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Fathers of the Bomb Part II; Leo Szilard article by Jennifer Lake The "Hungarians" who came to work on the Manhattan Project were called the "Martians" by their peers, according to Edward Teller in his Memoirs. They ascribed to themselves a unique "Hungarian Genius" that set them apart from their scientific cohorts. Choosing the god of War in nicknaming this oddfellow foursome, coworkers and associates may have insightfully understood something about the nature of these men. Foremost among the Manhattan Engineer District's Martians was Leo Szilard, known for his eccentric and demanding behavior. Born with the surname "Spitz" which the family would change in 1900 while Leo was a toddler, the Szilards were descendants of "lesser nobility" who emerged as a small, wealthy, and overwhelmingly Jewish "middle class" in a land of agricultural peasants. Leo's parents are described as nonreligious Jewish freemasons; his father worked as a civil engineer and his grandfather was an "agricultural entrepreneur". Similar backgrounds are seen among the other Hungarian "polymaths" like Michael Polanyi, who grew up in the political environment of Balkanized eastern Europe. Researcher Tibor Frank writes that "The Hungarian intellectual diaspora was huge and not confined to German-speaking Europe [but] was scattered all over the Continent."(1). Perhaps more than others, the Jewish sons of the Austro-Hungarian empire considered themselves the premier internationalists, following in the footsteps of Theodore Herzl, a scion of Budapest.. As a schoolboy, Leo Szilard and his younger brother 'Bela' created the Hungarian Association of Socialist Students for the purpose of distributing a pamphlet on tax and monetary reform purportedly written by Leo. The Szilards were also inducted into the Galilei Circle (founded in 1908 by the Polanyi brothers, Michael and Karl, at the University of Budapest) to discuss and design the nationalistic future of Hungary. Compare this to the indoctrination of Niels Bohr and his brother in Copenhagen, through the Ekliptika Circle. Tibor Frank records that Leo was otherwise not political, but in the characterization of his life, biographers affirm that Szilard was exceptionally political to his last day and onwards into his legacy. Schooling was interrupted by the necessities of war and Leo was drafted as an officer candidate in 1917, but he contracted severe influenza (Spanish flu?) and was discharged before ever giving service. In the rising social tension of Budapest that was soon to erupt, Szilard displayed a turnabout that marked his personal nature. As Tibor Frank describes it "on July 24, 1919, he converted from Judaism and was baptized into the Calvinist faith...in the Calvinist church on the street where he lived with his family...the date of his baptism, however, reveals a sense of urgency: The Hungarian Council Republic would exist for just one more week, and the signs of an anti-semitic wave of revenge for what was generally viewed as a Jewish takeover of the government were evident." Showing a certificate of baptism to the boys who pushed him around in the streets brought only more derision, adding perhaps to Szilards lifelong "anxiety neurosis". In time, as a mature man, even his friends called him the "General" for his dictatorial behavior. They said that he liked to "startle" people with unexpected pronouncements, effecting an off-balancing of friend and foe alike. Szilard left Budapest in 1919 and centered his life in Berlin around the activities of his mentors; Einstein, Max Planck, and Max von Laue. Famous for his role behind-the-scenes in organizing the 1933 relocation of Jewish scientists, Szilard is notorious for crafting the "letters from Einstein" that were passed to FDR urging the creation of an atomic bomb. The first letter is credited to the 3 Martian physicists --Szilard, Eugene (Paul) Wigner, and Edward Teller. (2). Teller says he only gave Szilard a ride over to Einstein's house in Princeton, and that Szilard was prepared with a ready document from his pocket. This letter was signed by Einstein and given to Rothschild agent Alexander Sachs, subsequently reaching the hand of the President in August of 1939. According to an article by William Lanouette, FDR responded by tasking an investigative committee to look into it, promising funds for Szilard and Enrico Fermi to establish an experimental chain-reaction laboratory at Columbia in New York. When the funding failed to show, a second letter in the spring of 1940 from "Einstein" threatened to publish the working details of a nuclear device for the world community of physicists. Lanouette reports, Szilard got his funding. (3). 