Pandora's Keepers

by Brian Van DeMark

  “We both wanted to be conservative,” Szilard noted, “but Fermi thought that the conservative thing was to play down the possibility that this may happen, and I thought the conservative thing was to assume that it would happen and take the necessary precautions.” 42

  Szilard grew increasingly frantic that spring the more he thought about fission. For weeks he rushed about the Columbia University labs and faculty offices, bearing witness to the great and dreadful events he foresaw. He was anxious—almost desperate—to prove or disprove a chain reaction. Half in hope and half in fear, he set up an experiment on the night of March third. The setting was the vaultlike laboratory on the seventh floor of Pupin. The experiment was designed to reveal pulses on an oscilloscope that could be expected from the neutrons of split uranium atoms. All Szilard had to do was flip a switch and watch the oscilloscope screen. If pulses appeared on the screen, it would mean that secondary neutrons were emitted in the fission of uranium—and that would confirm a chain reaction.

  Szilard flipped the switch, saw the dreaded pulses, and watched them for several minutes with mounting horror. Then he flipped off the switch and walked back in silence to his hotel. “That night,” Szilard later recalled, “there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief.” 43

  CHAPTER 2

  The Gathering Storm

  THE SAME NIGHT that Szilard conducted his experiment at Columbia University proving a chain reaction, he phoned Edward Teller with the ominous news. Teller remembered the moment vividly many years later. “I was at the piano, attempting with the collaboration of a friend and his violin to make Mozart sound like Mozart, when the telephone rang. It was Szilard, calling from New York. He spoke to me in Hungarian, and he said only one thing: ‘I have found the neutrons,’” and hung up. 1 Teller understood just what Szilard’s laconic message meant. And he shared Szilard’s sense of dread. “All my worries about nuclear energy—the full realization that it was coming, and coming very soon, and that it would be very dangerous” was clear to Teller. “My sleep that night was uneasy,” he recalled. 2

  Teller’s sense of foreboding had been building for years. When he arrived at the University of Göttingen in 1930, he saw the goose-stepping, the torchlight parades, the pagan rallies, and found them barbaric rituals unworthy of a cultured people. He saw the critical faculty of Germans being swept away in an emotional frenzy, and every hateful lie that Hitler shouted being accepted as Truth itself. How could this happen? A few Germans were troubled, they admitted to Teller—but what could they do? It was not a question that many Germans asked, or answered. The Nazis’ virulent anti-Semitism also bothered Teller. For most German Jews, it came as a terrible shock. They could not grasp how such a thing could happen in an advanced society in the heart of Europe in the twentieth century. Teller, a Hungarian Jew, knew better. What was happening in Germany was an uncomfortable reminder of what he had left behind in his native land.

  Teller, like Szilard, had been born in turn-of-the-century Budapest. His father, Max, was a lawyer and associate editor of the major law journal of Hungary who worked from a spacious office apartment on the east embankment of the Danube near the Parliament Building. A quiet and reserved man, Max Teller did all the routine work on the law journal while the chief editor added the flair. His son’s own later style, avoiding routine work and constantly offering original ideas, may have been an unconscious reaction against the tedium of his father’s life. From his mother, Ilona, Teller inherited a moody temperament and a tendency to worry, though his worries were uniquely his own. As a young boy, he had such a terrible fear of the dark that, until he was seven, his parents always left a light on in his bedroom at night. When the light went out, he worked math problems to help cope with his fear of the dark. The consistency of numbers made him feel safe.

  As a schoolboy, Teller annoyed his teachers and classmates with his self-concern and self-assurance even as he awed them with his brilliance. He was opinionated and always eager to show that he knew more than others. Classmates who resented this behavior bullied him as he walked to and from school. His governess later recalled that all he would say was, “I’m working on a plan.” 3 After getting a longer strap for his books, Teller, when approached by the gang, whirled his books around him and was never bothered again. It was an early example of defense through a cunning weapon. The bullying engendered in Teller a lifelong sense of being embattled, besieged, alone in a struggle against his enemies. Sensitive but deeply insecure, he took refuge at the family piano, losing himself for hours playing Mozart and Beethoven sonatas with great feeling. Teller also sought escape in the novels of Jules Verne, which carried him into the exciting and imaginative world of science fiction.

  The revolutionary turmoil that swept post—World War I Europe hit Budapest when Teller was an impressionable adolescent. He witnessed political violence in the streets from the window of his bedroom. One day walking home from school, he saw a poster of a stern man with an outstretched arm whose large fingertip seemed pointed right at him, warning: “You, hiding in the shadows, you counterrevolutionary, TREMBLE.” He did.

  When the communists briefly took over Hungary in 1919, Teller’s father was labeled a capitalist and the family became social outcasts. Communist soldiers requisitioned the Teller apartment as “bourgeois excess” and terrorized the family by urinating on houseplants and scrounging for money, which Max had hidden in the lining of his law books. This terrifying ordeal was the eleven-year-old Teller’s first taste of communism, and it fed into his preexisting fear of Russia, the great looming presence to the east. “When I misbehaved when I was a small boy,” he remembered, “my grandmother told me, ‘If you don’t behave, the Russians will get you.’” 4 Her threat, and the haunting image it evoked, resonated and would stay with Teller all his life.

