In 1948, Szilard approached Oppenheimer to ask if the Institute for Advanced Study might be interested in “applying scientific methods of investigation to the problem of racial discrimination and race relations.” Szilard had read that under Oppenheimer the institute was interested in “taking up problems to which scientific methods have not been applied in the past” and reported that he knew of possible funders for such a project.16 In 1950, Szilard and University of Chicago chancellor Hutchins tried to enlist Oppenheimer in a fund-raising project for a study of ways to maintain peace, but at this Oppenheimer demurred.
Szilard disliked Oppenheimer personally, especially for his hypocrisy with fellow scientists, saying during the Manhattan Project that they should have no role in setting policy when he pressed his own views on politicians and government officials freely. But Szilard saw a threat to all scientists when the AEC revoked Oppenheimer’s security clearance, and he tried to influence the review board in several ways. Szilard wrote to scientists who might be called to testify, urging them to support Oppenheimer.17 Szilard paraphrased his draft “statement” for newspaper reporters, and he was quoted at length about the AEC hearing in the American Communist party’s Daily Worker, a fact not missed by FBI agents at the time and duly noted in Szilard’s file.18 Szilard also helped draft an editorial for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that declared that charges Oppenheimer is a security risk are “contrary to both decency and common sense,” although he later complained when his name was used with the statement.19
But most importantly, Szilard tried to prevent Edward Teller, Oppenheimer’s most influential accuser, from appearing before the AEC review board. For, unlike Teller, Szilard did not consider Oppenheimer a national security threat. This put Szilard on the spot: opposing someone he liked but disagreed with while supporting someone he agreed with but disliked.
Beyond Teller’s anti-Communist paranoia was a vindictive hatred of Oppenheimer for opposing development of the H-bomb. Teller had criticized Oppenheimer before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy as early as 1950, and in two FBI interviews in 1952 he made charges that would later form the basis of the AEC’s case.20 But Teller was also Szilard’s friend, despite their fierce differences over national security issues, such as building the H-bomb and negotiating with the Russians. According to Szilard’s widow, he wanted to save his friend Teller from his own “worst instincts.”21
Szilard and Teller had first met casually in Budapest and became friends in London in 1934–35, when both were refugees from Nazi Germany. At the time, Szilard explained his chain-reaction theory to Teller along with his fearful prediction that it might lead to a nuclear explosion. While impressed, Teller later recalled, he “did not then expect that it would actually be realized.”22 They also worked together to enlist the US government’s support for A-bomb research in 1939, through Einstein’s letter to President Roosevelt and their participation in the Advisory Committee on Uranium that the letter prompted. Just after the war, they socialized when both men taught at the University of Chicago, and in 1952, Szilard and Teller were among the scientists who attended physicist Joseph Mayer’s popular Thursday afternoon seminar at the Institute for Nuclear Studies.23 The same year, Szilard invited Teller to join a group of scientists and academics to meet with Adlai E. Stevenson, later the Democratic candidate for president,24 but the meeting was canceled.
