The Age of Radiance (22 page)

Szilard returned to Peconic to redraft on August 2, this time driven by Ed Teller in his 1935 Plymouth. Back at the King’s Crown, he paid Columbia secretary Janet Coatesworth to take dictation for a letter from the world’s most famous scientist to Franklin Roosevelt about a bomb that could destroy the world. Szilard:
“We did not know just how many words one could put in a letter which a president is supposed to read.” Janet thought Leo was a crackpot, and she would continue to think this until 1945, when she learned of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At war’s end, Einstein insisted that, with his letter to FDR,
“he really only acted as a mailbox” for Leo Szilard.

Szilard and Einstein then thought they might ask Charles Lindbergh to discuss the matter with FDR, but learned soon enough that the president and the aviator were politically opposed and thus returned to Sachs, who met with the president on October 11 and 12, bringing Einstein’s letter for FDR to read directly:

Albert Einstein

Old Grove Rd.

Nassau Point

Peconic, Long Island

August 2nd 1939

F.D. Roosevelt

President of the United States

White House

Washington, D.C.

Sir:

Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on
the part of the Administration. I believe therefore that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations:

In the course of the last four months it has been made probable—through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America—that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.

This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.

The United States has only very poor ores of uranium in moderate quantities. There is some good ore in Canada and the former Czechoslovakia, while the most important source of uranium is Belgian Congo.

In view of the situation you may think it desirable to have more permanent contact maintained between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America. One possible way of achieving this might be for you to entrust with this task a person who has your confidence and who could perhaps serve in an inofficial capacity. His task might comprise the following:

a) to approach Government Departments, keep them informed of the further development, and put forward recommendations for Government action, giving particular attention to the problem of securing a supply of uranium ore for the United States;

b) to speed up the experimental work, which is at present being carried on within the limits of the budgets of University laboratories, by providing funds, if such funds be required, through his contacts with private persons who are willing to make contributions for this cause, and perhaps also by obtaining the co-operation of industrial laboratories which have the necessary equipment.

I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over. That she should have taken such early action might perhaps be understood
on the ground that the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, von Weizsäcker, is attached to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in Berlin where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated.

Yours very truly,

(Albert Einstein)

After reading it, the president said,
“Alex, what you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.”

“Precisely,” Sachs replied.

Roosevelt called in his aide General Edwin “Pa” Watson and said, “Pa! This requires action!”

The White House

Washington

October 19, 1939

MY DEAR PROFESSOR,

I want to thank you for your recent letter and the most interesting and important enclosure.

I found this data of such import that I have convened a board consisting of the head of the Bureau of Standards and a chosen representative of the Army and Navy to thoroughly investigate the possibilities of your suggestion regarding the element of uranium.

I am glad to say that Dr. Sachs will co-operate and work with this committee and I feel this is the most practical and effective method of dealing with the subject.

Please accept my sincere thanks.

Very sincerely yours,

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

FDR’s presidential advisory uranium committee—created six months after the Nazis had begun their own uranium group—would be known as the Briggs Committee, for its chair, Lyman Briggs, head of the Bureau of Standards, the federal physics lab, and a known sloven. On October 21, Wigner, Teller, and Szilard attended the committee’s first meeting and tried to convince army and navy ordnance officers to expedite the development
of atom-splitting technology before the Nazis beat them to it. Herb Anderson:
“Szilard came to the conclusion that a large-scale experiment using carbon for slowing down the neutrons ought to be started without delay. It was a gamble, but the other possibilities looked less practical at the time. The problem was where to get money for the graphite. This was the kind of problem Szilard liked. Fermi, on the other hand, was not very good at the kind of promotion this required. . . . [Szilard] estimated they would need about $10,000 for the graphite. Since this was much more than he could hope to get from any university, he thought of going to the government for support, especially in view of the military implications. . . . A meeting had been arranged with Lyman J. Briggs, Col. Keith R. Adamson of the army and Cmdr. Gilbert C. Hoover of the navy.”

Ed Teller: “After the initial presentation, Adamson began by voicing his doubts about novel scientific projects: ‘At Aberdeen, we’re offering a $10,000 reward to anyone who can use a death ray to kill a goat we have tended to post. That goat is still perfectly healthy.’ ”

Herb Anderson: “The question of money arose. Szilard thought $6,000 would suffice for the test of graphite in mind. There followed a long declamation from the army representative about the nature of war. In the end he argued it wasn’t weapons that won wars, but the morale of the troops. [Eugene Wigner] said, in his high-pitched voice, that it was very interesting to hear this. He had always thought the weapons were very important and that this is what cost money, that this is why the army needed such a large appropriation. But he was interested to hear that he was wrong; it’s not weapons but morale which wins the wars. If this was correct, perhaps one should take a second look at the budget of the army, maybe the budget could be cut. Col. Adamson wheeled around to look at Wigner and said, ‘Well, as far as those $6,000 are concerned, you can have it.’ ”

The navy’s $6,000 for Szilard’s graphite surprisingly did not arrive with due haste from Washington. In early 1940, Peter Debye, who had headed the post-Meitner physics section of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and had then been forced to resign by the Nazis for being Dutch, visited his American colleagues and warned everyone he could that the Germans were developing uranium bombs in their Virus House. Fermi guessed that since the Nazis did not bring their atomic scientists into one research facility but left them dispersed, their efforts would go nowhere (and this would turn out to be true). But Debye’s report alarmed Szilard, who got Einstein to send a second letter to FDR, and the $6,000 was finally released to Columbia.