  Max Teller told his son that the Hungarian Soviet would eventually fail and that anti-Semitism would follow. “Too many of the communist leaders are Jews,” he explained, “and all the Jews will be blamed for their excesses.” 5 It was a sadly accurate prediction. In the fall of 1919 fascists swept to power in Budapest. Red Terror gave way to White Terror—an especially cruel trap for the Jewish middle class. They never had any use for the Commune, and yet now they became the scapegoats of the fascists. They were publicly vilified and denied access to certain professions, such as law, medicine, and education. For the first time, Teller tasted the bitterness of persecution.

  Max Teller pressed two lessons on his son: he would have to leave Hungary, and as a Jew, he would always have to excel just to survive. Edward added two lessons of his own. One was his already deep and abiding anticommunism. The other was a practical view of what a science could do for him. “I loved science,” he later said, “but it also offered a possibility for escaping this doomed society.” 6 In this, he meant more than just Hungary. Science was a way for Teller to hold his own in a hostile world.

  He took these experiences and emotions with him when he left to study in Germany, just weeks before his eighteenth birthday. Teller did work at Karlsruhe, Munich, and Leipzig, where his mentor was Werner Heisenberg. From Leipzig, Teller went to Göttingen, where for the first time he suffered taunts from Nazi students. A Göttingen administrator made plain the danger that he faced. “I would like to help you,” the administrator told him, “but you have no future in Germany.” 7 The comment shocked Teller, but he took the hint. He emigrated to Britain and took up a temporary lectureship at the University of London, then won a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to study with Bohr in Copenhagen. The terms of the award prohibited marriage during the fellowship, but Teller decided to wed his childhood sweetheart, Mici Harkanyi, anyway. (What Edward Teller wanted, he pursued—whatever the rules.) After a year in Copenhagen, he was offered a tenured position at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Quantum mechanics was still a new discipline, and Teller was one of perhaps a hundred theoretical physicists in the world well educated in the subject.

 
Teller left for the United States at the beginning of 1935. He traveled aboard a ship from Southampton to New York. The gentle rocking of the ship induced Teller to meditation. He felt suspended between two worlds, not yet in a country where his future was uncertain, yet forced to leave a continent that was no longer home. Never before had Teller so powerfully felt a sense of exile.

  Also aboard the ship was Hans Bethe, another refugee physicist forced to leave Germany, headed to Cornell University. Teller and Bethe shared much in common: Jewish roots, the impact on their lives of rising political extremism, the unsuccessful attempt to keep physics above politics, the maelstrom of Nazism. They were unsure what awaited them in America. Anxious about the fate of their families and friends back in Europe, they were in acute need of emotional, professional, and financial support. They found all these things in their adopted country. Like Szilard, both quickly came to love the United States for its embrace of immigrants. “I am speaking English with an accent, but in no other country have I been told that my accent is charming!” Teller reported to longtime friends back in Europe. “I am praised for mispronouncing the language!” 8

  The state of American physics was also quite advantageous for newcomers. Experimental nuclear physics was developing rapidly, with experimental results outrunning theory. For a theoretician like Teller, such a situation was made to order. In Europe, Teller—for all his ability—had worked in the shadow of older, more established physicists. In America he was his own man with his own graduate students. These advantages, combined with his awareness of his own intellectual gifts, rapidly gave Teller a brash self-assurance that made him a commanding teacher at George Washington University. His physical presence helped: intense, sad gray eyes stared out from under thick black eyebrows. And he was an impressive speaker, his pauses powerful, his words great blocks of stone laid down one by one. If he sensed he was losing his students’ attention, his stentorian voice would go down—not up.

  Dramatic and passionate, forceful and egotistical, gregarious and clever, Teller could be irresistibly charming—when it suited his purposes. On such occasions he was a brilliant raconteur with a perfect sense of timing who told good stories and listened attentively to others. Yet coexisting with this warm, charming, vulnerable, and idealistic Teller, there was an alternative Teller, who was melancholy and whose gusto for life was offset by bouts of dark brooding during which he could be bullying, aggressive, devious, intolerant, resentful, vengeful, and self-absorbed. This Teller, when tense, was liable to take a route of no-holds-barred aggression that could include a full-blooded tirade against his opponents, real and imagined. And even when in a good mood, he would always exaggerate the gap between himself and his critics. There was always something angry about the energy and intensity with which he pursued an argument, an unremitting fierce tight focus, like a flame, that put observers in mind of a blowtorch.

  People were amazed by Teller’s stamina in dispute. Marvelously argumentative, never tired, he possessed a singularity of purpose that brooked no diversion. Given this propensity, it might come as a surprise that Teller kept any friends—but he did. Yet the role of former friends was, in comparison, endless, all of them guilty of making an objection to some aspect of Teller’s work, no matter how mild or constructive in spirit. The general rule was: once exiled, exiled forever. Even détente was unthinkable. Onlookers were left openmouthed at the ferocity of the rows and the intensity of the rejections.

