The day after these reviews appeared, President Truman named financier Bernard Baruch to be US representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC).14 A self-styled “adviser to presidents” and a wartime counselor to Secretary of State James Byrnes, Baruch had written an influential report on postwar economic conversion but seemed to know little about scientific or international affairs.
Ten days after Baruch’s appointment, the State Department released its Acheson-Lilienthal Report, which proposed international control of atomic energy under the United Nations. A small group headed by Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson and David Lilienthal, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, had drafted the report since January. This report pleased the scientists, who thought that their calls for international control of the atom were finally answered.
In April, McMahon thanked Szilard for his “splendid cooperation” on the bill’s Senate passage, but by this time he was back in Chicago thinking more broadly about the fate of the postwar world.15 Szilard gained national attention in May when the Associated Press published a twenty-eight-page supplement for its newspaper subscribers by science writer Howard W. Blakeslee on “The Atomic Future.” Pictured with Einstein and Alexander Sachs as one of “Those Who ‘Sold’ the Atom to America,”16 Szilard now had to sell its control to the world.
Szilard called on Einstein in May 1946 to propose creating an Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists (ECAS) to raise money for public education on atomic energy, for the citizens groups in the NCAI. Just after Hiroshima, Einstein had told Szilard that he wished he had done nothing to develop atomic energy, but soon he wrote a chapter for One World or None, dictated an Atlantic Monthly article advocating worldwide control of atomic energy, signed a petition to President Truman against the May-Johnson bill, and publicly endorsed world government.
Einstein trusted Szilard, usually followed his suggestions, and in this spirit he signed a May 23 fund-raising telegram that announced formation of the ECAS. (Other founders included Bethe, Condon, Urey, and Szilard.) “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our mode of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled disaster.” Einstein warned.17 This statement, which has been widely quoted ever since, was actually drafted by Szilard and Harold Oram, a press agent and fund-raiser for liberal political causes.18
In June 1946, as the House Military Affairs Committee amended the Senate-passed McMahon bill, as Baruch delivered the US plan for the atom’s control to the UNAEC, and as Soviet delegate Andrei Gromyko began months of debate—and delay—with a counterproposal,19 Szilard bobbed from Washington to New York, via California. He traveled west to assure that his role and Einstein’s were portrayed accurately in The Beginning or the End.20 On M-G-M’s movie lot in Culver City, producer Samuel Marx handed the script to Szilard, who went off, read it, and returned to declare: “It’s lousy.” He told Marx just how Einstein had written to FDR— not after rapturous inspiration, as the script portrayed, but after a visit by Szilard and Wigner.21 Eager to keep the character of Einstein in his film, Marx agreed to correct the story, gave Szilard an office, and urged him to rewrite this important scene; Szilard did, and several other episodes as well.22 Then he boarded a plane for New York to talk up the Baruch Plan.
That month, Szilard also journeyed to Colorado, where he spoke at a conference on the “Regional Consequences of the International Control and Utilization of Atomic Energy,”23 continuing a frantic life of public appearances and private negotiations aimed at saving the world from his own invention. Szilard and his fellow scientists gained fresh notoriety in August when Life magazine touted Atomic Power, a film in the monthly March of Time series: “While Hollywood is laboring over a ponderous epic of the atomic bomb, the March of Time has scooped them with a remarkable piece of living history.”24 Atomic Power “tells how the bomb was made, but instead of actors [has] the real scientists and directors of the Manhattan Project to re-enact their own parts.” One of the scenes was captioned “ALBERT EINSTEIN is asked by Physicist Leo Szilard to urge US atomic-research backing. Then Einstein wrote famous letter to Roosevelt.” Reenacted on the back porch of Einstein’s Princeton home, the scene showed a pensive professor, in shirtsleeves, sucking a churchwarden pipe; a formal Szilard, as always wearing a necktie, was seated at his side to study the letter. In another scene, scientists, including Oppenheimer in his familiar porkpie hat, fiddled with electronic “controls which set off the first atomic bomb ever exploded, on July 16, 1945.”25
While Oppenheimer relished his screen debut, Szilard seemed stiff and self-conscious in his four scenes. In the Columbia laboratory with Dean Pegram, Szilard eyed an instrument nervously, pointing with a pencil to some calculations on paper. Over the letter to FDR, Szilard pointed stiffly as Einstein slouched forward. In a scene where Einstein approved the fund-raising telegram for the ECAS, Szilard sat upright and glanced down at the paper, as if afraid to nod his head. Szilard could be flamboyant and funny when speaking to small groups or when he chatted into a radio microphone, but before a camera he could look rigid and uncomfortable, as he did when reenacting his “art of the impossible” speech for the film.
