also praised the decision as “rejecting death and embracing life.”2 Noble sentiments by two of Szilard’s friends but not completely true. Szilard’s career shift in the spring of 1946 was in part a virtue made of necessity.

  Although biology had appealed to him for more than a decade, Szilard had no desire to quit his research in nuclear physics. In the 1940s and 1950s he continued to file patents for reactor designs and even sketched plans for a nuclear airplane. He relished the publicity when he and the late Enrico Fermi were awarded the joint US patent on the first nuclear reactor in 1955. And he enjoyed devising government-funded export schemes to spread the “peaceful” atom to developing countries. In fact, Szilard’s shift to biology was occasioned by his nemesis, Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the military leader of the Manhattan Project.

  The “baiting of brass hats,” Szilard’s self-professed hobby, had set him and Groves at odds ever since the fall of 1942, when the Army Corps of Engineers took command of the nuclear-research project that Szilard and Fermi had begun at Columbia more than three years before.3 From their first meeting, the straitlaced and steady Groves had found Szilard impetuous and rude: He openly questioned the general’s orders, joked with his colleagues and superiors, and criticized and debated decisions. This conduct seemed downright subversive to an army engineer like Groves, and within a month he had ordered Szilard transferred back to New York from the Met Lab in Chicago. When Szilard’s colleagues defended him, Groves withdrew the order but secretly tried to have Szilard jailed and deported as an enemy alien, a move ultimately rejected by the secretary of war.

  From that first conflict, Groves’s “intuition” had led him to suspect Szilard. “I just didn’t trust him,” Groves later explained. “I knew he was a detriment to the project.”4 Before long, Szilard had become an obsession for Groves.

  Groves’s animus toward Szilard grew from several causes. Groves was an all-American boy, active in sports and devoutly Christian, a patriotic militarist and engineer, while Szilard was an Eastern European immigrant, active in science and irreligious, a vagabond with no nationalistic sympathies who in his youth had spurned both the military and engineering. Groves’s authoritarian rectitude and anti-intellectual swagger clashed with Szilard’s austere reason and playful erudition. Unlike his
colleagues, Szilard also seemed pushy and arrogant to Groves, outspoken on any subject, from physics to politics. In addition, Groves’s anti-Semitism was focused and personified in Szilard, in all making him a perfect villain.

  Groves’s personal dislike and distrust of Szilard was amplified when he challenged Groves at two critical points in his army career: The scientists’ petition had questioned wartime use of the A-bomb, Groves’s pivotal professional achievement; and the scientists’ double-barreled attack on the May-Johnson bill and support of the McMahon bill had turned the congressional hearings from a moment of glory for Groves to a public confrontation that put him on the defensive. The general was irate, but his aide, Kenneth Nichols, urged him “to refrain from making any comment on Dr. Szilard’s testimony unless requested to do so,” warning Groves that “when dealing with one who juggles the truth and warps facts as this individual does, it is not advisable to argue with him publicly.”5 Groves kept an angry silence about Szilard, but privately the general fumed. Besides their direct disagreements, Groves detested Szilard’s call for international control of atomic secrets and his idea that a world government was necessary to enforce peaceful uses of nuclear power.