  Uncomplicated and genuine at one moment, an aggressive salesman driven to impress at the next, slyly political and naive, he was a complex and moody man who remained scarred by political upheaval. Such experience had made Teller an insecure pessimist. Like Szilard or Fermi or Bethe, he loved America, but he was never a happy exile, never able to live from day to day, and the fate of his family—whom he did not know how to protect—in Europe caused him much anxiety and suffering. Conflicts born of such frustrations would embitter Teller for the rest of his life.

  The morning after Szilard phoned Teller with the news about neutrons, he took the train from New York to Washington. Teller picked him up at Union Station in the shadow of the Capitol, and they drove to Teller’s home on Garfield Street in leafy Northwest Washington. There they talked in Hungarian, long into the night, about fission and a chain reaction. Szilard told Teller it was crucial for fission research to remain secret in order to keep it out of the hands of the Nazis. He understood that science was advanced through the free exchange of ideas and that many refugees like himself had left Germany precisely because the Nazis had censored intellectual inquiry, but Szilard saw war coming and feared that atomic bombs would decide the outcome. Teller agreed.

  Szilard felt so strongly about this issue that he decided to lobby Niels Bohr as well. If he could convince Bohr to swing his prestige behind secrecy, then the campaign to hinder German atomic research might succeed. On March 16, 1939, Szilard and Teller went to see Bohr at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. That same evening the radio broadcast ominous news that Hitler had sent German troops into Prague, violating the promise to respect Czech independence he had made to the leaders of Britain and France at the Munich Conference just six months earlier. Awakened at last to Hitler’s duplicity, Britain and France now issued guarantees to Poland, next on Hitler’s list, and began to rearm furiously. And there was this: Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia had some of the world’s richest uranium deposits.

  The news only confirmed the two Hungarians in their advocacy of secrecy, but Bohr disagreed vehemently. “Openness is the basic condition necessary for science,” he scolded them. “It should not be tampered with.” 9 Physics was an international discipline. The good physicist reported his results so that other physicists could scrutinize them and correct errors. Secrecy would subvert openness and subordinate physics to national competition, substituting petty rivalry for progress.

  Bohr also thought Szilard and Teller were being unduly alarmist. Bohr continued to believe that separating U-235 from U-238 and accumulating enough of the U-235 isotope to make a bomb would require a staggering—well-nigh impossible—engineering effort. “You would have to turn the entire country into a factory,” Bohr told them. 10 He estimated that an isotope separation factory would have to operate twenty-four hours a day for ten days to produce only a billionth of a gram of U-235. At that rate, it would take 26, 445 years to produce one gram. To Bohr, the conclusion was simple and inescapable: U-235 was, thankfully, not a practical source for atomic bombs.

  As Bohr’s time in Princeton came to an end, colleagues urged him to send for his family and remain in the States—any university position in the country was his for the asking. Bohr certainly saw the handwriting on the wall—that war was imminent—but turned down all invitations to stay because of his loyalty to Denmark. He had to return home, Bohr felt, in order to protect his institute and keep its doors open as a haven for scientists fleeing Nazi persecution. “We are aware that a catastrophe might come any day,” he wrote a friend in America after his arrival back in Copenhagen. 11 But still he refused to leave home.

  Szilard had concluded that fission was deadly serious business and that physicists could no longer handle it alone. They had to share their knowledge and concerns with the U.S. government—the stakes were simply too big and too grave. In Szilard’s mind, the question now was not whether to notify Washington, but how. He approached the chairman of Columbia’s physics department, George Pegram, with his concerns. Pegram had followed Szilard’s and Fermi’s experiments and agreed that the time had come to notify the government. He mentioned a contact he had in the Navy Department in Washington. Pegram and Szilard asked Fermi to see this contact during an upcoming trip he had planned to Washington.

  Fermi had spent his first months in America adjusting to his adopted country. He strove to master the plainsong of American speech and the nuances of American culture—all with a sunny disposition and modest manner. He made a deal with his students: if they corrected his English and taught him Americanis
ms, he would teach them physics. He and his wife, Laura, bought a house in Leonia, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Columbia University. Working at night, they dug a hole in the basement, where they buried his remaining Nobel Prize money as a precaution against the chance that it might be taken away from them as enemy aliens in the event of a war.

  On March seventeenth Fermi took the train to Washington and called on Admiral Stanford Hooper, technical assistant to the chief of naval operations, at the Navy Department building on the Mall near the White House. “There’s a WOP outside,” said a lieutenant loud enough for Fermi to hear, rudely foreshadowing the puzzled indifference of the admiral he was about to see. Fermi affected nonchalance, but inside he was fuming. When Fermi was let in to see Hooper, he handed the admiral a letter of introduction from Pegram that described the physicists’ discoveries and their implications:

  Experiments in the physics laboratories at Columbia University reveal that conditions may be found under which the chemical element uranium may be able to liberate its large excess of atomic energy, and that this might mean the possibility that uranium might be used as an explosive that would liberate a million times as much energy per pound as any known explosive. My own feeling is that the probabilities are against this, but my colleagues and I think that the bare possibility should not be disregarded. 12