“In the first draft I would go rather extensively into my childhood and even the childhood of my mother, but most of this will come out again, and only what is actually relevant to the history of the bomb will remain in the final draft,” Szilard proposed.17 For about a week in June, Szilard worked on an outline and rough draft for his “Memoirs,”18 but current events and visitors distracted him constantly, and by the fall he had written very little. NAL later reclaimed its $5,000 advance when Szilard refused to finish a manuscript.19
It is intriguing that Szilard thought his mother should be covered so extensively and unfortunate for our knowledge of his life and personality that he did not dictate more about her. From what survives we know that Szilard revered his mother’s moral influence and thought much of the instructive tales she told about her father’s honesty and strict sense of ethics. In his hospital dictations Szilard also recalled from The Tragedy of Man a vision of the human race at the point of extinction and stressed anew the need for a narrow margin of hope to sustain valiant efforts— something he needed now for his own survival as well as for mankind’s.
In all, Szilard’s recollections and memoirs revealed very little emotion. He failed to mention his brother and sister, his cousins, his classmates, his infatuations and loves (and losses), or his long and deepening relationship with Trude. There is no instance of exuberance or despair, yet we know from his friends and colleagues that Szilard could be very animated, warm, brusque, bitter, and gentle. Despite this opportunity to bare his soul before a possibly early death, Szilard held back—not, as Trude would later say, because he “was much more interested in the next twenty-five years than in the past twenty-five” but because since adolescence he had worked to keep his emotion and reason separate, and in a lifetime of trying he had succeeded.20 In the end, it was Szilard’s reason that ran wild—exuberant reason in playful and profound excess.
With more time to study the newspapers and follow the details of statecraft, arms control was just the kind of “general problem” worthy of his final days. February’s Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists featured Szilard’s essay “How to Live with the Bomb—and Survive,” in which he called for “a meeting of the minds” between Russia and America to maintain peace in the face of an unstable and changing strategic military balance.21 In a long introduction, Bulletin editor Eugene Rabinowitch praised Szilard’s “capacity to think years ahead of his contemporaries in a rapidly changing world” and argued that “this entitles him to attentive consideration, however bizarre some of the ideas expressed . . . may appear at first sight. . . .”22 In this article, Szilard foresaw clearly the stalemate that eventually led to arms-reduction efforts in the late 1970s and 1980s.
He also restated his overly rational proposal to identify ten Russian and ten American cities, which in turn would be bombed—city for city—if a nuclear war started: his way to dramatize how and why such a war should never begin in the first place. The article gained him international attention. On March 7 the ABC program “Edward P. Morgan and the News” linked “How to Live with the Bomb—and Survive” with the call by Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy to create an Arms Control Research Institute. Morgan praised Szilard’s “bizarre but challenging plan” as an example of his “bold and imaginative thinking” on nuclear arms control.23 Newsweek featured Szilard’s article in a piece captioned “A room with a startling view.”24 This was echoed a few weeks later in the Soviet humor magazine Krokodil, which paraphrased the paired-cities scheme: “I Will Exchange: Detroit for Omsk? Philadelphia for Leningrad?”
Up to now international exchanges were widely used: among picture galleries, theatrical troupes, municipal delegations of cities . . . but whole cities!
However, the American scientist, Dr. Leo Szilard, proposes to exchange—it is true—not his own native city of Chicago, but Detroit and Philadelphia for Omsk and Leningrad.
Of course, every man in his right mind agrees that warming up of the international climate is not favorable to the “exchange” according to the prescription of the Chicago physicist. How much simpler would be the varying of this by exchanging . . . rooms within the borders of the same city. The magazine, “Newsweek,” should help Leo Szilard by inserting the following advertisement:
WILL EXCHANGE NEW YORK FOR NEW YORK ONE ROOM, NUMBER 812 (IN THE MEDICAL WING)—BRIGHT, WITH ALL COMFORTS—FOR A ROOM, NUMBER 6 (IN THE PSYCHIATRIC WING)
P.S. The thankful residents of Omsk, Detroit, Leningrad, and Philadelphia would assume payment for the ad.25
For the March Bulletin, Szilard wrote about the nuclear-test-ban debate: “To Stop or Not to Stop.”26 They should stop, he said, because testing allows both sides to develop more specialized weapons, such as those for tactical use on battlefields or for antiballistic missile defense—”a new kind of futile arms race.” He proposed that scientists should be encouraged, with a tax-free $1 million reward from their governments, to report any secret weapons tests and be assured sanctuary afterward—an idea he had advocated for fifteen years.
