The Age of Radiance (21 page)

Szilard and Fermi argued over everything—even what the numbers actually meant. Szilard:
“We went over to Fermi’s office, and Rabi said to Fermi, “Look, Fermi, I told you what Szilard thought and you said ‘Nuts!’ and Szilard wants to know why you said ‘Nuts!’ ” So Fermi said, “Well . . . there is the remote possibility that neutrons may be emitted in the fission of uranium and then of course perhaps a chain reaction can be made.” Rabi said, “What do you mean by ‘remote possibility’?” and Fermi said, “Well, ten percent.” Rabi said, “Ten percent is not a remote possibility if it means that we may die of it. If I have pneumonia and the doctor tells me that there is a remote possibility that I might die, and it’s ten percent, I get excited about it.” The relationship was so fraught that a few weeks after this encounter, Szilard wrote a letter to Fermi outlining their difficulties, and concluding that if each had worked separately, a chain reaction would surely have occurred by now. He never sent this letter, but instead on July 4 wrote a more tentative proposal of collaboration, asking Pegram, the department chair, to adjudicate.

After learning that Leo was physically inept, Enrico finally accepted this state of affairs, as the last thing he wanted was an accident-prone physicist working with slippery graphite bricks and uranium. Herbert Anderson:
“Szilard was not willing to do his share of experimental work, even the preparation in the conduct of the measurements. He hired an assistant to do what we would’ve required of him. . . . Fermi’s vigor and energy always made it possible for him to contribute somewhat more than his share, so that any
dragging of feet on the part of the others stood out the more sharply in contrast. . . . That experiment was important in a number of ways, but it was the first and also the last experiment in which Fermi and Szilard collaborated.”
That experiment was important in a number of ways
—as it would be the birth of both nuclear power and atomic bombs.

Eventually, Fermi and Szilard arrived at a satisfactory professional modus operandi. First they would brainstorm theory together, then Fermi would design and execute the experiments with students, share the results with Szilard and the two would debate the next steps. While Fermi was in the lab, Szilard both conceptualized and got the needed graphite and uranium from suppliers. The Italian and the Hungarian essentially worked separately, together, and communicated through a “conduit” by the name of Edward Teller:
“During the summer of 1939, I taught summer school at Columbia. I lectured graduate students, but I was invited primarily as a consultant peacemaker on the Fermi-Szilard chain reaction project. Fermi and Szilard both had asked me to work with them. They were barely speaking to each other. Temperamentally, the two men were almost opposites. . . . Fermi seldom said anything that he could not demonstrate. Szilard seldom said anything that was not startling and new. Fermi was humble and self-effacing. Szilard could not talk without giving orders. Only if they had an intermediary could they be in contact with each other for any length of time. Because I admired and enjoyed working with both men and they were comfortable with me, I became a conduit of information, able to solve problems between them unobtrusively, sometimes even before they occurred.”

Leo Szilard:
“On matters scientific or technical there was rarely any disagreement [but] Fermi and I disagreed from the very start of our collaboration about every issue that involved not science but principles of action in the face of the approaching war. . . . Of all the many occasions which I had to observe Fermi I liked him best on the rather rare occasions when he got mad (except, of course, when he got mad at me). . . . If the nation owes us gratitude—and it may not—it does so for having stuck it out together as long as it was necessary.”

At the start, Szilard immediately wanted to make the leap to fission, while Fermi thought it was merely a curiosity and continued his steady, meticulous investigations. Their split in thinking was echoed in the press: On January 29 and 30, 1939, the
Washington Evening Star
reported on page 1, “Power of New Atomic Blast Greatest Achieved on Earth,” but that “as a practical power source, the new finding has at present no significance.” On February 5 the
New York Times
said, “Hope is revived that we may yet be able to
harness the energy of the atom,” but called it “remotely possible.” The same week,
Newsweek
quoted Einstein, echoing Rutherford on the improbability of nuclear energy:
“It is like shooting birds in the dark in a country where there are not many birds.”

