by P. D. Smith
But in this 1942 memo, Szilard did a great deal more than just kvetch. He also demonstrated once again the depth of his thinking on the implications of atomic energy. Writing weeks before the world’s first atomic pile went critical in Chicago, he called for all the scientists on the project to devote ‘more thought to the ultimate political necessities which will arise out of our present work’.37 With a dig at the johnny-come-latelys in Washington, many of whom had once dismissed his idea of atomic energy as science fiction, Szilard began by saying that ‘these lines are primarily addressed to those with whom I have shared for years the knowledge that it is within our power to construct atomic bombs’. Ominously, he predicted that such bombs ‘will bring disaster upon the world’. ‘We cannot have peace’, Szilard told his colleagues,
in a world in which various sovereign nations have atomic bombs in the possession of their armies and any of these armies could win a war within twenty-four hours after it starts one. One has to visualize a world in which a lone airplane could appear over a big city like Chicago, drop his bomb, and thereby destroy the city in a single flash. Not one house may be left standing and the radioactive substances scattered by the bomb may make the area uninhabitable for some time to come.38
Szilard looked into the future and saw that the fears of science fiction writers would soon be realized. In that future lay the nightmare of a single aircraft appearing far above a city, carrying a weapon that could annihilate the whole metropolis. Both H. G. Wells and Jack London had fantasized about this prospect at the beginning of the century. In Arthur Train and Robert Williams Wood’s The Man Who Rocked the Earth, their saviour scientist, Pax, also used airpower to force the world to acknowledge that ‘either war or the human race must pass away forever’.39 That moment was fast approaching. Szilard saw clearly the dangers that faced a world armed with superweapons yet divided by fear and mutual distrust. More than any other scientist at this time, he believed that he and his colleagues had a special responsibility to show the politicians that there was a more important prize to be won than being the first nation to own a superbomb. Soon every physicist around the world would be able to master the science of the atomic bomb. Then the real prize – peace – would be lost.
‘Those who have originated the work on this terrible weapon,’ wrote Szilard, ‘and those who have materially contributed to its development, have, before God and the World, the duty to see to it that it should be ready to be used at the proper time and in the proper way.’40 It was a powerful reminder to the scientists of their responsibilities as human beings. But, once again, no one was listening to Szilard’s warnings. Far from having a greater say in how the bomb was to be used, the scientists would become ever more distanced from the results of their labour. Despite inventing the world’s most powerful weapon, the saviour scientist would soon be powerless. He or she would become a mere cog in a military machine.
A few days before Szilard wrote those words, on 17 September 1942, the army had taken control of the S-1 project. On 23 September, the 46-year-old military engineer Leslie R. Groves was promoted to brigadier general and officially took command of the secret project known to the army as the Manhattan Engineer District. According to a colleague, he was ‘the biggest sonovabitch I’ve ever met in my life, but also one of the most capable individuals’.41 The man who had just overseen the construction of the Pentagon was ruthless, arrogant and rude. But he was also efficient and indefatigable. If anyone could build the bomb and keep the long-hairs in line, General Groves could.
Groves visited the Met Lab on 5 October. As far as Szilard was concerned, it was hostility at first sight. ‘How can you work with people like that?’ he asked after meeting Groves.42 There would be open warfare between the two men until the Manhattan Project had achieved its goal. Then Groves finally succeeded in doing what he had wanted to do from day one: he had Szilard excluded from official research on atomic energy.
