From his desk in the Dupont Plaza’s lobby, Szilard continued to dispense advice to his government. Anticipating a Kennedy-Khrushchev showdown over Berlin, Szilard drafted several memos proposing a political settlement. One appeared in the May 1961 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and was reprinted in the Congressional Record.
The first Pugwash meeting to be held in the United States was scheduled for that September at a ski resort in Stowe, Vermont, and during the summer Szilard drafted enough memos to make a book-length manuscript on “How to Secure the Peace in a Disarmed World.” This was his step-by-step plan to eliminate nuclear weapons and restrict conventional weapons to regional peacekeeping armies. Routinely, now, Szilard sent his memos to William C. Foster and Adrian Fisher at the ACDA, to Wiesner at the White House, and to Prof. Henry Kissinger at Harvard, then an administration consultant.25
Memos on other topics also fluttered from Szilard’s lobby desk that spring and summer. He proposed creating a private think tank, similar to the military-oriented RAND Corporation, to operate in the field of arms control and general disarmament. He asked financier and Pugwash sponsor Cyrus Eaton to consider funding a joint US-Soviet research center in molecular biology. He offered President Kennedy advice on responding to civil unrest in Brazil.26
No doubt with his Bund in mind, Szilard proposed creating a “National Society of Fellows” that would provide systematic advice to the US government. These ten to twenty scientists and scholars would address current issues full-time. Besides probing topics that make headlines, these fellows would draw attention to “unrecognized problems” and to “problems which have been recognized but neglected.” For the fellows’ agenda, Szilard cited topics he had fancied for years: new forms of democracy suitable for developing countries; fertility and population controls; novel ways to arbitrate international conflicts.27 More speculative still were Szilard’s proposals in the summer of 1961 to study ways to use expanded leisure time and, perhaps, even find a biological means to eliminate the need for sleep.28
All the while, Berlin continued to haunt Szilard’s calculations. One chapter of the paper he drafted for the Pugwash meeting at Stowe, “Political Settlement in Europe,” repeated his scheme to declare Berlin a “free city” by moving the two German capitals. Within hours of completing this chapter, his speculation gained a new significance. After nightfall on Saturday, August 12, East German border guards sealed the crossings between the divided city and began building the Berlin Wall—first with barbed wire, soon after with concrete blocks and mortar. Tensions were already high between Khrushchev and Kennedy. The actions that night in Berlin had ominous strategic overtones, and Szilard, who personified and internalized the fate of the world, must have been shocked.
Henry Kissinger was also preparing to attend the Pugwash meeting at this time, and when he read Szilard’s papers on a political settlement in Europe, he wrote: “I agree with the philosophy contained in your draft proposal on disarmament and have been working with a group at the Disarmament Administration [ACDA] in order to improve our position.” The two had dined that summer. Now Kissinger suggested that they meet for lunch.29
But while Kissinger said he liked Szilard’s approach to solving the Berlin crisis and would discuss it in the White House, to his former Harvard colleague McGeorge Bundy, Kissinger was more skeptical about Szilard’s ideas, especially those on Berlin. Forwarding Szilard’s Berlin paper to Bundy, Kissinger wrote that Szilard “claims that he knows his proposal is negotiable with the Soviets because of his conversation with Khrushchev last year.” To Bundy, Kissinger was “not very enthusiastic” about Szilard’s approach but admitted that if the United States was moving to recognize East Germany, then his proposals do “have the advantage of a certain ingenuity.” Kissinger added that Szilard “will be glad to do the negotiating” over Berlin, a thought that infuriated Bundy. “He should not be encouraged to feel he has any role as a US negotiator,” Bundy urged.30