1933 was the year Szilard claims to have thought of the "chain-reaction" while walking in London and waiting on a traffic light. He had landed a job at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in radiology, but he was also deeply engaged in the creation and administration of the Academic Assistance Council that maintained an office at the headquarters of the London Royal Society. (4). Szilard came to London following on the heels of Sir William Beveridge who happened to meet him in Vienna. Szilard resigned his post in Berlin-Charlottenburg at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute after the Reichstag Fire (Feb.27) and drifted back into Austria looking for a new position. Under British patronage, the likes of William Beveridge and Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell), Szilard spearheaded the nuts-and-bolts effort from London to coordinate the exodus of science out of Germany. He took it upon himself to weave the actions of other rescue organizations together and provide a claimed "even distribution" of job applicants among receiving nations. For his own personal contribution, Szilard was looking for a sponsor to fund his chain-reaction experiments, an effort that his friends at the University of Manchester, Michael Polanyi and Chaim Weizmann, engaged in the years 1936 to 1938 when the emergence of atomic power was a certainty. (5). Szilard patented his ideas for atomic chain-reactions in 1934 and signed them over "in trust" to the British Admiralty in '36. In 1934, Chaim Weizmann was occupied with the opening of the Weizmann Institute for Science (as it was renamed in 1949). Niels Bohr, a participant in the creation of the Academic Assistance Council as well as mirror organizations elsewhere, was downplaying the feasibility of atomic power and is noted for saying it would take the resources of a whole country to produce a nuclear weapon. In 1936, as Szilard, Weizmann, et.al., were exploring their options, Einstein was giving reassurances to the American government that nukes were next to impossible. By 1938, as the main activities of the relocation committees were drawing to a close, Szilard himself would emigrate out of Britain as a refugee and come to Columbia in New York where he reunited with his friend Enrico Fermi. (6). As far as the public knew, no one had yet conceived of how to build superweapons. The first inklings of New Age weaponry were forecast by the work of Samuel Tolver Preston in his 1875 publication of "Physics of the Ether". H.G. Wells picked up the ideas and demonstrated them as science-fiction in 1908 and 1914, most notably in a story called "The World Set Free". By this time in history, the available nuclear technology of X-rays and "radium emanations" was well employed and known to be deadly. The dangerous medical applications of radiation were subversively buried along with the victims but known to the researchers themselves and reflect the overriding mindset that "safe" use was a technical determination that was not yet understood but attainable with sufficient experimentation. In the coming years, Leo Szilard would read Wells' stories and decide to be first among scientists to harness the atom. The parallel inventions of particle accelerators (including Szilard's) before 1930 enabled fission experiments to operate concurrently in the U.S. and Europe, and the production of radionuclides for medical use was ostensibly creating a need for reactors. In this milieu of 1930, Abraham Flexner founded the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton as a "haven where scientists may regard the world and its phenomena as their laboratory". Offering huge salaries for the time, with no requirements to teach or publish, Flexner contracted for Albert Einstein to come in 1932, although Einstein didn't actually arrive until October of 1933 when he qualified as a "refugee" eligible for relocation grants. Einstein was a jewel in the IAS crown, and would follow the Hungarians, mathematician John von Neumann and physicist Eugene Wigner, who were recruited in 1930. The flambuoyant and reckless von Neumann, as he's been described, offered invaluable "intel" to the relocation enterprise. When Szilard and Fermi finally got funding for chain-reactions, the University of Chicago became the new home of the Metallurgical Lab division of the Manhattan Project. The Met Lab developed the critical function of sustainable and controllable fission based on a U.S. patent that the Szilard/Fermi team had registered in 1939. The two men were apparently collaborating in Europe to produce a chain-reaction in 1934, years before the "Germans" Hahn, Strassman, Meitner, and Frisch. (7). Accomplishing the task late in 1942 on the record, the Manhattan Project became official. Oppenheimer and his team were sequestered in New Mexico under the Army's guardianship at Los Alamos, a situation that brought great tension to the participating scientists, but one that nearly all would look back on as the greatest time of their lives. Teller relates that the whole Manhattan Project was a reunion for "international science". Szilard, having