The “ponderous epic” that M-G-M was then producing displeased not only Szilard but also syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann, who complained to Marx after a preview that “the basic theme of the film is not the problem of the atomic bomb in the world, but the success story of the Americans, particularly General Groves, in making the bomb.” He protested “melodramatic simplifications” and “falsifications” of historic events, including a fictional meeting between Groves and Truman to decide on the bomb’s use. From this and other scenes, Lippmann concluded that “serious people abroad are bound to say that if that is the way we made that kind of decision, we are not to be trusted with such a powerful weapon.”26
Szilard arrived at Princeton for a weekend meeting of the ECAS board in November, where Einstein announced a $1 million drive to educate the public about atomic weapons.27 Szilard warned the group that a nuclear arms buildup would move the United States “along a road that leads to war.” In December 1946, the University of Chicago hosted a fourth-anniversary commemoration of the first chain reaction at Stagg Field. Szilard moved uneasily among his former colleagues, no doubt sensing that many of them disliked his extroverted political actions. On the steps of Eckhart Hall, in the university’s neo-Gothic Quadrangle, Szilard posed for a photograph with Fermi, Zinn, Herb Anderson, and other Met Lab colleagues. The group had stepped outside for the photo, but ever cautious, Szilard alone wore a coat. He stood off to the side, now both physically and emotionally on the fringes of nuclear science.
Other scientists committed to international control joined that December at a meeting that united the Federation of Atomic Scientists with organizations from rocket, radar, and related fields to form the Federation of American Scientists. Szilard helped organize an Atomic Energy Conference to educate important persons about the bomb, which was held at Chicago’s Shoreland Hotel in mid-December.28 The FBI agents who followed him at the time described Szilard as walking “with his head back and stomach protruding; rarely wears a hat; has traits of nervousness and absent-minded [sic].”29
Absentminded he surely must have seemed, for Szilard’s thoughts seldom focused on the university and the city about him; he was simply too preoccupied with saving the whole world. In January 1947, Szilard addressed the Foreign Policy Association’s Cincinnati chapter, saying that no one knows much about foreign policy in an atomic age, so scientists— who are at least rational—might as well be allowed to offer their views.30 He pleaded “not guilty” for his role in creating the bomb.