In Paris, the Joliot-Curies were also investigating fission, and Szilard urged the Americans and the French to keep their studies private to safeguard this information from the Fascists. Beginning at the start of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth century with the
Journal des sçavans
and
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
, publishing scientific findings became a method of announcing one’s achievements, expanding the understanding of the natural world, contributing to the public good, and, of course, competing with your professional colleagues—the highway of hive mind. Szilard’s insistence that scientists should not publish was such a shocking and contrary notion that a number of physicists in 1939 couldn’t comprehend it. I. I. Rabi even took Szilard aside to warn that, by promoting such a bizarre notion, his guest status at Columbia was in danger. Bohr thought there was little future in atomic bombs since it was so difficult to produce the needed U-235 isotope that was known to be an effective source for a chain reaction and so didn’t feel this remote possibility meant upending a three-hundred-year scientific tradition of free discourse, even if it involved Hitler. Fermi agreed with Bohr.

The Joliot-Curie team did not honor Szilard’s request, publishing in
Nature
on March 18 that the U-235 isotope could produce 3.5 neutrons per fission (later revised to 2.9) and chain-react. Secrecy was not thoroughly maintained in the United States, either, for after Bohr gave a speech at the American Physical Society on fission’s potential for explosion, the
Times
said, “The creation of a nuclear explosion which would wreck an area as large as New York City would be comparatively easy,” since a remarkably small quantity of uranium could “blow a hole in the earth 100 miles in diameter. It would wipe out the entire City of New York, leaving a deep crater half way to Philadelphia and a third of the way to Albany and out to Long Island as far as Patchogue.”

As it turned out, Szilard was right. German scientists brought Joliot-Curie’s results to the attentions of both the Berlin War Office and the Reich Ministry of Education. When Fermi’s Columbia tests showed that very pure graphite worked but the average industrial product did not, Szilard got Pegram to convince Fermi not to publish. This secrecy may have tricked the Germans, who had failed with impure graphite in their test reactor, to switch to heavy water as a moderator, which crippled their program.

When he heard Fermi had accepted Szilard’s argument, Bohr did, too.
“Contrary to perhaps what is the most common belief about secrecy, secrecy was not started by generals, was not started by security officers, but was started by physicists,” Fermi remembered. “And the man who is most responsible for this certainly extremely novel idea for physicists was Szilard. He is certainly a very peculiar man, extremely intelligent. I see that this is an understatement. He is extremely brilliant and he seemed somewhat to enjoy, at least that is the impression that he gives to me, he seems to enjoy startling people. So he proceeded to startle physicists by proposing to them that given the circumstances of the period—you see it was early 1939 and war was very much in the air—given the circumstances of that period, given the danger that atomic energy and possibly atomic weapons could become the chief tool for the Nazis to enslave the world, it was the duty of the physicists to depart from what had been the tradition of publishing significant results as soon as the physical review or other scientific journals might turn them out, and that instead one had to go easy, keep back some results until it was clear whether these results were potentially dangerous or potentially helpful to our side.”

During that summer of 1939, Fermi, Anderson, and Szilard got five hundred pounds of uranium and tried to initiate a chain reaction using water as a moderator. It failed, and secrecy or no secrecy, this would be the last American experiment with fission for nearly a year. While Fermi then spent the rest of the season at an Ann Arbor conference, where he experimented with cosmic rays, Szilard settled on carbon (graphite) or deuterium (heavy water) as promising candidates for the moderator. He and brother Bela met at the Waldorf-Astoria with a group of investors, to whom Szilard described energy generated by what Fermi and Szilard called “piles,” and a business plan with a majority of shares controlled by physicists. The financiers regretfully declined.

When a chemist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute then published “Can Nuclear Energy Be Utilized for Practical Purposes?” in June 1939, the Hungarians in America became certain that Germany was on the road to atomic weapons and that Washington had to understand the threat. Their fears were valid; three months later, the Nazi War Office began conducting secret conferences on nuclear bombs attended by Bagge, Geiger, Bothe, Hahn, and Heisenberg. In time, the War Office would oversee atomic bomb research and would take over the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute as part of this mission. To drive away curious passersby, they called KWI’s nuclear research facility the Virus House.