Szilard was a more successful strategist when working through Wiesner. During the Pugwash meeting in Moscow, the Soviet and Chinese scientists were at times openly hostile to each other, reflecting their governments’ growing conflicts. Szilard urged that a Chinese participant be invited to the Stowe meeting as a way to begin a dialogue fractured in Moscow. But the US State Department refused an entry visa, in part because Washington did not recognize the Communist regime in Beijing. Szilard urged Wiesner to press the issue, and the latter had President Kennedy request a visa from the reluctant Dean Rusk, secretary of state. A visa was issued, but for other reasons no Chinese delegate attended.31
At the time, Szilard felt ebullient and cocky, again enjoying his celebrity. A three-page “Close-Up” on Szilard entitled “I’m Looking for a Market for Wisdom” appeared in Life magazine the first week in September. He was pictured strolling around Washington “badgering his friends in government to buy his brand of political wisdom.” Readers saw him working away at his lobby desk and holding forth on disarmament while seated on the broad lawn at the Virginia farm of the New Republic’s publisher, Michael Straight. This “disputatious, free-spirited man” described his own role in the capital by saying, “The most important step in getting a job done . . . is the recognition of the problem. Once I recognize a problem I usually can think of someone who can work it out better than I could.” A page of Szilardisms included this thought on credit and fame:
In life you must often choose between getting a job done or getting credit for it. In science, the important thing is not the ideas you have but the decision which ones you choose to pursue. If you have an idea and are not going to do anything with it, why spoil someone else’s fun by publishing it?
On nuclear disarmament he was quoted as saying, “It is not necessary to succeed in order to persevere. As long as there is a margin of hope, however narrow, we have no choice but to base all our actions on that margin.”32
When this Life profile appeared, Szilard, and the world, watched as that margin of hope narrowed. In mid-August, President Kennedy had responded to the Berlin Wall by sending a 1,500-man battle group to West Berlin to strengthen US forces stationed in the divided city. On September 1 the Russians unexpectedly broke a nuclear-testing moratorium they had honored for nearly three years; in the next two months they would explode fifty weapons, including the largest ever recorded by either super power, a 56-megaton blast. A few days after the Soviets resumed testing, President Kennedy emphasized the national fallout-shelter program he had first announced in May. All public buildings would be surveyed, and suitable sites would be marked with yellow and black signs. Food and water would be stockpiled. Alarm systems would be improved to “make it possible to sound attack warning on buzzers right in your homes and places of business,” Life reported in a special cover story.33
At Stowe during the second week of September, the weather was warm and sunny, but the normally friendly Pugwash meeting was decidedly cool. “Disarmament and World Security,” the conference theme, had everyone on edge. The Russians, who had to be coaxed at the last minute to attend at all, were obliged to defend their government’s nuclear tests, while the Americans had to explain their own civil-defense plans. Compounding tensions during the conference, the United States resumed its nuclear weapons tests. The special issue of Life magazine that was passed around was headlined “How You Can SURVIVE FALLOUT” and promised that “97 out of 100 people can be saved.” Included were detailed plans for building home shelters, among them “A $700 Prefabricated Job to Put Up in Four Hours.”34
Scientists at the Pugwash conference were cautious with one another during the opening sessions, unsure how to begin or sustain helpful dialogue. Indeed, for the first few days the only people who seemed pleased to be in Stowe were the Russian delegates’ wives; on a shopping spree in local stores, they returned each night hauling to the hotel bags of goods they could not buy at home. Determined to lift his colleagues’ gloom, Szilard moved among the delegates in the autumn sunlight, chatting and cajoling.
At one point during the formal discussions, he walked over to sit among the Russians, and from there proposed a topic all might agree on: that the nuclear testing moratorium should be resumed.
“Does the American delegation agree?” asked the chairman.
“Yes, we do” came the answer.
“Does the Soviet delegation agree?” There was a nervous silence. A long pause.
