by P. D. Smith
Szilard’s fifteen-page patent named beryllium as the element he thought would most likely sustain a neutron chain reaction. It was the element that had led James Chadwick to the discovery of the neutron in 1932. To Szilard, lying in his bath, it was the obvious candidate. His faith in beryllium was also bolstered by incorrect data about its atomic weight; it was not for another three years that a more accurate value was found. Significantly, Szilard also identified uranium as a potential element for a chain reaction.22
Fiction writers were also fascinated by the nuclear potential of the silvery metal beryllium. In a remarkable science fiction story written in the year that Leo Szilard applied for a patent detailing an atomic chain reaction in beryllium, Isaac R. Nathanson described how a scientist achieved precisely this, using the same element. ‘The World Aflame’, published in the science fiction pulp magazine Amazing Stories, contains echoes both of Goethe’s Faust and of Wells’s The World Set Free.
It begins with a passionate lecture on atomic energy by a scientist, Professor Samuel Mendoza. The parallels with Professor Rufus (aka Frederick Soddy) and his lecture at the start of Wells’s novel are clear. He paints a utopian picture of how, when the atom’s energy has been unlocked, ‘a truly new age of man will be ushered in’ and life revolutionized. But he also issues an apocalyptic and, as it turns out, prophetic warning: ‘with the coming of this all-powerful jinni of science, comes also unequalled responsibility… Man will either rise to the heights of the gods, or, if he does not take care, he may just as easily destroy himself!’23
Cover illustration for Isaac R. Nathanson’s ‘The World Aflame’, published in Amazing Stories: ‘The brilliantly incandescent beryllium suddenly turned to a strange bluish-white radiation of such dazzling intensity as to all but overpower the senses.’
With this ominous thought in mind, Professor Mendoza begins his experiment to release the atom’s energy: ‘When the beryllium atoms begin to kick out neutrons heavily, we’ll turn on full force and see what happens.’24 But as he raises the voltage to unprecedented levels and the temperature of the beryllium increases to two million degrees, ‘something let go with an awful, explosive roaring… The brilliantly incandescent beryllium suddenly turned to a strange bluish-white radiation of such dazzling intensity as to all but overpower the senses.’25
Professor Mendoza has created the self-sustaining chain reaction with neutrons that Szilard was dreaming about in his bathtub at the Strand Palace Hotel. But Mendoza’s chain reaction spirals out of control. The ‘disintegrating beryllium’ radiates such vast quantities of energy that the laboratory and the entire physics building are blown apart. Frédéric Joliot-Curie’s nightmare has come true.
As the beryllium disintegrates, the flood of neutrons sets off reactions in other elements. J. J. Connington’s scientist in Nordenholt’s Million had described the chain reaction as a domino effect spreading through matter – an explosive self-sustaining chain reaction. Even Rutherford, in the early days of radioactivity before World War I, had confided to a colleague that he thought ‘some fool in a laboratory might blow up the universe unawares’ by unleashing a ‘wave of atomic disintegration through matter’.26
Professor Mendoza almost becomes that fool. He only just succeeds in halting the rapidly spreading chain reaction. But although it is not the end of the earth, it is the end of Mendoza’s career. Brilliant though he is at physics, the professor’s ‘entirely too open and critical views on such public matters as religion, politics, industry and society in general’ have won him powerful enemies at the university.27 The explosion and the destruction of university buildings provides an excuse to sack the troublesome scientist. But the ‘all-powerful jinni of science’ is out of the bottle. Soon it falls into the hands of America’s enemies – in this case Japan – and, despite his idealism and hopes for ‘a new age of man’, Professor Mendoza’s discovery becomes a doomsday weapon.28
An ‘atomic bomb’ explodes in the American countryside, triggering a chain reaction in soil and rocks. It becomes a ‘fiery cancer… slowly consuming the earth’s substance’.29 The description of the bomb site is straight out of H. G. Wells’s novel – a volcano of disintegrating, molten matter. But it was an idea that can be traced back to the photograph of glowing radioactive ore in Ernest Merritt’s article on Marie Curie. This time the chain reaction is uncontrollable. The earth is doomed. But even though the ‘awful Jinni of atomic energy’ will cause the death of the planet, such is Nathanson’s belief in science and the atom that he still describes it as ‘the saviour of mankind’.30 For it is through the power of the atom that space travel is finally achieved. Before the earth is transformed into a ‘world aflame’, humankind fulfils its Wellsian destiny, leaving the earth for new worlds and new futures.