Groves never trusted Szilard, the one scientist who did most to push America into building the atomic bomb. ‘Groves thought Szilard was the perfect spy’, said fellow Met Lab scientist Samuel K. Allison.43 Szilard had a ‘German’ accent, erratic movement patterns, and he never missed an opportunity to challenge authority. On one occasion Groves even drafted an order for Szilard’s immediate arrest and internment as an enemy alien. Fortunately, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson refused to sign it. Later, in 1963, Groves remarked bitterly that ‘few enemies were causing us as much trouble’ as Leo Szilard.44
Groves had Szilard placed under round-the-clock surveillance. An Army Counterintelligence report from 24 June 1943 provides a wonderful snapshot of the eccentric and, to the military, suspiciously foreign scientist:
Subject is of Jewish extraction, has a fondness for delicacies and frequently makes purchases in delicatessen stores, usually eats his breakfast in drug stores and other meals in restaurants, walks a great deal when he cannot secure a taxi, usually is shaved in a barber shop, speaks occasionally in a foreign tongue, and associates mostly with people of Jewish extraction. He is inclined to be rather absent minded and eccentric, and will start out a door, turn around and come back, go out on the street without his coat or hat and frequently looks up and down the street as if he were watching for someone or did not know for sure where he wanted to go.45
Leo Szilard had experienced the secret police in Hungary and Germany. Now, in the land of the free, he encountered them again. For scientists it was the dawn of a new era of collaboration with the military. From now on they would have to become accustomed to working beneath the dark veil of secrecy. Once hailed as saviours, scientists were now – as Princeton physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth said in 1951 – reduced to being little more than ‘tools of war’.46
15
Devil’s Work
It’s devil’s work. But suppose other devils make it first?
Pearl S. Buck, Command the Morning (1959)
1942 was the year in which atomic energy became a reality. On a cold squash court at the University of Chicago on 2 December, Leo Szilard’s dream of releasing the power locked inside the atom came true. As the pen of the chart recorder showing neutron production in the heart of the atomic pile rose sharply off the measurable scale, Szilard turned to Enrico Fermi and said that it was a ‘black day’ in human history. Even the sceptical Fermi now knew that they had taken the first step on the road to the atomic bomb. It was the crucial experiment that demonstrated to the last remaining sceptics that the chain reaction was not just theory, and that atomic energy was not mere moonshine.
The names of both Fermi and Szilard appeared in the 1955 US Government patent as the inventors of the nuclear reactor. The two men had a rather stormy relationship. More than once Fermi refused to speak to his unorthodox Hungarian colleague. Fermi, the great experimentalist, quickly lost patience with Szilard’s off-the-wall insights and ingenious inventions. Like Rutherford, Fermi saw himself as a pure scientist who did not need to worry about politics or how his ideas might be used or abused. For him, knowledge was its own reward; for Szilard it was merely the beginning.
In July 1942, Hans Bethe called on Edward Teller at the Met Lab. Both men had been invited to attend a gathering of top physicists in Berkeley. Before they left Chicago, Teller took Bethe to see the atomic pile being constructed on the squash court beneath Stagg Field Stadium. When he saw the ‘tremendous stacks of graphite’, Bethe finally ‘became convinced that the atomic-bomb project was real, and that it would probably work’.1 Until then, Bethe had distanced himself from work on the atomic bomb. Instead, he had agreed to start work at MIT on radar, believing that this would have a more immediate impact on the course of the war.
On the train to California, Bethe and Teller discussed the plans to build a plutonium fission bomb. Bethe recalls that Teller regarded its success as a certainty, so much so that he had already moved on to the next generation of nuclear weapons – the hydrogen bomb. Talking in German, they brainstormed about ways of using the unimaginable temperature
s generated by a fission bomb to ignite Harold Urey’s 1932 discovery, deuterium.
The Berkeley meeting had been organized by the 38-year-old J. Robert Oppenheimer, a tall, chain-smoking theoretical physicist with a love of Sanskrit and poetry. The elite group of physicists who met that summer shared Teller’s view that the fission bomb was a foregone conclusion. All that remained was to hammer out the technicalities. Instead, the theoreticians focused their combined brainpower on fusion. They spent most of their time discussing how to build what they termed the ‘Super’ – a hydrogen bomb.