By the end of 1939, four Curie Institute associates had patented a uranium oxide chain reaction using deuterium—heavy water—as the moderator. Norway’s Norsk Hydro plant in Vemork was the sole industrial European source of heavy water. IG Farben approached Norsk Hydro to buy it, but the Norwegians declined. When, tipped off by the Joliot-Curies, a lieutenant in the French intelligence agency offered to purchase all of the company’s supply for FF 36 million, the Norwegians refused. Instead, to “aid France’s victory,” they shipped it gratis to France in twenty-six cans on March 9, 1940. Three months later Paris fell, the French government fled to Bordeaux, and the British sent in the War Ministry’s liaison with the French Ministry of Armaments—Charles Henry George “Mad Jack” Howard—to abscond with as many French scientists, industrial diamonds, machine tools, and other matériel that he could spirit out from under the Nazis, including the deuterium.

Mad Jack and the Curies split up the shipment, with physicist Hans von Halban packing as many cans as possible into a touring car, covering them with cushions and blankets, having his children sit on the blankets, and telling them that no matter what, they had to look happy. In trying to ship the rest out of the country, Mad Jack arrived to find the port in utter chaos, so he corralled the crew of the British coal ship SS
Broompark
, got them too drunk to float, loaded up his cargo, and set off through the Gironde on June 19. With everyone at the Curie Institute save the Joliot-Curies themselves now evacuated, Fred and Irène pretended to be busy with obscure problems in theoretical atomic physics while risking their lives to manufacture explosives and radio equipment for the Resistance. When another French ship hit a mine and sank, Fred Joliot told the Nazis that this was the one with the heavy water. Von Halban’s and Mad Jack’s supplies, meanwhile, successfully reached Britain.

With the Germans approaching Denmark, Otto Robert Frisch and Rudolf Peierls fled to England, finding jobs at the University of Birmingham. Since the needed isotope for explosives, U-235, was only found in 0.7 percent of natural uranium, many, notably Bohr, believed it was technically unfeasible, even absurd, to attempt fashioning a uranium bomb. But Frisch and Peierls at Birmingham finished calculations proving that a tremendous device would only need a few kilos of uranium-235. Simultaneously, in April 1940, Lise Meitner was visiting the Bohrs when the Nazis invaded Denmark. As they prepared to evacuate Copenhagen, Bohr asked Meitner to send a telegram from Stockholm to British physicist Owen Richardson with the news that the Bohr family was fine. It concluded, “Please inform
Cockroft and Maud Ray Kent Meitner.” The British physicists who received this thought “Maud Ray Kent” was a coded message about German atomic weapons research, so the British fission committee called itself the MAUD Committee. At war’s end it was revealed that the Bohr’s governess, Maud Ray, lived in the town of Kent, and Bohr was hoping to get word to her that all was well. The MAUD report to the British war effort was based on the Frisch and Peierls research:
“We have now reached the conclusion that it will be possible to make an effective uranium bomb which, containing some 25 lb of active material, would be equivalent as regards destructive effect to 1,800 tons of T.N.T. and would also release large quantities of radioactive substance, which would make places near to where the bomb exploded dangerous to human life for a long period. . . . The committee considers that the scheme for a uranium bomb is practicable and likely to lead to decisive results in the war.”

On May 5, 1940, the
New York Times
reported, “Vast Power Source in Atomic Energy Opened by Science. . . . A chunk of 5 to 10 pounds of the new substance, a close relative of uranium and known as U-234, would drive an ocean liner or an ocean-going submarine for an indefinite period around the oceans of the world without refueling, it was said, for such a chunk would possess the power-output of 25,000,000 to 50,000,000 pounds of coal, or of 15,000,000 to 30,000,000 pounds of gasoline. . . . The main reason why scientists are reluctant to talk about this development, regarded as ushering in the long dreamed of age of atomic power and, therefore, as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, discovery in modern science, is the tremendous implications this discovery bears on the possible outcome of the European war, it was explained. . . . Germany, it was asserted, may regret her act of having sent into exile Dr. Lise Meitner, who, with Professor Hahn, made the first observations that led to the discovery of the fountain-head of atomic energy that German scientists are so feverishly working to harness.”

Traveling to the United States from a Britain under siege and a Europe defeated, MAUD’s Mark Oliphant was stunned to learn that the apparatchik Lyman Briggs had not passed on the British committee’s report to anyone else in the United States, to such effect that, when Oliphant met in secret with the Advisory Committee on Uranium, they were shocked by his openly discussing atomic weaponry as though the technology was imminent. After Vannevar Bush took the MAUD report to FDR, the slow-moving Briggs was quickly replaced by the hard-charging James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard, and on June 12, 1940, the Briggs Advisory Committee on Uranium was disbanded and supplanted by the far more politically connected National
Defense Research Committee (NDRC), soon to be renamed the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), headed by the protean Vannevar Bush. Before coming to the NDRC, Bush was vice president of MIT and president of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and one of the few Americans experienced in government-funded research (in years to come, NACA would become NASA). The only purpose of his OSRD was to mobilize science for war, and its first achievement was microwave radar, including a portable radar gun, which was tested by tracking the speed of automobiles. One physicist said,
“For the Lord’s sake, don’t let the cops know about this.” With his rimless glasses, military-tight haircut, and lean frame, Bush was the embodiment of can-do American academic management, achieving an apotheosis as head of OSRD. In July 1945, he would even predict the smartphone—
“consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library”—and he decided that his outfit should fully investigate the potential military applications of nuclear weapons. The new organizational structure, however, meant that only American citizens were supposed to be involved in classified military research—leaving out Einstein, Fermi, Szilard, Teller, and Wigner, to name just five. One reason why such a large percentage of the physicists involved in America’s nuclear project were European émigrés was that the development of radar had first priority among leading scientific administrators of the United States, as radar was deemed immediately useful, unlike the pie in the sky of splitting atoms to make munitions.