Genius in the Shadows

by William Lanouette

  The arms race that Szilard feared advanced by January 1950 when President Truman announced that the United States would build a hydrogen, or “super,” bomb. And that February, Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy launched an anti-Communist crusade that would, by 1954, lead to his condemnation in the Senate but also incite fears of Moscow and its agents throughout the land. Szilard created a scare of his own that month when he told a national radio audience that by adding cobalt to H-bombs the weapons might create enough intense radioactive fallout to annihilate the human race. This astonished physicists Hans Bethe and Frederick Seitz as they sat by Szilard in the radio studio.48

  “It was terrible but typical,” Bethe recalled. “Szilard was his own worst enemy. . . . The H-bomb was bad enough. Why go beyond it? Why devalue the H-bomb in a way by that?” Here, said Bethe, was “one of the occasions where I thought Szilard hurt his cause by going too far.”49 This cobalt-bomb suggestion was made to oppose H-bomb development by showing where it might lead, but Szilard’s ultimate weapon soon had a life of its own. Other scientists—and the AEC—dismissed the idea, opening a debate that ran for months. In a science column headlined “Hydrogen Hysteria,” Time magazine compared Szilard to the nurserytale character Chicken Little, warning that “the alarmists, however well-intentioned they may be, are helping to frighten the US public into forcing dangerous concessions to Russia.”50 The Bulletin commissioned University of Chicago physicist James Arnold to critique the cobalt bomb’s practicality, and after several months of study, he reported that Szilard’s ideas were feasible.51

  Still hoping that influential persons might help their government find its way in the world, Szilard proposed to Einstein in March 1950 that he and other scientists form a “citizens’ committee” to debate arms-control proposals and appoint designated teams to represent US and Soviet views. Szilard wrote:

  When the Russians opposed the Baruch Plan, they did not tell us their real reasons for doing so, and what they told us of their reasons, they said in a language which is not intelligible to the American people. Our “Russian team,” on the other hand, will not only tell us why they find the Baruch Plan unacceptable from the point of view of their “client,” but they will tell us their reasons in a language which we can understand.52

  Unfortunately, by this time better public understanding could do little to ease East-West rancor. Accused atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested in June 1950, the same month North Korea invaded South Korea, ultimately drawing US troops into a war with Communist China’s forces and raising the possibility that A-bombs might be used.53 Weeks after the war began, Szilard drafted an open letter to US scientists, hoping again to arrange arms-control meetings with their Soviet counterparts.54 Like so many of his proposals, this one laid out detailed suggestions for organization and meeting topics. And, like so many, it was disregarded and eventually dropped.

  In September 1951, during a nuclear physics conference in Chicago, Szilard, Bulletin editor Eugene Rabinowitch, and English nuclear physicist Joseph Rotblat met one evening in a colleague’s home and for the first time raised the question of arms-control discussions directly with Soviet scientists.55 But when this overture yielded no Soviet response, Szilard truly believed a nuclear war inevitable and took two practical steps.

  First, he made plans to create a school in Mexico, where his friends’ children might survive the war. Second, in a fit of anger and frustration, he proposed a permanent institution to resolve those long-standing differences between the two superpowers that he feared would lead to war. His hasty and passionate draft, “You Do Not Want War with Russia?,” is Szilard’s half-sarcastic, half-desperate plea for help. As early as July 1948, Szilard had penned a measured letter asking intellectual leaders to join “an adequate movement aimed at the establishment of enduring peace.” Then his goal was to clarify foreign policy issues before the coming presidential election. But in March 1952, with another election ahead, came this more fervent and demanding appeal.

