To explain his point, Szilard discussed a hypothetical US invasion of Mexico after a Marxist takeover. Under his rules, “the Russian price might specify that if Mexico is invaded by American troops, Russia will give notice to two to four cities of the seventh category, and after four weeks, which is ample time for an orderly evacuation, Russia will destroy these cities, will demolish these cities, with the clean hydrogen bombs.”
“Does this mean that after the Soviet Union destroys four of our cities, we can destroy four of theirs?” asked Grodzins.
“Yes, of the same category,” said Szilard. Soviet chemist Topchiev interrupted, saying the two countries should “maybe pledge not to ruin cities at all.”
“In that case,” Szilard answered, “I cannot abolish war, because I cannot prevent the American government from invading Mexico.”
“We are not going to organize Communist revolution in Mexico,” Topchiev replied to a chorus of laughter.78
But delegates had trouble deciding whether to laugh or not when Szilard complained about “too much rigidity in thinking about to what use a bomb can be put” and suggested as a clever initiative that “our Russian friends” buy the city of Lyons from France and destroy it with three “clean” H-bombs.79 Szilard also urged a “full exchange of information” between the United States and the Soviet Union to assure that bombs can be made “clean.” And if the US government does not accede, he proposed—perhaps seriously—that they “enlist the help of the churches” and “organize prayer meetings” to ask God “that there should be a patriotic traitor among us who will inform the Russians on how to make clean bombs.”80
For his part, Szilard expected his Pugwash colleagues to be skeptical. And they were. “I have some experience about what kind of reaction one gets if one proposes something unusual,” he said, “like, for instance, setting up a chain reaction in the uranium atom.” But when they stopped laughing at that crack and at his other quips, many scientists were still skeptical. Szilard seemed at once too logical and too whimsical.
Before the conference ended, Szilard, Leghorn, and Wiesner proposed that Topchiev convene a meeting that summer of Russian and American scientists, including some members of President Eisenhower’s newly formed PSAC.81 By June, Topchiev had agreed, and Szilard raised foundation money, arranged sponsorship by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and planned a September meeting in Moscow.82 With that meeting in mind, Szilard began drafting a grand scheme for resolving the arms race, his “Pax Russo-Americana.”83
Later versions of this manuscript served as the focus for Szilard’s arms-control thinking during the rest of his life: in talks and proposals at Pugwash conferences, in letters to colleagues and newspaper editors, in a 1960 meeting with Khrushchev, and in satirical fiction as The Voice of the Dolphins. Szilard tried out these thoughts in May 1958 when, as MIT’s Arthur D. Little Lecturer, he provoked academic and political guests at Endicott House in Dedham, Massachusetts, with the talk “Could a Stale mate Between the Atomic Striking Forces of America and Russia Be Made Truly Stable?” Unlike some arms-control activists, Szilard did not believe nuclear weapons could, or should, be eliminated; but they should be minimized and their use negated by political accord.
“When Russia and America can destroy each other to any desired degree, the overriding issue becomes the stability of the stalemate, and on this issue Russia’s and America’s interests coincide,” Szilard argued.84 When questioned about the value of achieving more stability in the current stalemate, he answered by mocking the premise on which US deterrence was based—Secretary Dulles’s “massive retaliation.” This, said Szilard, “would mean murder and suicide today. . . . Now such a threat is not believable, and therefore there is no deterrent in it whatsoever.” His sarcasm may have miffed a few listeners when he said that “clean” bombs pose a greater threat than “dirty” ones because “you embarrass America more” by “making ten million people without shelter” than by killing them.85
Szilard’s remarks clearly provoked a blustery exchange with Walt W. Rostow, then an MIT economic history professor and later a foreign policy adviser in the Kennedy administration. Rostow warned that the loss of China to the Communists in 1949 had a current parallel in Egypt, and “at this moment the Communist party in Egypt is saying exactly what the Communist party said about the [Chinese] Nationalists. . . .”