Leo Szilard could only dream of the kind of funding Professor Mendoza had secured in order to create his chain reaction using beryllium. Many people believe that if Szilard had received adequate funding, he might have split the atom before 1938. Instead, Szilard spent the years 1934 to 1939 in a scientific wilderness, banging on doors trying to convince people that his dream could come true. Sir Hugo Hirst’s company, General Electric, remained unconvinced by Szilard’s (and Wells’s) predictions of limitless energy, as were the financiers he approached. No one wanted to listen to the exiled Hungarian scientist with a big idea and a grand vision of the future. Atomic energy was strictly ‘for the science fiction fans’, Leo Szilard was told.31
In spring 1934, Eugene Wigner visited London to check up on his friend. Leo Szilard showed him equations describing an atomic chain reaction using beryllium that he hoped would produce enormous amounts of heat or even a violent explosion. Wigner was astonished. Together they visited Rutherford at Cambridge to discuss the idea. As Szilard’s biographer says, it was a meeting that ‘might have changed the course of nuclear research and with it modern history’.32 Rutherford had the facilities and the scientists who could have tested Szilard’s idea. But the meeting went disastrously from the outset.
The gruff, curmudgeonly Rutherford was an intimidating figure, both physically and intellectually. He had made his view abundantly clear on many occasions: atomic energy was moonshine. Understandably, Leo Szilard was very nervous. Perhaps for this reason, he didn’t explain his idea properly, telling Rutherford that the chain reaction could be made to work with alpha particles. He didn’t even mention neutrons. It was a fatal mistake. No one on the planet knew more about what alpha particles could or could not do than Ernest Rutherford.
The noble lord’s mood darkened still further when Szilard said he had already patented his idea. Pure scientists didn’t take out patents – they published their ideas in scholarly journals so that the whole scientific community could assess their worth. At the turn of the century, when J. J. Thomson had discovered the electron, they had a toast in the Cavendish: ‘To the electron: may it never be of any use to anybody.’33 When Szilard asked if he could test his ideas – which he had just patented – using the Cavendish’s world-class facilities, Rutherford exploded. ‘I was thrown out of Rutherford’s office,’ a horrified Szilard explained to Edward Teller later that year.34 Indeed, when Teller attended a lecture by Rutherford at Cambridge in the autumn, the veteran atomic physicist publicly poured scorn on certain ‘crazy people’ who were promoting the idea of atomic energy.35 It was clear whom Rutherford had in mind.
For the next four years in England, Szilard committed himself full-time to the search for his neutron chain reaction. But unlike Lise Meitner and Enrico Fermi, who were also exploring the potential of the neutron, Szilard had no laboratory, no fellow researchers and, most importantly, no funding. An outsider in the British scientific community, he had to beg for laboratory time at London’s St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Here, during the summer of 1934, he was able to make use of the radium samples used to treat cancer to conduct a few inconclusive experiments with beryllium. However, working together with Thomas A. Chalmers, a hospital staff member, Szilard did discov
er a new and extremely useful method for separating isotopes. As he said, ‘these experiments established me as a nuclear physicist, not in the eyes of Cambridge, but in the eyes of Oxford’.36
Eventually a meeting with Frederick Lindemann, the director of Oxford’s Clarendon Laboratory and later scientific advisor to Winston Churchill, landed Szilard a fellowship, funded by ICI, at Oxford in 1935. There Szilard was at last able to conduct original research into how neutrons are absorbed by the atomic nucleus. Niels Bohr described it as ‘beautiful’ research.37 Even Rutherford was forced to acknowledge grudgingly it was an advance in understanding. By 1936, Leo Szilard had switched his interest from beryllium to indium.