When Teller arrived in Washington for the Oppenheimer hearing in April 1954, he was eager to speak with AEC chairman Lewis L. Strauss.25 Teller had earlier sought Strauss’s help to arrange the release of his mother, Elona Teller, and his sister, Emma Kirz, from Hungary. It is possible that Teller’s concern about his family increased his eagerness to please Strauss by publicly criticizing Oppenheimer, although he had strong personal and professional motives for doing so as well.26
According to Trude Szilard, her husband came to Washington on the eve of Teller’s scheduled testimony and set out from his hotel to find his friend. Szilard rode taxis to restaurants and clubs, walked to other hotels, but after hours of searching, finally returned dispirited. “If Teller attacks Oppenheimer,” Szilard grumbled to Trude, “I will have to defend Oppenheimer for the rest of my life. . . .” Half joke, half gibe. Nevertheless, the search was futile. Teller was sequestered that night with Roger Robb, the AEC prosecutor, and with Hans Bethe and his wife in their hotel room.27
On the witness stand the next day, Teller was asked directly: “Do you or do you not believe that Dr. Oppenheimer is a security risk?” Teller answered, in part:
. . . I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more. In this very limited sense I would like to express a feeling that I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.28
By these words, Teller drove a wedge between himself and many of the country’s leading scientists. In May 1954, like the character in Szilard’s “Security Risk” satire, Oppenheimer was certified “a loyal citizen” by the AEC board but still denied his clearance.29 Later that year, Szilard proposed to Oppenheimer that he defend Teller publicly. Szilard added, however, that he could not tell if this proposal was serious or not.30 Teller later lamented that from his testimony “I lost practically all my friends.” But he was pleased that although “Szilard disapproved very much,” they could still like one another.31
A few weeks after the Oppenheimer hearing, Strauss contacted CIA director Allen W. Dulles to seek help in releasing Teller’s family—an approach that ultimately failed.32 Szilard remained friendly with Teller after the hearing and later urged him to defend himself before his scientific peers, but the two continued to disagree about most military and political matters. Yet Szilard advised Teller about his right to a German pension33 and urged him to participate in several scientific conferences at which the nuclear arms race was discussed. Teller always refused.34
For his part, Teller liked and defended Szilard and proposed his name for the annual Atoms for Peace Award. Citing both Szilard’s “genius” and the way he “disregards some social conventions,” Teller acknowledged that Szilard’s odd behavior had “cost him dearly” during his career.35 Their friendship remained “strong,” Teller would later recall, “but strangely unemotional” in its manner.
By contrast, intellectual arguments between the two friends were often emotional and intense. Over dinner in Washington in the spring of 1958, Szilard urged Teller to visit the Soviet Union as a way to soften his hostility to the country. Teller’s response was curt: “I have no intention of visiting Russia.”
“Why, why?” Szilard asked. “Don’t be unreasonable.”
“Look,” said Teller. “There are many reasons, but one of them is this.”
“Is what?”
“My mother and sister live in Hungary. Once I’m in Russia I don’t know what the Communists might do to force me into a situation which I don’t like. . . .”
Szilard listened, shaking his head. “Teller, you are completely wrong. The Russians would never stoop to such methods. But I understand how you feel. Let me see what I can do about it.”36
Szilard considered this reply wrongheaded and typical of Teller’s anti-Soviet paranoia, but from that conversation he also realized a personal reason for “the emotions which manifest themselves in some of Teller’s public statements, as well as the emotions he had displayed in private conversations.” The next day, Szilard wrote to the third secretary of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, seeking to arrange the release of Teller’s mother and sister.37
Nothing happened until August, when Szilard was at the ski resort of Kitzbühel, Austria, for a Pugwash conference. Szilard and chemist Harrison Brown met with Soviet academician Alexander Topchiev privately to discuss plans for a US-Soviet scientists’ conference. A Moscow meeting had been proposed for that summer but was postponed wh
en some American scientists—among them Teller and Eugene Wigner—followed AEC chairman Strauss’s advice and refused to participate. Topchiev promised knowledgeable and influential Soviet participants. “If you bring Teller,” he said, “we will produce the Russian Teller,”38 no doubt having in mind physicist Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet Union’s leading H-bomb designer.
At the Kitzbühel meeting, Szilard again told Topchiev that one reason for Teller’s bitterness against the Russians was the fate of his mother and sister. Topchiev promised to help. After the conference, on the train down the mountain passes to Vienna, Szilard was sitting in a compartment next to the Hungarian physicist Lajos Jánossy.
“I understand you want to talk to me,” Jánossy said. Topchiev had mentioned Teller’s problem, and during the ride Jánossy, Szilard, and Brown discussed ways to arrange the women’s release. Jánossy was the stepson of Marxist philosopher George Lukács and himself a well-known Communist, so it was possible that he might have influential friends in Budapest and Moscow who could help.