“Da!” It was Szilard’s voice. Everyone laughed. Tensions eased. And with the laughter serious and friendly conversation at last began.35 During that Pugwash meeting came the first focused discussions about a permanent ban on atmospheric nuclear tests, an initiative that would result two years later in the US-Soviet Limited Test Ban Treaty.36
Passing through Boston at the time of Pugwash, Szilard also turned his irrepressible mind to lighter affairs. Over dinner at the Hong Kong Restaurant in Harvard Square, he mused to stepnephew John Schrecker about how to attract readers to The Voice of the Dolphins. “Make posters,” Szilard suggested, “and put them in the window of the Harvard Coop,” the university store. When Schrecker suggested this was too obvious and perhaps a little crass, Szilard replied: “Let’s run an ad. In the Harvard Crimson.” A popular advertisement for a newspaper at this time declared, “In Philadelphia, nearly everybody reads the Bulletin.” Szilard found a scrap of paper in a pocket and scribbled copy for his own ad:
In Philadelphia almost everybody reads “The Voice of the Dolphins,” five stories of political and social satire by Leo Szilard. (In second printing Simon & Schuster; paperback $1) on sale in the Harvard Coop. If you do not buy it to-day you will forget it.37
Back in Washington by mid-September, Szilard resumed his personal crusade for arms control by writing to Khrushchev. Within the Kennedy administration, Szilard reported, there had begun—”appearances to the contrary—some serious thinking about general disarmament.” Szilard also reported that he had “so far not given up hope that a constructive approach will be made with respect to the problem of Germany,” and to pursue this, he planned to remain in Washington “for the time being.” This letter, with a package of Schick Injector razor blades, Szilard forwarded to Khrushchev through Pugwash participant Alexander Topchiev.38 Just after dispatching this letter, Szilard drafted another, to McGeorge Bundy and Carl Kaysen at the National Security Council, offering to return to Moscow and discuss with Khrushchev a political settlement for Europe. But Szilard had doubts and never mailed the second letter, perhaps already aware of Bundy’s anger at his efforts as a mediator.39
Another letter to Khrushchev followed in early October, this one sent via Ambassador Menshikov. Szilard repeated the “free city” plan for Berlin he had posed at their first meeting a year before. He urged Khrushchev to agree that the long-term goal for both Russia and America should be “to have Europe as stable as possible.” And he said, if Khrushchev “would be willing to think through with me the implications of a political settlement . . . I would be glad to fly to Moscow, at a time convenient to you.” But the only reply Szilard received, through the Soviet embassy, was Khrushchev’s thanks for the “good wishes” and the blades.
Szilard’s Berlin solution was featured in the New Republic in October, yet neither side took his pragmatic steps seriously. Pondering how his voice might be heard, Szilard pushed anew for the National Society of Fellows, gaining fresh encouragement from Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., a Washington lawyer active in liberal politics, and from Pentagon lawyer Adam Yarmolinsky.40 But private foundations he approached were cool to the project, and it languished.
“In the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency Leo was viewed by the bureaucrats with whom I worked as a well-meaning eccentric who understood nothing of politics,” noted Richard Barnet, the deputy director in the Office of Political Research. “But his genius was in understanding precisely the unreality of bureaucratic realism.”41 Szilard resisted their “realism,” just as he resisted joining the scholastic debates that characterized many academic arms-control studies. He was after a simpler, more straightforward truth. It was quick and clever in reaction to slow-paced procedure. It was cool and ironic in reaction to the terrifying times.
And yet Szilard gradually accepted another lesson about Washington, from his friend Herbert York. A physicist who was then leaving his job as the Pentagon’s director for defense research and engineering to become chancellor at the University of California in San Diego, York advised Szilard that “people in government pay more attention to the advice they invite than to the advice they are offered.”42 In the popular phrase, government officials expect scientists to be “on tap, not on top,” and those on tap were chosen to be there.