His logic is impeccable, his proposals ingenious. But reading or hearing about this inspection scheme, people must have wondered if Szilard was serious. At the time, the Herald Tribune’s syndicated columnist Marguerite Higgins described him as “an odd combination of scientific genius, eccentric . . . and politician interested in mobilizing forces to mould high policy.”27 And, in a way, Szilard himself had become part of the public policy debate as a celebrity who personified the terror that nuclear weapons posed and the hope needed to control them.
In March and April, Szilard was interviewed for several days about his views on arms control and disarmament by broadcasters Howard K. Smith and Edward R. Murrow—joined by such experts as Hans Bethe and Edward Teller, MIT engineer Jerome Wiesner, and former AEC commissioners Lewis Strauss and Thomas Murray. Murrow opened the first of two half-hour programs from the patients’ balcony at Memorial Hospital; the Manhattan skyline at his back, he intoned that “the small world of Leo Szilard” is the story of “a man and a world on the danger list.” Szilard’s contribution to making the atomic bomb, Murrow said, “has left him with one driving purpose, and that is to try to help dismantle the era of terror he helped to create.”28
In the most animated and best-remembered sequence, Szilard reminisced with Teller, the friend who had also become his chief adversary, over ways to curb the nuclear arms race. The two talked with obvious affection about their 1939 drive to Long Island to meet Einstein and draft a letter to FDR and about the Uranium Committee meeting that year where émigré scientists extracted the first federal money for chain-reaction research. But Szilard quickly became annoyed with Teller’s declarations of patriotism and with his comparison of Szilard’s crusade to make the A-bomb against Germany during World War II and Teller’s own later efforts to create an H-bomb against Russia.
“I like to shock my audiences,” Szilard said, and proposed that Teller and Klaus Fuchs, the Soviet atom spy, be depicted on a monument, shaking hands. “Because without you,” Szilard added sarcastically, neither country would have H-bombs, and by Teller’s logic both are “necessary if war is to be abolished.” Still, Szilard kept open their friendship. “Come back and we’ll talk . . . privately, without these microphones,” he said. “It’s much nicer.”29
Teller and Szilard had a second, more celebrated clash that fall, on NBC-TV when they debated “Is Disarmament Possible and Desirable?” “We were in agreement that the danger [of nuclear war] was great,” Szilard said, “but Teller meant this danger is great if the US government should listen to me, and I meant the danger was great if the US government should listen to him.”