“We don’t care a damn whether a country is democratic or not; what we care is to have a friendly government,” Szilard complained. Citing the US-backed coup that ousted Premier Mossadegh in 1953, Szilard said: “We have subverted Iran very successfully, and we have a government which is friendly to us; but Iran is of course not a capitalist country, nor is it a democratic country. We are not propagating democracy. We want governments which are friendly to us. This is precisely what the Russians want.”
“What makes a government friendly in the absence of a political conviction?” Rostow asked.
“A government is made friendly,” said Szilard, giving no ground, “because we supply the arms for this government to remain in power.”86
As founding chairman of the “Operating Committee on World Security Problems Raised by Nuclear Weapons” at the American Academy, Szilard schemed to use this panel to sponsor the Moscow meetings. Behind all his practical steps was Szilard’s visceral fear of global nuclear war, a fear that intensified in the summer of 1958 as President Eisenhower sent US Marines into Lebanon to quell a rebellion and as Communist China bombarded the Nationalist-held islands of Quemoy and Matsu off Formosa. “If a confrontation develops, I’m going to leave the country,” he told Philip Morrison that summer.87
In September 1958, Szilard left the country, anyway, and met again with Topchiev and Skobeltzyn at the Third Pugwash Conference in Kitzbühel, a ski resort in the Austrian Tyrol. Still hoping for a Moscow meeting, the Russians promised their most knowledgeable and influential scientists. But plans for the meeting faltered when the State Department discouraged US participants from attending and the Rockefeller Foundation balked at covering the expenses. Then plans revived again in the spring of 1959, after Szilard added to his American Academy committee three scientists active in public policy issues, physicists Hans Bethe and Alvin Weinberg and environmental scientist Roger Revelle. At Revelle’s urging, the US State Department finally favored the meeting.
For the Fourth Pugwash Conference in Baden, Austria, in the summer of 1959, Szilard simplified his “Pax Russo-Americana” paper into a talk about “How to Live with the Bomb.” The Pugwash meetings by this time had become the leading forum for international discussion of the nuclear arms race. Issues such as an end to weapons tests and bans on specific technology were regular topics, and Pugwash veterans claim that their sessions highlighted ways to detect and measure nuclear explosions, laying the groundwork for the Treaty for a Partial Nuclear Test Ban of 1963 and the 1976 Threshold Test Ban that limited US and Soviet explosions to 150 kilotons. Pugwash discussions also developed and endorsed the “black box” approach to verifying underground tests with nearby monitoring devices, and some of the main provisions of the 1968 Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty were devised at a series of Pugwash meetings begun in 1958.
In his quest for “stability” in the arms race, Szilard complained that antiballistic missiles (ABMs) posed a special threat because they invited unlimited development of offensive nuclear weapons. “In particular,” said physicist John Holdren, a Pugwash officer since the 1980s, “influential Soviet scientists, who initially supported ABMs as defensive and therefore inherently benign, were persuaded by their American counterparts in Pugwash that this view was dangerously incorrect.” The consensus reached among Pugwash scientists led to the 1972 ABM Treaty.88
While Szilard assaulted his colleagues with rational schemes for saving the world that left them wondering whether he was joking, his humorous quips left them wondering if he were serious. At the Baden meeting, Szilard offered toasts that poked fun at both the Americans’ directness an
d the Russians’ reserve. To A. P. Vinogradov, Szilard raised his glass and said, “While he may not always say what he thinks, he never says what he does not think. . . .”89
Szilard was just as jocular with the Soviet premier. In September 1959, a week before Nikita Khrushchev was to visit Washington, Szilard was in Geneva and sent the Russian leader “How to Live with the Bomb—and Survive.” A copy would also go to the White House, Szilard wrote, “with the instruction that an oral report be rendered to President Eisenhower, if this appears to be warranted.” Szilard even urged Khrushchev, in a cheeky aside, that “a similar procedure might, perhaps, be adopted by you also.” He stressed the need to focus on “long-term implications” of current nuclear policies, and beyond prompting the Soviet premier on what to tell the US president, Szilard vowed to spend October in Washington “to discuss with certain members of the State Department the issues raised in the attached manuscript, which are semipolitical, as well as semitechnical.” Szilard also promised Khrushchev that he would request discussions in Moscow with Soviet scientists.
