necessities of war. But the Soviet government in the meantime had assembled an advisory committee that included Kapitza and the senior Academician Abram Joffe, Kurchatov's mentor. The committee endorsed atomic bomb research and recommended Kurchatov to head it. Somewhat reluctantly he accepted.
“So it was that from early 1943 on,” writes his colleague A. P. Alexan-drov, “work on this difficult problem was resumed in Moscow under the leadership of Igor Kurchatov. Nuclear scientists were recalled from the front, from industry, from the research institutes which had been evacuated to the rear. Auxiliary work began in many places.” Auxiliary work included building a cyclotron. Kurchatov moved his institute out of the Soviet capital to an abandoned farm near the Moscow River in the summer of 1943. An artillery range nearby offered an area for explosives testing; “Laboratory No. 2” would be the Soviet Union's Los Alamos. By January 1944 Kurchatov had assembled a staff of only about twenty scientists and thirty support personnel. “Even so,” writes Herbert York, “they did experiments and made theoretical calculations concerning the reactions involved in both nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors, they began work designed to lead to the production of suitably pure uranium and graphite, and they studied various possible means for the separation of uranium isotopes.” But the Soviet Bear was not yet fully aroused.
“The kind of man that any employer would have fired as a troublemaker.” Thus Leslie Groves described Leo Szilard in an off-the-record postwar interview, as if the general had arrived first at fission development and Szilard had only been a hireling. Groves seems to have attributed Szilard's brashness to the fact that he was a Jew. Upon Groves' appointment to the Manhattan Project he almost immediately judged Szilard a menace. They proceeded to fight out their profound disagreements hand to hand.
The heart of the matter was compartmentalization. Alice Kimball Smith, the historian of the atomic scientists whose husband Cyril was associate division leader in charge of metallurgy at Los Alamos, defines the background of the conflict:
If the Project could have been run on ideas alone, says Wigner, no one but Szilard would have been needed. Szilard's more staid scientific colleagues sometimes had trouble adjusting to his mercurial passage from one solution to another; his army associates were horrified, and to make matters worse, Szilard freely indulged in what he once identified as his favorite hobby — baiting brass hats. General Groves, in particular, had been outraged by Szilard's unabashed view that army compartmentalization rules, which forbade discussion of lines of research that did not immediately impinge on each other, should be ignored in the interests of completing the bomb.
The issue for Szilard was openness within the project to facilitate its work. “There is no way of telling beforehand,” he wrote in a 1944 discussion of the problem, “what man is likely to discover and invent a new method which will make the old methods obsolete.” The issue for Groves, to the contrary, was security.
At first Szilard bent the rules and Groves threatened him. In late October 1942, while Fermi moved toward building CP-1, Szilard apparently badgered the Du Pont engineers who arrived in Chicago to take over pile design. Arthur Compton saw this activity as obstructive but not necessarily subversive; on October 26 he wired Groves that he had given Szilard two days to remove base of operations to new york. action based on efficient OPERATION OF ORGANIZATION NOT ON RELIABILITY. ANTICIPATE probable resignation. Compton did not know his man. Szilard would not resign, for the simple reason that he believed he was needed to help beat Germany to the bomb. Compton proposed surveillance: suggest ARMY FOLLOW HIS MOTIONS BUT NO DRASTIC ACTION NOW. Two days later Compton hurriedly wired Groves to desist: szilard situation stabilized WITH HIM REMAINING CHICAGO OUT OF CONTACT WITH ENGINEERS. SUGGEST YOU NOT ACT WITHOUT FURTHER CONSULTATION CONANT AND MYSELF.
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.” Compton's telegram forestalled an ugly arrest and the letter was never signed or sent.
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.” 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. 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.” 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. 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 pluto-nium 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.”
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 Frederic Joliot's group had been published in