already made his major contribution to the war effort, now began to agitate against the military interference, which he perceived as a takeover threat to marginalize the preeminence of the scientists. As the reality of the Atomic Bomb was nearing fruition, Szilard mounted an all out campaign to prevent it from being used, circulating a petition to stage a "demonstration" in place of a hostile strike. William Lanouette reports that there was another, little known letter from "Einstein" written by Szilard "seeking to influence post-war arms control" that went ignored. The petition, called the Franck Report (named for physicist James Franck), was circulated among the Project scientists, but that too was suppressed and never reached President Truman for whom it was intended. The "demonstration" came after the war as Operation Crossroads in the Marshall Islands. Szilard turned away from physics then and began a career in the field of molecular biology. (8). For the other physicists, things were just heating up. Edward Teller had been a relatively unhelpful presence in Los Alamos due to his obsession with building a "Super", but the way was soon cleared after the McMahon Bill created the Atomic Energy Commission in 1946. The higher-ups in military and government circles were enthusiastic about the Super, and so was Ernest Lawrence at the University of California's Berkeley Rad Lab. Lawrence was a golden boy who was brought into the Bohemian society on his ascendancy into Berkeley in the late '20s. Thermonuclear Super supporters squared off with the disarmament faction over the next three years, but the Soviet A-bomb test of August 1949 would tip its development in their favor. Despite the appearance of debate and delays, the H-bomb was a sure thing, backed by the empirical Lewis L. Strauss who took his efforts behind closed doors. It took less than 2 years to set the stage for thermonuclear tests, which were performed in the Marshalls in the spring of 1951 and unleashed in full terrifying splendor during Operation Ivy, November 1952. Over the course of that year, the United States recorded an all-time high of epidemic polio. The "Mike" shot on November first was a 10.4 megaton surface blast that sucked one million tons of contaminated soil into the mushroom cloud. By the end of '52 and from then on, "summer" polio became a year-round affliction. Oddly, Leo Szilard the biologist, had proposed at the start of thermonuclear testing that an increase in the killing power of H-bombs could be accomplished by cladding the plutonium core with "dirty" cobalt, an act that he said could "wipe out all life on the planet". (9). As Teller explains it, an explosive yield beyond 10 megatons (10 million tons of TNT) is blown into space and therefore "wasted" as unusable firepower. Szilard, it seems, still had a contribution to make. He married his longtime girlfriend, health physicist Dr. Gertrude Weiss, and in the coming years he helped Jonas Salk organize the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, and sat on the Board of Directors. In his pursuit of scientific hegemony, Leo Szilard learned the hard way how to become an "insider" and better use his influence and other people's money. He gave up writing letters and circulating petitions. He joined the effort in 1954 with Niels Bohr to found CERN in Geneva. He created numerous organizations and used them to gain political leverage, like The Council For A Livable World that shrewdly stretched its money by "buying" a Senator from the sparsely populated state of South Dakota, helping George McGovern to take a seat. It was among the last worldly actions that he took. Diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1960, Szilard designed his own radiation treatment at Sloan-Kettering, requiring a second course in 1962. The claim is he was cured. In May of 1964, Leo Szilard died of a heart attack in his sleep. ============ A theory on aging was put forward by Szilard, (reproduced in brief by Tibor Frank at http://www.franktibor.hu/img/kozl/05_frank_236-web.pdf) where he "postulates that different individuals age at different rates, and the rate of aging of an individual is determined by the number of 'faults' inherited. These 'faults' are mutants of what he dubbed 'vegetative genes' that are inherited through the chromosomes containing them and whose number increase with age and cause some people to be relatively old even before they are born. He derived mathematical formulae for aging based upon this hypothesis of 'aging hits' on the human cell, from which he interpreted the shape of a mortality curve of the U.S. population and predicted the decrease in life expectancy of children who are exposed to ionizing radiation. He concluded that the inherited faults increase the death rate 'in conjunction with the hits of time, and they increase it appreciably only above 40 (years of age)' and 'thus in its crudest form, the