Eugene Wigner, Ed Teller, and Leo Szilard discussed what would prod the American government into researching and producing atomic bombs before the Nazis could. The Hungarians knew that the Nazis were about to take Belgium, that the Belgian Congo held the world’s biggest uranium mine, that the Germans already controlled the Czech mine that had been so useful to Marie Curie, and that suddenly, the Nazis had halted exports of all their Bohemian ore. With nuclear weapons, Szilard worried, Hitler could conquer anyone. A few months before, they tried directly contacting the Pentagon, but got nowhere. George Pegram, the Columbia dean who’d brought Fermi to America, arranged for Enrico to meet with Admiral Stanford Hooper, technical assistant to the chief of naval operations, and Fermi, while waiting for his appointment, got to hear the desk officer receptionist tell the admiral,
“There’s a wop outside.” Wigner, Teller, and Szilard thought they should write to the leaders of Belgium to protect that nation’s colonial Congo ore—the biggest source of uranium in the world—from the little housepainter, but wondered if it would be proper to contact a foreign government without the approval of the American State Department. But then Leo remembered that Albert Einstein was friendly with the queen of the Belgians (so friendly that his letters to the queen included such comments as
“Princeton is a wonderful little spot, a quaint and ceremonious village of puny demigods on stilts”).

Leo and Gene decided they must go see Einstein, vacationing, sailing, and daydreaming the calculus of physics (what he called “thought experiments”) in Peconic on the north fork of eastern Long Island. On Wednesday, July 12, 1939, they drove out in Wigner’s 1936 Dodge, past the glorious World’s Fair, which featured Calvin Coolidge’s pet hippo, Billy; England’s Magna Carta; pavilions from every major nation (except Nazi Germany); a cat named Hitler with a “mustache” of black under his nose who joined his mistress for the jitterbug contest; and a streamlined moderne architecture that was promised as the World of Tomorrow. In fact, the real world of tomorrow was about to be ignited by two eccentric Hungarians driving by in a rickety Dodge.

Szilard and Wigner got confused by the Native American names of the region and ended up in Patchogue on the south fork instead of Cutchogue on the north. It took two hours to fix that mistake, and then when they asked everyone in Peconic where Dr. Moore, Einstein’s friend, lived, no one knew. Finally, Szilard insisted,
“Let’s give it up and go home. Perhaps fate intended it. We should probably be making a frightful mistake by enlisting Einstein’s help in applying to any public authorities on a matter like this. Once a government
gets hold of something, it never lets go.” But Gene insisted, and they kept driving, this way and that, utterly lost. Then Leo thought, “How would it be if we simply asked where around here Einstein lives? After all, every child knows him.” Almost immediately they spotted a little boy, perhaps seven years old, sunburned and playing with a fishing rod by the side of the road. Szilard called out to him from the car, “Do you know where Einstein lives?” “Of course I do,” the child said, and gave them directions that took them straight to the doctor’s white bungalow.

Einstein had spent the morning sailing and was now relaxing in a screened porch at the back of the house, drinking iced tea. After Szilard described fission, Einstein was quiet for a moment, then explained, “Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht”—“I hadn’t thought of that at all.” If it worked, Einstein explained, it would be the first source of energy for human beings that did not derive from the sun. (This is still technically and convolutedly true, as the sun’s heat leads to wind, and that wind moves the rain that begins hydro, while the sun’s light powers photosynthesis—the origin force of coal, oil, and natural gas—and its heat and light together generate solar, while uranium is derived, like all elements, from supernovas, meaning
a
sun but not
the
sun.) While Szilard drafted, Einstein dictated in German a letter to the Belgian queen, and also one to the US State Department, for its opinion about the protocol for resident aliens’ contacting a foreign power.

Returning to the King’s Crown, Szilard had second thoughts about the approach they were taking and decided to ask around for opinions on dealing with Washington. A Berlin economist acquaintance put him in touch with Alexander Sachs, a Lehman vice president who was one of FDR’s economic consultants. Sachs told Szilard that Einstein shouldn’t be writing to the queen of the Belgians about such matters, but to the president of the United States himself, and that Sachs would deliver such a letter to the Oval Office personally. For if any scientist could get FDR’s attention, after all, it was Albert Einstein. He was the Franz Liszt of physicists, with young girls mobbing him, people fainting in his presence, and the London Palladium offering a three-week engagement for a one-man show on anything he’d like to say. And, after all, immediately after arriving to exile in America, he’d been invited to sleep over at the presidential mansion by the Roosevelts themselves. Additionally as Szilard noted,
“The one thing most scientists are really afraid of is to make fools of themselves. Einstein was free from such a fear and this above all is what made his position unique on this occasion.” Laura Fermi:
“In the United States of those days there were no links between government and the universities, such as the ministry of
education in other countries; and virtually no channels of communications were available. So the scientists took the initiative. In the typical devious Hungarian way, Szilard and Wigner agreed with Einstein, the tallest figure in science, that they would write a letter to President Roosevelt, and he, Einstein, would sign it.”