Judgment of another sort came to Szilard that January when he joined Manhattan Project chemist Harrison Brown to drive uptown in his sedan to an office building in Chicago’s Loop, there to attend a screening of The Beginning or the End for scientists and journalists. At first, the scientists roared with laughter as the actor playing Fermi spoke his
lines in a thick Italian accent. And they guffawed as Hume Cronyn portrayed Oppen-heimer’s nervous mannerisms. But through most of the screening the scientists were silent, bemused, or angered at the story’s elusive message, distracted by the excessive flashing lights and electronic sound effects. As the screening ended and the lights flickered on, M-G-M’s representative looked around nervously, seeking in the scientists’ faces some reaction. Most sat quietly, volunteering nothing, but Szilard was more direct. Before journalists could turn to ask his opinion, he slipped out the door, rode the elevator to the lobby, climbed into Brown’s car, and crouched on the floor by the backseat. Days later he would only mention the film with pained humor. “If our sin as scientists was to make and use the atomic bomb,” he declared, in mock-theological tones, “then our punishment was to watch The Beginning or the End.”31
In March 1947, Gromyko rejected America’s proposal at the United Nations for international control of atomic energy, and a week later the president told a joint session of Congress that his Truman Doctrine on aiding allies now bound the United States to contain Soviet aggression. Szilard reacted to these cold-war tensions by hitting the road. After his article “Calling for a Crusade” appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that spring, he addressed a university audience in Bloomington, Indiana, as a scientist speaking about peace. To bring about a transition to world-government control of atomic energy, Szilard proposed that the United States sell “peace bonds,” as it had sold war bonds during World War II, and called for a constitutional amendment to redefine US sovereignty. “The Constitution was twice amended in this century over the issue of Prohibition,” he said, “and if we are willing to go out of our way for the sake of being permitted to drink or for the sake of preventing others from drinking, maybe we shall be willing to go out of our way for the sake of remaining alive.”32
Szilard ended his hour onstage with a peroration that linked arms control to politics. “We cannot look for our salvation to the Eightieth Congress,” he said. “But this country is a democracy. We are the masters of our destiny. There will be elections in ’48 and again in ‘52,” In Portland, Oregon, Szilard repeated this point, but in Spokane, Washington, he turned philosophical. When speaking about “Atomic Energy—A Source of Power or a Source of Trouble,” he made his first public admission that the atom’s peaceful benefits may not be as grand as he had first hoped.33
In May, Szilard’s “Calling for a Crusade” speech gained him national attention as a cover story: “The Physicist Invades Politics,” in the Saturday Review.34 And in June, Szilard and Harrison Brown met with publicist Harold Oram, who urged that as a fund-raising gimmick the ECAS should issue a public declaration after the forthcoming atomic scientists’ conference at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. “I was a negative member” of the ECAS, Bethe recalled, “trying to restrain Szilard from making extravagant statements.”35
Einstein warned Szilard and his other younger colleagues that the ECAS should not strive to become a mass movement. “You must not use razor blades for chopping wood,” he said.36 As scientists, you should work in more subtle ways.37 Einstein was right, for after the Lake Geneva conference the ECAS board haggled for more than a week before it agreed on a draft statement for Oram—a statement so bland that it only criticized the UNAEC for failing to reach accord on international control.38 “Usually we agreed with the ideas that Szilard had,” Bethe recalled. “But most of us didn’t think we should make so many statements.”39
Groping for new ways to forestall a nuclear arms race, Szilard thought it worth a try to contact Kremlin leaders directly and turned to University of Chicago law professor Edward Levi for legal advice. “Why not go right to the top?” Szilard asked Levi with a touch of his good-natured mischief. And he did, by drafting a letter to Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. In it Szilard weaved concerns about Truman’s “containment of Russia” with US fears about Soviet retaliation. He urged that Stalin speak often by radio to the American public, as Truman should to the Russians. And he proposed informal discussions by people from all walks of life to devise a Soviet-American peace agreement.40
A schemer who preferred working behind the scenes, Szilard tried to sidestep Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky, UN delegate Gromyko, and the “layers of Marxists” in the Kremlin by calling on Marshall MacDuffie, an international lawyer and former State Department official who had helped negotiate lend-lease aid contracts with Stalin during World War II. In October 1947, Szilard met with MacDuffie at his New York apartment, at Columbia’s Men’s Faculty Club, and on a train trip to Washington, hoping to contact the Soviet premier directly. When MacDuffie warned about the Logan Act, a 1799 law that prohibits US citizens from dealing personally with foreign governments, Szilard was undeterred, claiming grandly that he would seek permission from Secretary of State George C. Marshall, perhaps by way of Eleanor Roosevelt.41 Szilard asked MacDuffie to find “some special person” to penetrate the State Department: Under Secretary Dean Acheson, perhaps; or George Kennan, then director of the department’s Policy Planning Staff. And Szilard used his favorite technique—a letter from Albert Einstein. Einstein wrote Marshall about Szilard’s letter “to support his request that he be permitted to transmit this letter to Mr. Stalin through channels chosen by him.”42
When MacDuffie’s meeting with State Department lawyers failed to win permission for Szilard’s letter, he sent copies of the “Letter to Stalin” and Einstein’s letter to Marshall to Attorney General Thomas C. Clark. But this only prompted Clark to ask FBI director J. Edgar Hoover for “any derogatory information” about Szilard and later to circulate his FBI file to the State Department and the AEC.43
Finally, after Under Secretary of State Robert A. Lovett refused Szilard’s request, he published the letter in the Bulletin, to a flurry of newspaper articles. Press coverage was mostly positive, in which the “father of the atom bomb” now wrote to slow the arms race he helped start by telling Stalin that “peace can yet be saved by you, yourself.” But a Washington Post and Times Herald editorial that praised Szilard’s “good will” and “great energy, imagination and patriotism” also criticized his “naivete” and compared the open letter with the “peace ship” that industrialist Henry Ford had spon sored during World War I.44 Szilard may have loved thinking up clever ways to control the bomb, but he lacked both the patience and the subtlety necessary to influence the defense and foreign policy establishments that would carry out his schemes.