As Szilard’s frustrations with Washington grew, Trude’s seemed to fade. She was delighted to be there, and sensing that their temporary visit was becoming permanent, she found appealing work in her field as a clinical associate professor in preventive medicine at the Georgetown University School of Medicine and a consultant in the health statistics branch of the Pan American Health Organization. These part-time appointments allowed her to share in her husband’s busy life and yet be free to travel with him—a necessity because of his bladder and heart conditions. The tube Szilard wore, which allowed urine to collect in a plastic bag strapped to his leg, she had to check for infection every few days. If the bag itself was not emptied after a few hours, it made a sloshing noise as Szilard walked. Rather than trying to conceal this, he called attention to it as a way to dramatize his precarious health and, some friends suspected, to be enjoyably shocking.
In print, too, Szilard could not resist shocking readers as a way to teach a graver lesson. In 1960, when his hopeful scheme for disarming the world gained no serious attention, he added dolphins and wrote it as fiction. Now that his search to stabilize the nuclear arms race was being ignored, Szilard felt it was time for some more fiction. With Russia and America testing larger and larger weapons almost daily in the fall of 1961, Szilard needed to find a way to dramatize the folly of the nuclear arms race. His city-for-city proposal the year before had made sense, at least to him, and he had revived it at Stowe. But there was no guarantee that world leaders would act rationally during a nuclear confrontation. (The Cuban Missile Crisis and its lucky resolution were still a year away.) Perhaps, he thought, fiction would make them face the facts.
In his latest letter to Khrushchev, Szilard had argued for “conversations” between Moscow and Washington on “how to keep to a minimum the amount of destruction—if a war should break out which neither of the two nations wanted.” It is important, he wrote, “that it should be possible even if one or two cities were destroyed through an unauthorized attack” to “get things under control” promptly.43 One way to avoid intentional attacks, Szilard now thought, would be to assure swift and certain retaliation if nuclear weapons were ever used. To gain that assurance, he mused, why not simply mine a few US and Soviet cities with H-bombs?
Preposterous? Of course, but no zanier, thought Szilard, than the whole precarious and wasteful nuclear standoff itself. Szilard wrote “The Mined Cities” to describe a rational and inexpensive way to maintain a reliable strategic stalemate while at the same time dismantling most nuclear weapons. Set in the year 1980, Szilard’s piece has a patient regaining consciousness after being preserved cryogenically for eighteen years— awaiting a cure for some illness. He is in Denver, one of fifteen American cities in which a team of Russians in an underground fortress maintains an H-bomb. The same number of Russian cities has American-manned fortresses with bombs. All other nuclear weapons have been destroyed, and with the savings from scrapping huge nuclear arsenals, the government can afford to pay each mined city’s family $3,000 a year to compensate for their anxiety. Szilard’s dialogue explains the mined-cities concept.
A [the patient]: Is Denver in any greater danger, now that it is mined, than it was before, when there was the air base nearby?
B [the doctor]: No, of course not. . . .
They are still a military target, but now they will
be warned before a nuclear explosion and given time to evacuate. Simple ground rules have been devised so that the teams, all family men, were paired with teams in another city: The Russians under Denver came from Kiev; the Americans under Kiev came from Denver. Each team will detonate a bomb only if its own home city has been destroyed. The plan eliminates the concern that a third country’s atomic attack on Russia or America could set off World War III and a nuclear holocaust.
This dialogue, at turns both playful and profound, also revealed Szilard’s own barbs and peeves.
A: Who thought up these mined cities?
B: Szilard had proposed it in an article . . . in 1961, but the idea may not have been original with him. His proposal was presented in the form of fiction and it was not taken seriously.
A: If he meant his proposal seriously, why didn’t he publish it in serious form?
B: He may have tried and found that no magazine would print it in a serious form. . . .
In fact, before the piece appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in December 1961, the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines had rejected it.
“In spite of its fictional form,” the Bulletin editors said in a preface, “the article is technically correct. The form permits the author to be more enlightening by being more entertaining.” Newsweek’s article “The Bomb Under Denver” called Szilard’s “mined cities” idea “a product of an intelligent imagination and a search for the bold act that might eliminate the danger of thermonuclear war. Short of complete disarmament, such a system might work, Szilard writes. . . .”44
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