Some frightening theoretical possibilities emerged during the Berkeley brainstorming sessions. On paper, the Super seemed attractive as a weapon. Obtaining deuterium was far more straightforward and less costly than either separating uranium-235 or manufacturing plutonium. Fission is when a heavy nucleus splits into two smaller nuclei, sometimes liberating enough neutrons to propagate a fission chain reaction. Fusion, by contrast, takes place between elements towards the top of the periodic table: two light nuclei are forced together to form a new nucleus, plus a free neutron. As with fission, loss of mass releases energy. Theoretically, the size of a thermonuclear fusion bomb is unlimited, as the fuel for the bomb (deuterium or heavy hydrogen) can be increased to any quantity. In 1942, the physicists calculated that every pound of deuterium was the equivalent of nearly 40,000 tons of chemical explosive. As its name suggested, the Super would be vastly more devastating than even the fission bomb. It was a true superweapon.
When he went to meet to Arthur Compton to report on the progress they had made, Oppenheimer also mentioned a theoretical risk that their freewheeling discussions had thrown up. ‘I’ll never forget that morning,’ recalled Compton, who was on holiday in an idyllic lakeside cottage in northern Michigan. Oppenheimer explained that they had been working on the Super, but that during their discussions Teller had calmly revealed the possibility that a fission bomb might trigger a thermonuclear chain reaction, not just in deuterium, but in other naturally occurring elements.
Compton was appalled. ‘Was there really any chance that an atomic bomb would trigger the explosion of the nitrogen in the atmosphere or of the hydrogen in the ocean?’ he wrote, looking back on that day. ‘This would be the ultimate catastrophe. Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind!’ Compton sent Oppenheimer straight back to Berkeley with instructions to find ‘a firm and reliable conclusion that our atomic bombs could not explode the air or the sea’.2
Despite the threat of an atomic doomsday, something both Rutherford and Pierre Curie had thought possible, the physicists at Berkeley all felt that the conference had gone well. For Teller, it was the first time he had worked with ‘Oppie’, as Oppenheimer was known to his colleagues. It was after this meeting that Teller learned that there was to be a separate laboratory where the bomb would be designed and built. The results of Oppenheimer’s summer conference also greatly impressed both Vannevar Bush and James Conant. They knew now that the atomic bomb, and potentially the hydrogen bomb, could be decisive in this war and in future wars. The superweapon was no longer merely a dream.
In June, the month before Oppenheimer’s conference, another crucial meeting took place – at Harnack House in Dahlem, Berlin, where Leo Szilard had lived during his final weeks in Germany. Hitler’s military met with Germany’s leading atomic scientists to discuss building an atomic bomb. Werner von Heisenberg gave a lecture on their research to Armaments Minister Albert Speer and his colleagues. The physicist Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker – identified in Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt as a crucial figure in any Nazi bomb project – had suggested as early as 1940 that a reactor could be used to create a new fissionable element that would be ideal for an ‘atomic explosive’.3 Heisenberg told the Nazi top brass that, ‘Given the positive results achieved up until now it does not appear impossible that, once a uranium burner [reactor] has been constructed, we will one day be able to follow the path revealed by von Weizsäcker to explosives that are more than a million times more effective than those currently available.’4
At the June meeting it was agreed that Heisenberg and his team would now focus their energies on building a reactor, both as a power source and to create plutonium for bombs. Unknown to the Germans, within six months Fermi and Szilard at Chicago would build such a reactor. The German scientists, their efforts divided between at least four competing research groups, never managed to design a reactor capable of going critical.
Adolf Hitler was deeply sceptical about the dream of atomic energy. When Albert Speer reported back on Heisenberg’s research, the Führer remarked that ‘the scientists in their unworldly urge to lay bare all the secrets under heaven might some day set the globe on fire’.5 Ironically, at that very moment in California, physicists were indeed calculating the likelihood of just such an outcome. If he was unimpressed by the prospect of atomic bombs, Hitler was much more enthusiastic about Wernher von Braun’s deadly brainchild. According to Hitler, the V-2 was ‘revolutionary for the conduct of warfare in the whole world’ and he demanded that the Army manufacture hundreds of thousands of the missiles.6 It was an impossible goal, but hundreds of millions of Reichmarks were ploughed into the project.
