Groves had prepared drastic action indeed. On the stationery of the Office of the Chief of Engineers, over a signature block reserved for the Secretary of War, he had drafted a letter to the U.S. Attorney General calling Leo Szilard an “enemy alien” and proposing that he “be interned for the duration of the war.”1918 Compton’s telegram forestalled an ugly arrest and the letter was never signed or sent.1919
But the incident raised the issue of Szilard’s loyalty and prejudiced Groves implacably against him. Szilard responded forthrightly; he assembled a large collection of documents from the 1939–40 period demonstrating his part in carrying the news of fission to Franklin Roosevelt and, pointedly, his efforts to enforce voluntary secrecy among physicists in the United States, Britain and France. Compton, waffling, sent the documents to Groves in mid-November with an implicit endorsement of Szilard’s stand. The first Groves-Szilard confrontation thus ended in stalemate. Szilard saw how much raw power Groves commanded. Groves learned how deep were Szilard’s roots in the evolution of atomic energy research and perhaps also that men he considered vital to the project—Fermi, Teller, Wigner—were Szilard colleagues of long standing and would have to be taken into account.
As political dissidents have done in the Soviet Union, Szilard embarked next on a careful campaign to negotiate changes by insisting meticulously on the enforcement of his legal rights. His opening sally came December 4, two days after Fermi proved the chain reaction. In a quiet memorandum to Arthur Compton he noted that the official responsible for handling NDRC patents had requested patent applications “for inventions relating to the chain reaction.” That raised the question, Szilard wrote, of how to deal with inventions “made and disclosed before we had the benefit of the financial support of the government.”1920 He and Fermi would be glad to file a joint application, but only if they could be sure they retained their rights to their earlier separate inventions. The memorandum continues in this straightforward style until its final paragraph, which throws down the gauntlet:
My present request clearly represents a change of [my] attitude with respect to patents on the uranium work, and I would appreciate an opportunity to explain to you and also to the government agency which may be involved, my reasons for it.
Previously Szilard had believed he would have equal voice in fission development. Since he had now been compartmentalized, his freedom of speech restrained, his loyalty challenged, he was prepared to actuate the only leverage at hand, his legal right to his inventions.
Compton sent Szilard’s request to Lyman Briggs, whose responsibilities within the OSRD included patent matters; Briggs thought the Army ought to handle it.1921 Szilard waited until the end of December, heard nothing and advanced further into the field. In a second memorandum he told Compton he wanted to apply for a patent on “the basic inventions which underlie our work on the chain reaction on unseparated uranium . . . which were made before government support for this research was forthcoming.”1922 The patent could be registered in his name alone or jointly with Fermi; he would be willing “to assign this patent at this time to the government for such financial compensation as may be deemed fair and equitable.” The memorandum mentions no amount; according to Army security files Szilard asked for $750,000.1923 But the issue was not compensation; the issue was representation:
I wish to take this opportunity to mention that the question of patents was discussed by those who were concerned in 1939 and 1940. At that time it was proposed by the scientists that a government corporation should be formed which would look after the development of this field and . . . be the recipient of the patents. It was assumed that the scientists would have adequate representation within this government owned corporation. . . .
In the absence of such a government owned corporation in which the scientists can exert their influence on the use of funds, I do not now propose to assign to the government, without equitable compensation, patents covering the basic inventions.
Burdened by Manhattan Project security, with Du Pont taking over plutonium production and the Army moving hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of earth in unprecedented construction, Leo Szilard was advancing singlehandedly to attempt to extricate the process of decision from governmental restraints and to return it to the hands of the atomic scientists.
Compton understood the extent of the challenge. He sent Szilard’s two memoranda directly to Conant, whose office received them on January 11, 1943. “Szilard’s case is perhaps unique,” Compton wrote the NDRC chairman, “in that for a number of years the development of this project has continuously occupied his primary attention. . . . There is no doubt that he is among the few to whom the United States Government can look for establishing basic claims for invention. The matter is thus one of real importance to our Government.”1924
Before Washington could respond Szilard had to fight off a harassing attack from the flank. It strengthened his resolve. He discovered that a French patent filed originally by Frédéric Joliot’s group had been published in Australia and he and Fermi had missed the deadline for filing challenges. Some of their claims overlapped the French work. “This is, I am afraid, an irreparable loss,” he told Compton. He had now started writing down his own inventions, he said, and hoped to file a number of patents in the near future. Until he had done so he wanted to be removed from the payroll of the University of Chicago to avoid legal complications. In the meantime he would toil on once again as a free volunteer: “It would not be my intention to interrupt or slow down the work which I am doing in the laboratory at present.”1925
Conant bumped Compton’s letter up to Bush, who answered it personally and to the point with Yankee canniness. Inventions scientists made after joining the project belonged to the project, Bush told Compton; unless Szilard had disclosed his previous inventions to the University of Chicago at the time of his employment he had only a very short leg to stand on, if any at all. Genially the OSRD director outlined the proper legal procedure for secret patent filings and then kicked at the leg Szilard had left: “It is my understanding that none of this procedure has been gone through with in the case of Dr. Szilard.” Bush either did not understand or chose to misunderstand Szilard’s idea of an autonomous organization of scientists to guide nuclear energy development: “I gather that Dr. Szilard is particularly anxious that the proceeds arising from his early activity in invention in this field, if such eventuate, should in some way become available for the furtherance of scientific research.”1926 He thought that was admirable, but he also thought it had nothing to do with the government. Nor did he intend that it should.