  “You Do Not Want War with Russia?” taunted his headline. “You will get it whether you want it or not—for it is in the making—unless you do something about it and do it quick.” Szilard’s badgering tone continued: “I say to you that there will be peace only if there is an overall settlement of all issues outstanding between America and Russia.” The “problem,” he said, “is not to write an agreement that Russia will sign but to write one which Russia will be eager to keep, not only for the next few years but ten years and twenty years hence.” Rejecting traditional diplomacy, he argued that “to devise such an agreement requires imagination and resourcefulness rather than patience and firmness; it requires thought and perhaps some compassion rather than arms.”56

  Then Szilard’s logic slipped loose, his reason outrunning common sense. Once “political issues” are settled, he argued, “there would no longer be a legitimate reason left for continued secrecy.” He even wondered “why we should not grant immunity to spies of any nation and revoke the Espionage Act to permit our own citizens freely to cooperate with spies of any nation.” Szilard was serious, logical, and wildly out of step with the anti-Communist paranoia then gripping his country.

  To take “immediate action,” Szilard proposed creating “a lobby for real peace in Washington” along with a bipartisan “political action committee” to influence the coming presidential election. As he would do ten years later with his Council for a Livable World, Szilard wanted to tithe participants to support these two activities.57 It is not clear what fired Szilard to write this proposal with such passion and anger, but perhaps it was panic at the remarks of Donald A. Quarles, air force secretary, who had said on February 2, “I cannot believe that any atomic power would accept defeat while withholding its best weapons.” Szilard clipped and saved the New York Times account of this speech and no doubt considered it proof that nuclear weapons might soon be used in Korea.

  There is no record in Szilard’s papers that he ever revised and sent this angry draft, but for us it reveals both his wild frustrations and his wily ingenuity. Fearful of both US and Soviet motives, Szilard realized that a peace agreement could succeed only by appealing to the interests and instincts of both partners. In short, it had to embody motives that would be self-enforcing. But his hopes to prevent a US-Soviet war and to slow the race for nuclear weapons withered just three days before the 1952 presidential election when the United States exploded its first H-bomb. Szilard asked the University of Chicago for a three-month unpaid leave in order to press even harder for arms control, but he could scarcely concentrate on any topic or project for long. He was clearly distraught, moving between Chicago, New York, and Princeton, later adding stops at Brandeis University and holiday visits to his wife, Trude, in Denver.

  In his cold-war gloom, Szilard began drafting a retrospective analysis of the nuclear arms race and its possible solution, which he called “Meeting of the Minds.” In August 1953 the Soviet Union tested its first hydrogen device, and in January 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles declared that US policy for any Soviet adventurism might be—in the popular phrase—”massive retaliation” with nuclear weapons. Frightened by these chilling events, Szilard became more unfocused, convoluted, and imprecise with each draft of “Meeting.” His thoughts about arms control were in turmoil. Fear now ruled his cherished reason.58

  In September 1954, Szilard proposed another conference for US and Soviet scientists, but ill health and anxieties about his erratic biology career all but overwhelmed this project. By the spring of 1955, Szilard’s personal and professional despair made him sarcastic about arms control. He told syndicated columnist Stewart Alsop what a bargain nuclear war would be; weapons were so abundant and powerful that the human race might be eliminated for only forty cents a head.59

  Trying to link arms control and politics, Szilard urged Sen. Hubert Humphrey to use his Subcommittee on Disarmament for off-the-record conferences on “what kind and what degree of disarmament is desirable within the framework of what pol
itical settlement?” Szilard suggested convening Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, and other policy analysts out of government with representatives from the State Department and Harold Stassen’s UN disarmament office. Szilard met with Humphrey, but nothing came of this idea.60 Desperately, Szilard was trying to engage his country’s brightest intellectual and political leaders in serious dialogue, in effect, creating another Bund. Again, no one cared to join him.