To muddle his efforts, Szilard complained that he could not always tell whether his own ideas were serious, and in October 1947, when busy plotting approaches to Stalin, Szilard’s mind twisted one grim thought into satirical fantasy. He imagined himself a condemned “war criminal” after Russians had invaded New York City in World War III. The Russians had bombarded the East Coast with a deadly virus (fortunately, Szilard added, the attack was limited to New Jersey), and once the president surrendered, the occupying forces rounded up all the scientists who had worked on the A-bomb. In “My Trial as a War Criminal” the Russians spurn members of the American Communist party because they have no sense of humor and enlist Britain’s government—now neutral—to conduct a Nuremberg-style tribunal. But before the accused Americans could be sentenced, Russia suddenly appealed to the United States for help. The vaccine against the virus had been manufactured incorrectly at a plant in Omsk, and an epidemic had killed more than half the city’s children. Riots broke out. And in the unrest, a postwar settlement “was in every respect very favorable to the United States and also put an end to all war crimes trials.”45
In the real world, no such settlement was even being discussed by the spring of 1948, but to take a first step, Szilard asked University of Chicago chancellor Robert M. Hutchins to organize and lead a new committee to devise and offer Russia fresh proposals for a stable peace. Szilard suggested that this “peace mongering organization” enlist such distinguished members as Einstein, Felix Frankfurter, Nelson Rockefeller, lawyer Abe Fortas, poet Archibal
d MacLeish, geographer Gilbert White, New Republic publisher Michael Straight, diplomat and politician Chester Bowles, Institute for Advanced Study director Frank Aydelotte, and Hutchins himself. But Szilard as much as conceded its futility as he urged Hutchins that “we necessarily have to operate within the narrow margin of small possibilities.” From his childhood, Szilard tried to summon faith in a “narrow margin of hope,” and now he struggled to be hopeful that his own efforts were useful, no matter how marginal.
“I am trying to figure out whether this business of saving the world is being left undone because it is too difficult for most of us,” Szilard admitted to Hutchins, “or rather because of the doubt in our minds whether the world is worth saving.”46 Like so many of Szilard’s schemes to enlist bright and influential men (rarely women) to solve the world’s problems, this committee soon stalled over how to include US government officials; Soviet scientists could work only with their government’s cooperation, so a private citizens’ approach from the United States would always confuse Moscow’s leaders.
Confusion about US-Soviet intentions was already abundant. The Soviets imposed a yearlong traffic blockade on Berlin in June 1948 and conducted their first A-bomb test in August 1949—an event that prompted Szilard to urge the United States to scrap its newly formed North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and negotiate a treaty with the Soviets for the “elimination of atomic bombs.” Newsweek gave a typical press reaction to Szilard’s idea when it reported, “To most Americans, this apparent combination of scientific erudition and political naivete was hard to understand.”47
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