In March he wrote to Bohr, suggesting that the rare isotope uranium-235 might be the ideal candidate for a neutron chain reaction. This time his hunch was right, but he would not see the proof for three years.
As well as continuing his experiments to find an element with which he could create a self-sustaining chain reaction, Szilard tried repeatedly but unsuccessfully to convince colleagues, such as Fermi, to keep their atomic research secret. His own patent was kept under lock and key at the British Admiralty. But other physicists were deeply sceptical about this obsessive desire for secrecy. In James Whale’s 1933 film of The Invisible Man, one of Griffin’s colleagues voices his suspicions about the mad scientist: ‘straightforward scientists have no need for barred doors and drawn blinds’.38 Secrecy offended the spirit of science, at least before the cold war.
Uranium had been one of the four elements Szilard had identified early on as potential candidates for a chain reaction. If he had received adequate research funding from the start, he might well have discovered that uranium emitted the neutrons needed to sustain a chain reaction before 1939.39 Much later, Szilard admitted that he was actually pleased that he hadn’t discovered this earlier. If he had, Nazi scientists might have been the first to create the atomic bomb. Szilard even joked that he should be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for not discovering uranium fission in the 1930s.40
In April 1934, Szilard wrote a declaration which he hoped would be signed by Nobel laureates, condemning the Japanese invasion of China. His draft statement began: ‘The discoveries of scientists have given weapons to mankind which may destroy our present civilization if we do not succeed in avoiding further wars.’41 By then, he knew how such doomsday weapons might be made. It was, he thought, just a matter of time before H. G. Wells’s atomic bomb was ready to be dropped from a lone aircraft on a real city.
IV
The Battle of the Laboratories
A weapon has been developed that is potentially destructive beyond the wildest nightmares of the imagination; a weapon so ideally suited to sudden unannounced attack that a country’s major cities might be destroyed overnight by an ostensibly friendly power. This weapon has been created not by the devilish inspiration of some warped genius but by the arduous labor of thousands of normal men and women working for the safety of their country.
Henry DeWolf Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes (1945)
13
‘Power Beyond the Dream of a Madman’
It is by devising new weapons, and above all by scientific leadership, that we shall best cope with the enemy’s superior strength.
Winston Churchill, 3 September 1940
[O]n May 1, 1976, had the reader been in the imperial city of Peking, with its then population of eleven millions, he would have witnessed a curious sight. He would have seen the streets filled with the chattering yellow populace, every queued head tilted back, every slant eye turned skyward. And high up in the blue he would have beheld a tiny dot of black, which, because of its orderly evolutions, he would have identified as an airship. From this airship, as it curved its flight back and forth over the city, fell missiles – strange, harmless missiles, tubes of fragile glass that shattered into thousands of fragments on the streets and house-tops. But there was nothing deadly about these tubes of glass. Nothing happened. There were no explosions… One tube struck perpendicularly in a fish pond in a garden and was not broken. It was dragged ashore by the master of the house. He did not dare to open it, but, accompanied by his friends, and surrounded by an ever-increasing crowd, he carried the mysterious tube to the magistrate of the district. The latter was a brave man. With all eyes upon him, he shattered the tube with a blow from his brass-bowled pipe. Nothing happened. Of those who were very near, one or two thought they saw some mosquitos fly out. That was all. The crowd set up a great laugh and dispersed…
Had the reader again been in Peking, six weeks later, he would have looked in vain for the eleven million inhabitants. Some few of them he would have found, a few hundred thousand, perhaps, their carcasses festering in the houses and in the deserted streets, and piled high on the abandoned death wagons.1
This is ‘the unparalleled invasion of China’, as described by American writer Jack London in 1906. Having just reported on the war between Russia and Japan as a journalist, London was surprised – not to say disturbed – at how advanced the Japanese were in their mastery of modern weapons. In his news articles he voiced xenophobic fears about the ‘Yellow Peril’. The fear had begun to grow in some parts of Europe and America that the sleeping giant of China might learn from Japan and embrace industrialization to become an economic superpower.2 In his short story ‘The Unparalleled Invasion’, London returned to these themes, creating a disturbing narrative about scientific superweapons and genocide.