As their argument deepened, Szilard suggested, “I think, Teller, we should shake hands because maybe later on we don’t. . . .” The audience laughed and applauded, but this sort of polite wordplay kept the two from sparring more aggressively over the main questions of the day: a moratorium on testing and schemes for actual nuclear arms reduction. The two
points are often confused, Szilard said, because distrust of the Russians for cheating on underground tests is transferred to their possible cheating on arms reduction—a very different question. During one bitterly memorable exchange, when Teller accused Szilard of “irresponsible trustfulness” toward the Russians, he blamed Teller for his “irresponsible distrust.”30
In addition to his many television appearances, Szilard’s letters to newspapers appeared often. And besides Higgins, the nationally syndicated columnists Marquis Childs and Max Lerner wrote about his illness and his arms-control efforts.31 The New York Post printed excerpts of the Szilard- Teller debates. Newsweek and Life magazines quoted Szilard. U.S. News & World Report published a three-and-one-half-page Szilard interview as part of a cover story entitled “Was A-Bomb on Japan a Mistake?” And Harper’s magazine featured historian Alice K. Smith’s warm and insightful profile “The Elusive Dr. Szilard” in its July issue.32
Awards gave Szilard added recognition and publicity during his busy year in the hospital, among them Humanist of the Year from the American Humanist Association and the New York Newspaper Guild’s “Page One Award” for science. He received the annual Albert Einstein Gold Medal and Award from Lewis L. Strauss, and when Trude said that the roster of previous winners was impressive, Szilard replied: “Yes, and it is getting better and better.”33 A few days after Szilard received the Einstein award’s $5,000 check, a call came from MIT president James R. Killian, who announced that Szilard would receive the Atoms for Peace Award and another, even more substantial, check. Understandably, the nurse on duty at the time noted in her log that Szilard was “quite cheerful this PM.”34
In May, Szilard and Trude traveled to Washington, where he shared the 1959 Atoms for Peace Award with Eugene Wigner. At the same ceremony, Alvin Weinberg and Walter Zinn, two of Szilard’s longtime associates, received the award for 1960. They were described as “the four men who, of all men living, have done most to originate and perfect the nuclear fission reaction,” and Szilard was said to have been “untiring” in his “efforts to arouse men of all nations to the social and political implications of atomic energy.” In his response, Szilard recalled that in 1945, as the war drew to its end, a young staff member on the Manhattan Project came into his office and complained that too much emphasis was placed on the bomb and not enough on the peacetime applications of atomic energy. “ ‘What particular peacetime applications do you have in mind?’ I asked him, and he said, ‘The driving of battleships.’ ”35
Emboldened by his celebrity, Szilard even dabbled in presidential politics but quickly discovered that his advice was not appreciated. He suggested that Sen. John F. Kennedy slip his chief Democratic opponent, Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey, a large donation to keep his faltering primary campaign alive, then, for maximum credit, leak this example of fair play to the press. Szilard also proposed setting up a postelection study program to instruct the new president in foreign policy issues. Both ideas were politely acknowledged and promptly ignored.36
At Memorial, which Szilard used more as a hotel than a hospital, urine samples taken in April and May still showed no return of the cancer, and his spirits continued to rise. In early June, Szilard left to speak at the Arden House Conference to Plan a Strategy for Peace at a site north of New York City. Szilard had come to the right place. He enjoyed the fresh air. He enjoyed the company; old friends who attended included Jerome Wiesner and Richard Leghorn from Pugwash meetings. And to an enthusiastic audience that night he spoke about how to “live with the bomb” as a way of “avoiding an all-out war.”37
Szilard’s fervor and humor impressed the conference participants, and he retired that night excited by this vision of a strategy to eliminate nuclear weapons. Too excited. As he awoke and stretched the next morning, Szilard suddenly felt vertigo. He turned pale. His heartbeat quickened. After breakfast, on the drive into the city, he felt “seasick” and vomited.38 And, back in room 812, still dizzy even when lying in bed, Szilard’s complexion stayed pale. He began sweating. His pulse jumped again. A doctor on the ward that morning concluded that Szilard had suffered a “minor stroke.”39 An electrocardiogram gave Szilard sobering evidence that he should slow his pace. He had “myocardial disease and/ or extracardiac effect,” Dr. Nickson discovered. The condition had developed during the busy spring—a reminder of Szilard’s earlier heart attack in 1957.40
But Szilard’s fatalism and his personal momentum drove him on to even bolder efforts: a personal appeal to Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev and a book showing how, by the late 1980s, the arms race might end. Two days after the stroke, on Sunday, June 5, the Soviet biologist Simeon E. Bresler stopped by for a chat, and their talk convinced Szilard that he and fellow scientists might be able to ease the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. Why not write directly to Khrushchev? Szilard wondered. After all, he had written to Stalin in 1947. Bresler said he would convey such a letter, and Szilard raised this possibility with Charles Bohlen, then a Soviet specialist at the State Department, sending him a draft letter that urged Khrushchev to back improved US-Soviet dialogue through Pugwash and other scientific meetings.