theory postulates that the age at death is uniquely determined by the genetic make-up of the individual'. Further, he concluded that his theory of aging would illuminate scientific issues involved in the practice of birth control....Szilard's theory was received warmly in England. John Lear suggested in the New Scientist that it was 'inevitable that this latest of the Hungarian-born theorist's long line of brilliances will in time be recognized as a major contribution to human thought.' " Before Szilard in 1932, Hermann Muller, who worked at inducing mutations in fruit flies with X-rays, made a similar prediction and went even further, offering his view of disease conditions that would plague the population. Muller suggested that radiation induced mutations would cause human extinction and denounced the practice of Eugenics as fraudulent. William Lanouette wrote about Szilard's brand of science as "subversion...He advanced by infiltrating and negating and reformulating what was already known by other scientists..." Notes and References, (1) contemporary Hungarian researcher, Tibor Frank, gives favorable reviews of the scientists in the migrations of 1919 to 1933 www.storicamente.org/05_studi_ricerche/02frank2.htm. Research selections are from the "Recent Articles" page at www.franktibor.hu/index_de.html (2) from the Princeton archives on Einstein, documenting the Hungarian influence behind the "Einstein" letter to FDR www.princetonhistory.org/museum_alberteinstein.cfm In 1945, Einstein published "Atomic War or Peace" and wrote, "I do not consider myself the father of the release of atomic energy". Szilard and Einstein collaborated closely for many years and famously share a refrigerator patent. (3) William Lanouette, writing for the Pugwash archives www.pugwash.org/reports/ees/lanouette.htm The Pugwash Conferences came about after the publication of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. (4) the Academic Assistance Council, HQ at the Royal Society on Piccadilly, documented by Tibor Frank in reference (1). The Royal Society history and Fellows are listed here --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellows_of_the_Royal_Society#Fellowship. Versions of the Royal Society motto allude to secrecy, as it was called the "invisible college" with a modern interpretation of the motto given as "nothing in words". (5) Michael Polanyi* and Chaim Weizmann at the University of Manchester, also called Victoria University. Niels Bohr had a post-doctorate teaching appointment here (Victoria U) at the same time that Weizmann began teaching chemistry in 1913. Within a decade, Weizmann became the President of the World Zionist Organization. (6) Szilard and Fermi seemed to have had a fertile friendship --it's possible that the original suggestion made by Fermi to Oppenheimer (at the start of the Manhattan Project) about using a weapon to irradiate the Germans' food and water could have come from Szilard. The idea is in keeping with his "cobalt" bomb. (7) Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman joined the German program under Heisenberg. Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch fled to Scandinavia. This very brief bio of Frisch locates these scientists before the war www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/library/biographies/bio_frisch-otto.htm (8) in molecular biology, Szilard collaborated with Aaron Novick at Argonne Nat'l Lab outside Chicago (9) the "Cobalt" bomb, couched in the light of a "warning" as what others might do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb *Michael Polanyi formed a "study group" in 1928 with Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and John (Jansci) von Neumann to analyze Soviet affairs, and appears to have had a strong influence over the careers of the "Martians". Read a bio of Polanyi here www.kfki.hu/chemonet/polanyi/9602/trad1.html . Szilard's communist activities after his youth are obscured, but during WWII and his "agitation", Gen. Leslie Groves requested Szilard's internment as an "enemy alien". His World Government endeavors never ceased. On JFK's election, Szilard moved to Washington, DC in an effort to intervene with the Soviets on the President's behalf. He is credited with suggesting a special "hotline" for the superpower leaders to speak directly. Frans Boas at Columbia Univ. was the main source of contact for Szilard. Boas was receiving his "intel" from Benjamin Liebowitz who was traveling around Europe and writing letters after the first Nazi "ban" in April 1933 (Restoration of the Professional Civil Service). Franz Boas is the "father" of modern anthropology, a nephew by marriage to Dr. Abraham Jacobi, the "father" of pediatrics. Dr. Jacobi immigrated to New York City in 1853 after release (or escape) from jail for armed insurrection in the communist Revolutions of 1848-- he married the daughter of publisher and Bonesman George Putnam. |