  Ironically, the international forum that finally coupled Szilard’s eclectic brainstorming with his fervent desire to curb the US-Soviet arms race evolved at just this time of despair: the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. It began with a “manifesto” signed by philosopher Bertrand Russell and Einstein in 1955 in which they called on the world’s scientists to “assemble in conference to appraise the perils” created by nuclear weapons.61

  Industrialist Cyrus Eaton offered the scientists use of his estate in the Nova Scotia village of Pugwash. “At first, Russell thought it was a joke,” recalled Rotblat, because in England “ ‘Captain Pugwash’ was an indolent comic-strip character.”62 But when the first conference met in Pugwash, in July 1957, it embodied what Szilard had tried to achieve for more than a decade by uniting US and Soviet scientists for arms-control discussions. Szilard participated in the first meeting, and at a critical moment he helped direct the group’s evolution. Ever the exuberant loner, Szilard also continued making fresh proposals for other US-Soviet meetings.63

  Among scientists and arms-control activists, Szilard and Pugwash are forever paired. When accepting Russell’s invitation to the first conference, Szilard suggested extending the meeting by several days, promised a paper on “how to live with the bomb” in order to achieve “stability in the atomic stalemate,” and proposed the names of other American scientists.64 A few days before the first conference, Szilard tried to convene some participants.

  “Why do that?” asked Harrison Brown.

  “So we can write the final report!” Szilard announced, and he arrived at Pugwash with a draft in his suit-coat pocket.65 The Russians and Americans were nervous about the meeting, as this was the first of its kind to bring together atomic scientists from the two countries. But the Russians quickly warmed to Szilard’s candor and wit. “They really loved Leo,” recalled Ruth Adams, an editor at the Bulletin who attended the First Pugwash Conference and many to follow. “He never tried to disguise anything, and they appreciated that.”66

  The dominant US and Soviet delegations were joined by scientists from Australia, Austria, Canada, China, France, Great Britain, Japan, and Poland. The venue forced them all to relax, although most men still wore dark business suits day and night. Pugwash, a lobster-fishing village on the Northumberland Strait, was Eaton’s birthplace. He proudly covered conference expenses and brought in three sleeping cars from his Chesapeake and Ohio Railway to accommodate guests; others slept in cottages or in family homes, as there was no hotel in this town of eight hundred. The twenty-five participants met around long folding tables in the village’s largest chamber, a schoolroom in the brick Masonic temple. Between sessions they chatted informally over drinks at backyard cookouts and on a boat cruise in the strait.

  Unlike most of his colleagues, Szilard was ebullient in all settings, taunting and quizzing about the arms race that many of them had helped to create. As the records noted politely, while delegates arrived the first day, “Szilard took the major share of the discussion.” He also “formu lated a number of specific questions which in his opinion should be the main concern of the conference,” among them, would using tactical nuclear weapons help avert “an all-out atomic catastrophe,” would President Eisenhower’s “open skies” inspection policy enhance stability, and would “a potential danger for peace” be eliminated by uniting East and West Germany?67 He even passed around drafts of his “final report” for comments.

  In one session, the minutes note, Szilard “spoke at length about the needs and the prospects for a political settlement” to achieve stability. His flamboyant style amazed some colleagues and amused others, as he split the nuclear arms race into three phases:

  1946-51

  logical, insane, stable

  1951-56

  logical, insane, unstable

  now

  illogical, insane, unstable

  The world became “unstable” in 1951 with the H-bomb, said Szilard, and now he feared that a peripheral political conflict—Berlin, perhaps, or a conventional war in the Mideast—might spark a nuclear war. To keep a nuclear conflict from escalating, Szilard proposed drafting in advance a “price list of cities, i.e., that the destruction of a city of one side would entitle that side to destroy an equivalent city of the other side but no more.” He also proposed what would later be called “minimal deterrence” by urging the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain to stop their nuclear tests and halt bomb manufacture, yet retain just enough weapons to deter each other.

  During the conference, Szilard was asked to talk informally among his colleagues and to record what had actually been agreed on rather than what was said in speeches and papers. When the participants finally consented to issue a statement, however, Szilard was typically contrary and refused to sign it.68

  Szilard relished his days at Pugwash, enjoying both the formal debates and informal chatter with his peers. His ironic humor and rigorous logic upset some of them but worked effectively with most, once they sensed how passionately he worried and thought about their common problems. “I am told that I puzzled some of my friends because I was not willing to go along with their statement that the most important step toward eliminating the danger of the bomb consists in stopping to test bombs,” Szilard said at the close of the First Pugwash Conference. “Yet they refuse to draw the logical conclusion and to say the most important step toward eliminating the danger of the bomb is to explode every single one of the bombs in our stockpile as soon as possible in a test.”69