Khrushchev never replied to this letter, although Szilard’s blunt and teasing style appealed to the Soviet leader and they would later exchange many letters and meet privately. Szilard’s feisty manner also appealed to some of his fellow scientists. One message that cheered Szilard came in a telegram referring to his decisive role in keeping the Pugwash movement low-key and private, “the pugwash committee meeting in london send you best wishes and look forward to disagreeing with you at future pugwash conferences = bertrand russell.”90
CHAPTER 25
Biology
1946–1959
When a meeting of the Atomic Scientists of Chicago ended in a classroom at the University of Chicago’s Social Science Building one March evening in 1947, Leo Szilard turned to a younger colleague and asked, “How would you like to join me in an adventure in biology?”
“I was very excited by the idea,” Aaron Novick recalled years later. Szilard was a theoretical physicist who was then dabbling in the social sciences; Novick, a physical-organic chemist whose work during and after the war included nuclear and solid-state physics. “I knew very little about biology. But I knew a lot about Szilard. I admired his genius, I liked his enthusiasm for ideas, and I liked him personally.” Novick’s answer was quick and decisive: “I would be delighted!”
“You must think about it,” Szilard cautioned.
“No need,” said Novick. “I can tell you, I am certain.” This was just the opportunity both men had been seeking. In 1946, when diverted from nuclear physics by his nemesis Gen. Leslie R. Groves, Szilard had secured a research professorship that linked biophysics and social issues and freed his restless mind for fresh discoveries. On his own, Novick was already intrigued with biology after reading What Is Life?, the provocative essay by physicist Erwin Schrödinger.1
Szilard and Novick had met on the Chicago campus during the war, at the Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab) of the Manhattan Project.2 After the war, Novick had roomed with Enrico Fermi’s colleague, physicist Herbert Anderson, in a carriage house behind the Quadrangle Club, the faculty club where Szilard lived. Szilard enjoyed brainstorming with younger associates and spent many late nights on a couch in that carriage house, talking and listening intently.3 Novick had also joined Szilard in Washington, in the spring of 1946, to help lobby for civilian control of atomic energy, and through the Atomic Scientists of Chicago they worked with other Manhattan Project veterans for the atom’s international control.
Biology appealed to both men because it offered them the chance to seek first principles in a field still lacking the kind of conceptual and theoretical breakthroughs that had revolutionized physics during the century’s first decades.4 As early as the 1930s there was a feeling that biology was ready for just such a dramatic theoretical advance, although this did not take place until about the time that Szilard and Novick decided to enter the field, with the rise of what is now called molecular biology.
While the impromptu offer in the classroom that night surprised Novick, just such an “adventure” had fascinated Szilard since his restless days in Berlin in the late 1920s. Szilard enjoyed reading The Microbe Hunters, Paul Henry de Kruif’s 1926 saga about the discovery and early use of the microscope, and talked about it excitedly. He probably read The Science of Life, a visionary story about genetic engineering written in 1929 by H. G. Wells and others.5 Szilard had met Wells in London that year and had tried (but failed) to contact his coauthor, biologist Julian Huxley, when promoting the idea of an intellectual policy group he called the Bund. Undoubtedly, Szilard also knew J. B. S. Haldane’s inspiring 1924 essay Daedalus, or Science and the Future, about the human consequences of biological progress.
Szilard also knew about physicist Niels Bohr’s imaginative approach to biology in the 1932 essay on “Light and Life,” which urged applying a principle from quantum mechanics, “complementarity,” to the understanding of biology.6 By his own account, Szilard was “strongly tempted to go into biology” in the spring of 1933, when he landed in England as a refugee from Hitler’s Germany. Szilard called on Archibald V. Hill, a biophysicist-turned-biologist who had won a 1922 Nobel Prize in his new field, and was advised to work as a physiology demonstrator at the University of London as a way to become a physiology instructor and, in the process, to learn biology.7
But biology had vanished from Szilard’s mind by the fall of 1933, when he conceived and developed his concept of a nuclear “chain reaction.” Now, fourteen years later, with the chain-reaction concept used to create the A-bomb he had dreaded, Szilard could balance his fervent armscontrol efforts with renewed speculation about biology.