By the time Bush’s letter reached Compton the Met Lab director had gone another round with Szilard. Szilard asked for a raise based upon the value to the project of his inventions. Compton took the position that Szilard had signed over all his rights to his inventions to the government for as long as he was in the government’s employ. Szilard would not sign a renewal contract under those terms. Trying to keep him aboard, Compton proposed raising his salary from $550 to $1,000 a month on the basis that the higher level was “comparable with the other original sponsors of this project, Messrs. Fermi and Wigner.”1927 That might have been acceptable to Szilard, since it tacitly acknowledged the special worth of the three physicists’ participation, including presumably their early inventions, but Compton had to clear it with Conant. Until the arrangement was cleared and a new contract signed Szilard would remain off the payroll.
Compton reported Bush’s response to Szilard in late March. There matters stood until early May, when Szilard with restrained exasperation proposed to proceed with filing patent applications. He asked that Groves designate someone to act as his legal adviser. The Army general supplied a Navy captain, Robert A. Lavender, who was attached to the OSRD in Washington, and Szilard met frequently with Lavender in the spring and early summer to discuss his claims.
Somewhere along the way Groves put Szilard under surveillance. The brigadier still harbored the incredible notion that
Leo Szilard might be a German agent. The surveillance was already months old in mid-June when the MED’s security office suggested discontinuing it. Groves rejected the suggestion out of hand: “The investigation of Szilard should be continued despite the barrenness of the results. One letter or phone call once in three months would be sufficient for the passing of vital information and until we know for certain that he is 100% reliable we cannot entirely disregard this person.”1928 He apparently equated disagreement with disloyalty and scaled the ratio of the two conditions directly: anyone who caused him as much pain as Leo Szilard must be a spy. It followed that he ought to be watched.
The surveillance of an innocent but eccentric man makes gumshoe comedy. Szilard traveled to Washington on June 20, 1943, and in preparation for the visit an Army counterintelligence agent reviewed his file:
The surveillance reports indicate that 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.1929 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.
Armed with these profundities a Washington agent observed the Subject arriving at the Wardman Park Hotel at 2030 hours—8:30 P.M.—on June 20 and composed a contemporary portrait:
Age, 35 or 40 yrs; height, 5’6”; weight, 165 lbs; medium build; florid complexion; bushy brown hair combed straight back and inclined to be curly, slight limp in right leg causing droop in right shoulder and receding forehead. He was wearing brown suit, brown shoes, white shirt, red tie and no hat.1930
Szilard worked the next morning at the Carnegie Institution with Captain Lavender. Wigner arrived at the Wardman Park for an overnight stay (“Mr. Wigner is approximately 40 years of age, medium build, bald head, Jewish features and was conservatively dressed”) and the two Hungarians, both of them presumably with justice on their minds, went off for a tour of the Supreme Court (the cabbie “said that they did not talk in a foreign tongue and there was nothing in their conversation to attract his attention. . . .1931 He said they more or less gave him the impression that they were ‘on a lark’ ” ). In the evening they sat “on a bench by the [hotel] tennis courts where both pulled off their coats, rolled up their sleeves and talked in a foreign language for some time.”
Wigner checked out early in the morning; Szilard took a cab to the Navy Building at 17th and Constitution Avenue, “entered the reception room . . . and told one of the ladies that he wished to see Commander Lewis Strauss about personal business. He stated that he had an appointment. . . . He also told the lady that he was a friend of Commander Strauss’ and was interested in getting into a branch of the Navy.” The Naval Research Laboratory had continued work on nuclear power for submarine propulsion independently of the Manhattan Project and that institution may have been the one Szilard had in mind. Or he may have been practicing misdirection. Strauss took him to lunch at the Metropolitan Club and apparently discouraged him from transferring; back at his hotel he wired Gertrud Weiss that he expected to arrive at the King’s Crown at 8:30 P.M. and left that afternoon for New York.