  Back in Chicago, Szilard proposed that the university sponsor a similar meeting of twenty scientists and pushed the idea in letters to Russians he had met at Pugwash: Dmitri Skobeltzyn, a science adviser at the United Nations, and Alexander Topchiev of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.70 Inside the US government, too, Szilard’s influence was reaching some official channels, at least indirectly. One route ran through the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), created in 1957, where colleagues sympathetic to Szilard’s ideas gained institutional access to the White House. “Szilard kept us interested in the subject” of arms control, recalled Hans Bethe, a PSAC member from its founding, because “many of us remembered what Szilard had said and we had a special subcommittee on arms control. I believe that Szilard had a lot of influence on all of us on that committee . . . and later on, that committee, in turn, sponsored the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, a part of the government.”71

  When passing through London in December 1957, Szilard sat in on the Pugwash Continuing Committee meeting that was then deciding what to do beyond the first conference. On his own, and from recent conversations with German physicist Carl von Weizsäcker, Szilard had plenty of ideas, and although not a committee member, he challenged Chairman Russell’s call to expand Pugwash into a scientists’ movement with broad public appeal. Szilard argued for continuing small, private meetings lasting over several days, and he eventually succeeded, setting the pattern for later Pugwash conferences. And Russell soon founded the popular group he desired: the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which organized mass demonstrations against nuclear weapons. “Szilard’s presence that day made a difference,” Rotblat recalled, “and Russell later conceded that this was the right decision.”72

  Following Szilard’s suggestion, the Second Pugwash Conference was held for twelve days the following spring at a ski resort in Lac Beauport, near Quebec.73 It focused on immediate political problems, seeking conclusions that might help governments to curb the nuclear arms race. Weizsäcker, who had worked on Germany’s A-bomb during the war, was a p
articipant. Others included Australian physicist Mark Oliphant, Topchiev and Skobeltzyn, chemists John Edsall and Linus Pauling, Manhattan Project physicist William Higinbotham, Rotblat, sociologist Morton Grodzins, aerial surveillance expert Richard Leghorn, Rabinowitch, and MIT engineer Jerome Wiesner (later President Kennedy’s science adviser).

  Absent from the meeting, although urged by Szilard to attend, was physicist Edward Teller, then an outspoken advocate for developing and testing “clean” nuclear weapons—with high neutron levels and little radioactive fallout.74 Still, Szilard used Teller’s name so often to personify scientists who were driving the arms race that he might as well have attended. Szilard ridiculed Teller’s work in order to dramatize “how absurd the situation is into which the arms race has led us” by posing his own logical solutions to an illogical world. He told his Russian colleagues, “It will be in your interest to give us accurate maps of Russia” so that the United States might drop “clean” bombs on certain cities rather than “dirty” bombs.

  Together with Leghorn, Szilard laid out more practical steps to achieve stability in the arms race, including “rules” that the nuclear powers would “pledge” to follow in any future war.75 One rule would require that nuclear weapons only be used on the territory being defended; that is, if the Warsaw Pact invaded West Germany, the United States would only use them to repel invading forces in West Germany. “I am stressing the need for the internal consistency of the set of rules which must operate in both America and Russia if an agreement providing for disarmament is meant to be kept in force,” Szilard argued, striving to impose his rational worldview on skeptical colleagues.76

  Repeatedly, Szilard said their task was to learn “how to live with the bomb” and eventually how to use that stability to seek “political settlements” that might afford “real peace.”77 Reviving his idea from the First Pugwash Conference, Szilard proposed mutual inspection systems that would pay Americans to spy on America, Russians on Russia. To his colleagues this sounded serious, though farfetched. He also revived his “price list” for cities, now “divided according to size in ten categories” to make nuclear retaliation rational and predictable, with a month’s warning “for an orderly evacuation.” To his colleagues this sounded crazy.