The three men talked as the train descended from the jagged Alps and cut through broad valleys between Kufstein and Salzburg, then through farm fields punctuated with fanciful, vegetable-shaped steeples—so many baroque turnips, pears, figs, and radishes atop pastel churches. They rode by the cliff-top Benedictine abbey at Melk and glided through the shady Vienna woods and into the city. At his favorite Vienna hotel, the Regina, Szilard telephoned Teller in Berkeley, asking for the names and addresses of his mother and sister.39 Szilard also kept in touch with Janossy before his return to Budapest, and the two had a snack in the Regina Hotel before going off to an American-Canadian reception organized for the Pugwash participants.40 But after this August encounter, Szilard heard nothing more from Jánossy until after Christmas, when a letter arrived in Chicago. “I am very glad to be able to tell you that the mother and sister of Dr. Teller have received permission to leave the country.”41
Soon after Teller’s mother and sister arrived in San Francisco, in January 1959, Szilard had occasion to telephone Teller. When he heard the good news, he said: “Give my condolences to Mici,” Teller’s wife. Teller didn’t understand the quip, but Mici replied, “Leo, you are the only completely honest man I know.”42
CHAPTER 24
Arms Control
1946-1959
In January 1946, Life magazine’s readers saw Leo Szilard in a typically impish pose. Under the headline “Scientists Scare Congress,” Szilard wearing his favorite tan trench coat, his eyes roving intently, but his round jaw seeming to stifle a broad grin, stood in a shadowy attic room with two colleagues. Capturing the “ironically humble Washington office” of the Federation of Atomic Scientists (FAS), the pictures showed “a suite of borrowed rooms on [the] top floor of an old, ill-heated brown-stone building.” These scientists were the “League of Frightened Men,” applying their “coldly intellectual kind of pressure” as they lobbied members of Congress. This pressure, Life concluded, had already contributed to a Big Three conference of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union in Moscow, in December, to seek postwar controls for the A-bomb.1
Although the US conferees in Moscow had ignored Szilard’s suggestion to arrange meetings among Soviet and American scientists,2 his writings, speeches, and congressional testimony on inspection and verification schemes to forestall a US-Soviet arms race had already identified what would become the nuclear era’s trickiest political problem. With his FAS colleagues in Washington, with other groups he helped to found in Chicago and Princeton, but mostly working on his own, Szilard struggled after the war to devise—and sell to political leaders—new ways to lessen mistrust and increase accord between the US and Soviet governments.
Szilard’s ardent faith in the powers of human reason, and his view that individuals and elites run the world and only need to be educated to assure peace, led him repeatedly to propose high-level discussions among statesmen and scientists, including his attempts to reach Soviet premiers Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev directly. After the war, Szilard also took up biology and worked fitfully in that expanding field. But in daydreams and nightmares, the fear that nagged him most was the bomb.
Unfortunately, most of Szilard’s attempts to control the weapon he had helped create were too visionary. Too rational. Too clever. Too impatient. And too quixotic to deal with the world’s newly complicated and dangerous postwar situation. “He was always ahead of his time,” concluded Hans Bethe, a physicist who worked with Szilard on many arms-control projects. “He had many good ideas, but seldom carried them to completion.”3 To do that, Szilard would have to manipulate expanding military and diplomatic bureaucracies in the US government and new forums at the United Nations rather than the secret contacts he knew before and during the war.