Since he worked for Vannevar Bush, Lavender was hardly a disinterested consultant; when he met again with Szilard on July 14 he informed the physicist that his documents “failed to disclose an operable pile,” meaning that in his opinion Szilard could not claim a patentable invention.1932 (Ten years after the end of the war Szilard and Fermi won a joint patent for their invention of the nuclear reactor.) Szilard realized then, if not before, that he needed private counsel and asked that an attorney who could act in his behalf be cleared.
The battle was almost decided. Szilard retreated to New York. He negotiated now not only with Lavender but with Army Lieutenant Colonel John Landsdale, Jr., Groves’ chief of security. In an October 9 letter to Szilard, Groves summed up the blunt exchange over which the three men bargained: “You were assured [by Lavender and Landsdale] that as soon as you were able to convey full rights [to any inventions made prior to government employment], negotiations would be entered into with a view to acquisition by the Government of any rights you may have and your reemployment on Government contracts. . . . I repeat this assurance.”1933 That is, Szilard could trade his patent rights, if any, for the privilege of working to beat the Germans to the bomb.
Groves and Szilard arranged a temporary truce—the general may have imagined it was a surrender—at a meeting in Chicago on December 3.1934 The Army agreed to pay Szilard $15,416.60 to reimburse him for the twenty months when he worked unpaid and out-of-pocket at Columbia and for lawyers’ fees.
The general had attempted several times to force Szilard to sign a document promising “not to give any information of any kind relating to the project to any unauthorized person.”1935 Szilard had consistently agreed verbally to that restriction and just as consistently refused as a matter of honor to sign. He meant to continue protesting and on January 14, 1944, he began again with a three-page letter to Vannevar Bush. He knew fifteen people, he told Bush, “who at one time or another felt so strongly about [compartmentalization] that they intended to reach the President.”1936 The central issue as always was freedom of scientific speech: “Decisions are often clearly recognized as mistakes at the time when they are made by those who are competent to judge, but . . . there is no mechanism by which their collective views would find expression or become a matter of record.”
In this letter for the first time Szilard emphasized a purpose to his urgency beyond beating the Germans to the bomb: that the bomb might be used and become grimly known.
If peace is organized before it has penetrated the public’s mind that the potentialities of atomic bombs are a reality, it will be impossible to have a peace that is based on reality. . . . Making some allowances for the further development of the atomic bomb in the next few years . . . this weapon will be so powerful that there can be no peace if it is simultaneously in the possession of any two powers unless these two powers are bound by an indissoluble political union . . . . It will hardly be possible to get political action along that line unless high efficiency atomic bombs have actually been used in this war and the fact of their destructive power has deeply penetrated the mind of the public.
Which was the explanation Szilard now gave for challenging the Army and Du Pont: “This for me personally is perhaps the main reason for being distressed by what I see happening around me.”
Bush insisted in return that all was well. “I feel that the record when this effort is over,” he wrote Szilard, “will show clearly that there has never at any time been any bar to the proper expression of opinion by scientists and professional men within their appropriate sphere of activity in this whole project.”1937 But he was willing to meet with Szilard if that was what the physicist wanted. In February, preparing for that meeting, Szilard drafted forty-two pages of notes. Much in those notes is specific and local; here and there basic issues are joined.
Since invention is unpredictable, Szilard writes, “the only thing we can do in order to play safe is to encourage sufficiently large groups of scientists to think along those lines and to give them all the basic facts which they need to be encouraged to such activity. This was not done in the past [in the Manhattan Project] and it is not being done at present.”1938 He tracked the consequences of the government’s policies of restriction:
The attitude taken toward foreign born scientists in the early stages of this work had far reaching consequences affecting the attitude of the American born scientists.1939 Once the general principle that authority and responsibility should be given to those who had the best knowledge and judgment is abandon
ed by discriminating against the foreign born scientists, it is not possible to uphold this principle with respect to American born scientists either. If authority is not given to the best men in the field there does not seem to be any compelling reason to give it to the second-best men and one may give it to the third- or fourth- or fifth-best men, whichever of them appears to be the most agreeable on purely subjective grounds.
Wigner’s early discouragement was an “incalculable loss,” Szilard thought; the fact that Fermi was excluded from centrifuge development work at Columbia “visibly affected” him “and he has from that time on shown a very marked attitude of being always ready to be of service rather than considering it his duty to take the initiative.”
Finally, Szilard judged the Met Lab moribund, its services rejected and its spirit broken, and pronounced its epitaph:
The scientists are annoyed, feel unhappy and incapable of living up to their responsibility which this unexpected turn in the development of physics has thrown into their lap. As a consequence of this, the morale has suffered to the point where it almost amounts to a loss of faith. The scientists shrug their shoulders and go through the motions of performing their duty. They no longer consider the overall success of this work as their responsibility. In the Chicago project the morale of the scientists could almost be plotted in a graph by counting the number of lights burning after dinner in the offices in Eckhart Hall. At present the lights are out.1940
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