The story shows how the Russo-Japanese war heralds ‘the awakening of China’. With her ‘four hundred millions and the scientific advance of the world’, China soon becomes ‘the colossus of the nations’. London sees China’s strength as lying in her vast and increasing population. Soon ‘there were two Chinese for every white-skinned human in the world’. The world is ‘terrified’ by this fact and by the growing power of China: ‘there was no way to dam up the over-spilling monstrous flood of life’. France tries to halt the tide of Chinese immigrants into French Indo-China, but – in a prefiguring of the start of the Vietnam War – ‘the French force was brushed aside like a fly’.3
Jacobus Laningdale is the saviour scientist who finds the brutal answer to the threat from the East. (Either by chance or design, he shares his initials with Jack London.) Laningdale is ‘a very obscure scientist’, a professor working in the laboratories of the Health Office of New York City. He comes up with an ingenious idea which, in a very unscientific way, he keeps secret. Rather than publishing it, he asks for a holiday. ‘On September 19, 1975, he arrived in Washington,’ writes London. ‘It was evening, but he proceeded straight to the White House, for he had arranged an audience with the President. He was closeted with President Moyer for three hours. What passed between them was not learned by the rest of the world until long after.’4 Science and the state had joined arms against a common threat. It was to be a mutually rewarding alliance in the coming years. From pure science, lethal technologies would flow.
Initially, troops from American, European and other nations mass along China’s borders. Then solitary airships appear above Chinese towns and cities, dropping their fragile cargo of glass test tubes. Inside each tube is a mosquito carrying a lethal pathogen. In this way, ‘a score of plagues’ are unleashed on China. This is biological warfare:
Every virulent form of infectious death stalked through the land… The man who escaped smallpox went down before scarlet fever. The man who was immune to yellow fever was carried away by cholera; and if he were immune to that, too, the Black Death, which was the bubonic plague, swept him away. For it was these bacteria, and germs, and microbes, and bacilli, cultured in the laboratories of the West, that had come down upon China in the rain of glass.5
What Jack London describes is not just a limited attack on a nation’s army, but total warfare against a whole people – genocide, designed in the laboratory. With its borders sealed by foreign armies, China is isolated from the world, its people quarantined until the country is turned int
o a ‘charnel house’. As well as the familiar diseases, ‘a new and frightfully virulent germ’ has been created. No one is immune to it. An entire nation is annihilated by science, the Janus-headed god of the modern world, offering miracle cures in one hand and super-weapons in the other: ‘it was ultra-modern war, twentieth century war, the war of the scientist and the laboratory, the war of Jacobus Laningdale. Hundred-ton guns were toys compared with the micro-organic projectiles hurled from the laboratories, the messengers of death, the destroying angels that stalked through the empire of a billion souls.’
‘And so perished China,’ writes Jack London at the end of his genocidal fantasy. After the victorious nations divide up the land among themselves, they agree to ban these ‘laboratory methods of warfare’.6 Clearly, such total wars could be waged only against the ‘yellow peril’, not against white people.
Or could they? In 1953, at the height of the cold war, American military scientists began experimenting with insects as carriers of biological agents. In laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland, Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were bred by the million on a rich diet of blood and syrup. The aim was to produce 130 million a month and infect them with yellow fever – a particularly nasty disease with a 33 per cent fatality rate. Cluster bombs dropped from aircraft would be used to deliver the disease-carrying mosquitoes onto the enemy’s population. Tests were conducted (although not with infected mosquitoes) in a residential part of Savannah, Georgia. They showed that ‘within a day the mosquitoes had spread a distance of between one and two miles, and bitten many people’.7 By the end of the decade, malaria and dengue (or breakbone fever) had also been weaponized for use in this way. Experiments were conducted using fleas and flies infected with other fatal diseases. Indeed, in the summer of 1999, when New Yorkers suddenly started coming down with West Nile encephalitis – another virus spread by mosquitoes – scientists immediately suspected a terrorist attack.8