Szilard’s first mission in 1946 was to shift federal nuclear programs to civilian hands, and he spent all spring lobbying with the FAS and other groups to defeat the May-Johnson bill, by which the army would have retained control over atomic energy. Szilard and most FAS colleagues favored the McMahon bill to create an independent Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), but when Pres. Harry S. Truman endorsed it that spring, the army’s allies retaliated with an amendment by Sen. Arthur Vandenberg to give the AEC a permanent Military Liaison Committee with access to all commission business.4 Vandenberg’s amendment was the issue that finally split the atomic scientists: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest O. Lawrence, and Enrico Fermi sided with the army. Oppenheimer, in particular, argued that the May-Johnson bill was a lesser evil that should be passed quickly so they could lobby for the atom’s international control. These three colleagues had gathered at a downtown Washington hotel room when physicist Edward Condon and Szilard swept in dramatically, both eager to defend McMahon’s approach. Fermi, who believed that Szilard exaggerated military restrictions on atomic science, stared for a moment.
“Leo,” he said, shaking his index finger, “you don’t always tell the truth.” Szilard glared at Fermi, and without saying a word, he and Condon spun on their heels and stalked out.5
Vandenberg’s amendment prompted the FAS scientists to join a coalition of citizens’ groups called the National Committee for Atomic Information (NCAI), which organized a lobbying campaign that hit the McMahon committee with 42,189 pieces of mail. But the army exploited news of an atom spy ring’s arrest in Ottawa by announcing plans to bar Communists from all “sensitive” positions.6 These polarizing events, bitter divisions within the scientists’ own ranks, and a majority conservatism of McMahon’s committee all merged to pass the amendment 6 to 1, perpetuating the military’s strong voice in atomic policy.7
Glum and dispirited by the army’s continued influence, the scientists found what relief they could in humor. Los Alamos physicist Philip Morrison got a laugh whenever he described the member of McMahon’s committee who groused, “Why is it that witnesses we have here, these scientists, have such difficult names, like this man ‘Zillard’ or whatever it is? Can’t we have some scientists with real American names?” The senator asking these questions, Morrison said, “was named Bourke B. Hicken-looper.”8 Szilard joked about the army’s obsessive secrecy and at a dinner party in Washington amused senators and representatives with tales about heavy-handed tactics. In one account, which Drew Pearson later featured in his nationally syndicated “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column, Szilard recalled walking into his office at the Met Lab during the war to find a bookcase turned toward the wall—an army officer’s way to conceal its secret contents. Szilard later complained that “the most powerful weapon of this war was not the A-bomb, but the secrecy stamp.”9
For a time, the atomic scientists were celebrities, their views widely reported, their suggestions respected. One Sunday in March 1946, book reviews in both the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune gave front-page acclaim to One World or None, the scientists’ “Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb.” This collection of essays included articles by physicists Arthur
Compton, Niels Bohr, Eugene Wigner, Oppenheimer, Louis Ridenour, Condon, Morrison, Frederick Seitz, Bethe, Szilard, and Einstein; by chemist Harold Urey; and by the distinguished political columnist Walter Lippmann. Szilard’s chapter, “Can we Avert an Arms Race by an Inspection System?” identified just the issue that has bedeviled arms-control negotiators to this day, although his rational solution—teams of inspectors to monitor scientists—seemed extreme. Szilard admitted this surveillance would only buy time, to avert an arms race while a “world community” creates “permanent peace.”10
But the Trib’s reviewer, science editor John J. O’Neill, found even these temporary steps too intrusive, complaining that Szilard “struggles, apparently without much happiness in his effort, to justify an international Gestapo snooping into laboratories, a procedure utterly repugnant to every scientist and destructive to the foundation of free scientific inquiry.”11
The Times review, by reporter Rufus L. Duffus, was printed around an ominous pen-and-ink sketch of the Manhattan skyline exploding. “Leo Szilard outlines an inspection system which might be effective if every country, including the United States and Russia, would open its mines and factories to UNO agents,” he wrote.12 Duffus and other readers were also impressed and frightened by the conjecture of Morrison—an early US observer at Hiroshima—about how an A-bomb might destroy mid-town Manhattan. “This book does not leave one in a hopeful state of mind,” Duffus wrote. “The beautiful optimism that has buoyed Americans up during most of their history is in for a shock.”13
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