The V-2, the world’s first ballistic missile, was successful launched on 3 October 1942. It broke the sound barrier and reached an altitude of sixty miles. This was the first time that a rocket had reached the edge of space. In the words of one historian, the V-2 ‘must be considered the greatest technological achievement of the Third Reich’.7 Two months later, as the Chicago scientists achieved the world’s first atomic chain reaction, Speer prioritized mass production of the missile.
A V-2 rocket being prepared for launch at Cuxhaven, Germany, 1945. This photograph was taken in the months after the fall of Nazi Germany during Operation Backfire, organized by the British to evaluate the V-2 rocket system. Eight complete rockets were assembled, three of which were launched, with the assistance of captured German firing troops and rocket scientists.
After the war, Wernher von Braun and his team of 126 scientists and engineers, having chosen to surrender to the Americans rather than the Russians, were whisked away to Fort Bliss, Texas. Here they would lay the foundations for the Apollo space project and the intercontinental ballistic missile, the technology that from the 1960s would threaten the world with apocalypse at the push of a button. For many, von Braun embodied the dark side of the scientific quest for new frontiers, regardless of the human cost. In the words of Tom Lehrer’s song:
‘Once the rockets are up,
who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department,’
says Wernher von Braun.8
In the 1930s and 40s, thousands of lives were sacrificed perfecting the lethal technologies of both Shiro Ishii, the Japanese microbiologist who tested bioweapons on Chinese prisoners, and Wernher von Braun, whose missiles were built by slave labourers. But in the cold war such unsavoury histories were ignored. For Carl Sagan, von Braun personified the ‘dread ambiguity’ of science and technology in the modern world. His rocket, said Sagan, ‘will prove to be either the means of mass annihilation through a global thermonuclear war or the means that will carry us to the planets and the stars’.9
It was this ambiguity that also resulted in Einstein and Szilard’s design for a safe refrigerator pump being used in breeder reactors to produce plutonium for nuclear bombs. Technology intended to save lives as well as so-called pure science could also be exploited. As Aldous Huxley argued, the much vaunted ‘purity’ of science is often short lived: ‘Pure science does not remain pure indefinitely. Sooner or later it is apt to turn into applied science and finally into technology. Theory modulates into industrial practice, knowledge becomes power, formulas and laboratory experiments undergo a metamorphosis, and emerge as the H-bomb.’10
It was General Groves who personally appointed Robert Oppenheimer to head Site Y, as the secret atomic bomb laborator
y was known. They met for the first time two days after the V-2 first took to the skies, on 5 October, when Groves introduced himself to the Met Lab scientists. Within a fortnight Groves had offered him the job. As physicist and biographer Jeremy Bernstein says, Oppenheimer was an unlikely choice for director of the lab: ‘He was an aesthete who read poetry in several languages, and he had a ton of left-wing baggage.’ But Groves took an instant liking to Oppenheimer. In particular, he liked the fact that Oppenheimer didn’t (as he put it) ‘tell me what to do’.11
Groves had not wanted the job of running the Manhattan Project. He was a no-nonsense army engineer who was sick of being a desk jockey. Managing a bunch of scientific ‘prima donnas’ was not how he had intended to spend the war.12 The last thing he wanted was an awkward customer, like Szilard, heading up the bomb lab, challenging his every decision. Oppenheimer was ideal for the job, thought Groves, despite his dubious political views. ‘He’s a genius. A real genius,’ said Groves later. ‘Why, Oppenheimer knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up. Well, not exactly. I guess there are a few things he doesn’t know about. He doesn’t know anything about sports.’13