Szilard beamed with enthusiasm for his new field and inspired Novick and others he spoke with to share his fervor. He yearned to create a theoretical structure that would permit biologists to make intuitive leaps of faith to explain and unite what they knew empirically. Eclectic and acrobatic in his own thinking, Szilard hoped that the jumps and juxtapositions of his mind could reveal fundamental theories to explain life itself. In this way, he was still thinking as a physicist, ever eager to pose bold and imaginative hypotheses to explain basic phenomena.
There is a slim possibility that in his final months in Berlin, Szilard met German physicist Max Delbrück, who is credited as a later founder of molecular biology. At the time, Szilard was teaching a theoretical physics course with Schrödinger, who was also fascinated by the theoretical possibilities of biology. Delbrück returned from research with Bohr in Copenhagen in the fall of 1932 and began study under N. W. Timofeeff- Ressovsky, a Russian biologist working in Germany.8
After Delbrück immigrated to the United States in 1937, he took up genetic research at the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) and later, while at Vanderbilt University in 1943, joined Salvador Luria to demonstrate that bacteria adapt to new conditions—such as the presence of a virus—by Darwinian mechanisms, just as higher forms do. Virus-resistant mutants preexist in a population, they concluded, and are not induced by the selective agent (the virus) that is applied to isolate the mutants.9 In 1943, Luria criticized bacteriology as the last stronghold of Lamarckism; and their demonstration of adaptation established bacteria as suitable objects for the study of genetic mechanisms so that principles applicable to all life could be discovered.10
Delbrück and Luria believed that they could better understand genetic mechanisms by studying one of nature’s simplest creatures: the bacteriophage, or simply, phage. The phage is a virus that infects bacteria. Viruses reproduce in a living cell by using the cell’s apparatus for reproduction, DNA or RNA. By definition, viruses contain either DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid: a large, stringlike molecule found in living cells that carries genetic information), which acts to redirect the bacterium’s own biosynthetic systems to make more virus phage, or RNA (ribonucleic acid: single- or double-stranded molecules).
The final event in the infectious process is usually a breakdown of the bacterial
wall (called lysis), which frees the newly reproduced phage particles. Some phage are tadpole shaped, with a head containing DNA within a wall of protein. The phage’s hollow tail, also made of protein, can attach to bacteria and facilitate the transfer of DNA into them. Because of their simplicity, phages seemed ideal for studying how genetic material reproduces, mutates, and expresses genetic information.
In the summer of 1947, Szilard and Novick enrolled in a course on bacteriophage at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on the north shore of Long Island, New York. Delbrück and Luria first organized this intensive course two summers before to recruit people to study phage and in three busy weeks participants were able to learn enough theory and technique to conduct their own phage research. “This isn’t a course,” Szilard huffed to his brother, Bela. “It’s a church. Delbrück’s phage church. And when you’re in it, you’ve got to believe.” Researchers who joined the “phage group” focused on the genetics of phage, anticipating that this study would help them to better understand the genetics of higher organisms. And since phages reproduce rapidly, as do the host cells, their reproduction provided a handy means for studying the evolution of many generations—here measured not in years or even months but in hours.
At work and at play the phage group became a close-knit alliance of cooperating researchers from very different backgrounds, and through the 1940s and 1950s it helped develop the new branch of science called molecular biology. But as one close observer noted, “With their fastidious rigor, their insistence on the simplest biological systems, their distrust of biochemists and earlier microbiologists, their self-conscious marking off of the group from others—their snobbery—the phage group has attracted attention even to a disproportionate degree.”11
Genius in the Shadows Page 52