But Bohlen questioned a private citizen dealing with a foreign head of state and urged Szilard to address only Soviet scientists. Szilard replied by recounting his many efforts since 1945 “to arrange for informal discussions between politically knowledgeable American and Russian scientists.” Two of these attempts collapsed because of US government criticism, Szilard noted, but after the Pugwash meeting at Baden in 1959, a new openness seemed evident from the Russians. Szilard promised to give Bohlen’s suggestions “serious considerations”41 and to await other State Department advice. But when no further word came after almost three weeks, Szilard sent his letter to Khrushchev.42
The same day, Monday, June 27, Szilard began dictating a satirical story he called “The Voice of the Dolphins,” and both the Khrushchev letter and his satire were sparked by the same frustration. In May, Szilard had sent a copy of his proposal for arms-control negotiations, “Has the Time Come to Abrogate War?,” to Look magazine, where editors accepted the article promptly but, to Szilard’s annoyance, would not set a publication date. Next he sent the Look article to Foreign Affairs,43 but the prestigious quarterly for the eastern foreign policy establishment rejected it in less than a week. “If they cannot take it straight, they will get it in fiction,” Szilard vowed angrily.44 As a youngster, he had enjoyed reading Bellamy’s Looking Backward and decided on the same device for a coldwar “history” written from the future. He took up the microphone on the Grundig stenograph and began a historical account of world events between 1960 and 1985, presenting his vision of how the nuclear arms race might be concluded.
“The Voice of the Dolphins” synthesized in fictional form the main points Szilard had made in his last three Bulletin articles. Looking out the window, crouching over the dictating machine, shuffling through copies of his articles, and scribbling notes, Szilard spun a tale peppered with details of his own life that took the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation, then safely back again. He recounted a revolution in Iran, a Chinese invasion of India, and a 1988 arms-control agreement between Russia and America—all events that later occurred. In Szilard’s tour of the future, the world had solved its burgeoning food and population problems and straightened out the chesslike politics of Europe and Berlin, perhaps all due to the superhuman intelligence of dolphins swimming in a Vienna think tank. By humor, irony, ridicule, and wishful thinking the rational scientific and political saga unfolded. Szilard finished dictating a first draft of his story by evening.45
“The book is not about the intelligence of the dolphin but about the stupidity of man,” Szilard would say later.46 Still, dolphins played an important role. Szilard had first become interested in them in 1958 when he befriended marine biologist John C. Lilly at the NIH.47 In the hospital two years later, Szilard read about a report Lilly had completed on the possibility that dolphins could imitate hu
man speech. With that idea, Szilard had the “fiction” that would carry his serious message. He cited Lilly in the text48 and linked his discoveries with the creation of a fictional US-Soviet Biological Research Institute in Vienna in 1963. The Vienna Institute, Szilard wrote, was inspired by Leningrad microbiologist Sergei Dressler, whose name, work, and travels resembled those of Simeon Bresler, Szilard’s personal link to Khrushchev.
Although they were superhumanly brilliant, “on account of their submerged mode of life, the dolphins were ignorant of facts, and thus they had not been able to put their intelligence to good use in the past,” Szilard’s story explained. “Having learned the language of the dolphins and established communication with them, the staff of the institute began to teach them first mathematics, next chemistry and physics, and subsequently biology.”
When the human researchers conducted experiments that the dolphins had suggested, these discoveries won Nobel Prizes for the next five years— each time credited to the dolphins. Soon the dolphins devised a way to cultivate a fast-growing algae whose protein was nutritious, delicious, and a natural fertility depressant for women. Named “Amruss” (for America and Russia) the protein solved both world food and population problems while earning immense wealth for the institute.49
With its wealth, the institute sponsored a worldwide television program, free of commercial or political bias, that analyzed modern problems rationally and objectively. The program was called The Voice of the Dolphins. Quietly and in a very Szilardian way, the institute also bribed politicians around the world to behave responsibly, by paying huge sums to “retire” corrupt officeholders and by rewarding honest ones who made politically tough choices. While Szilard feared that he would not survive another year, his pensive and playful mind still worked to find new ways that might help humanity survive for at least another twenty-five.50
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