The Making of the Atomic Bomb

secrets of the bomb — whatever Byrnes imagined those might be — for the price of a few tons of uranium ore, how much was their judgment worth? Why give away something so stupendous as the bomb unless you got something equally stupendous in return? Byrnes believed international relations worked like domestic politics. The bomb was power, newly minted, and power was to politics as money was to banking, a medium of enriching exchange. Only na'ifs and fools gave it away.

Enter Leo Szilard.

As the man who had thought longer and harder than anyone else about the consequences of the chain reaction, Szilard had chafed at his continuing exile from the high councils of government. Another politically active Met Lab scientist, Eugene Rabinowitch, a younger man, confirms “the feeling which was certainly shared… by others that we were surrounded by a kind of soundproof wall so that you could write to Washington or go to Washington and talk to somebody but you never got any reaction back.” With the successful operation of the production reactors and separation plants at Hanford the work of the Met Lab had slowed; Compton's people, Szilard particularly, found time to think about the future. Szilard says he began to examine “the wisdom of testing bombs and using bombs.” Rabinowitch remembers “many hours spent walking up and down the Midway [the wide World's Fair sward south of the University of Chicago main campus] with Leo Szilard and arguing about these questions and about what can be done. I remember sleepless nights.”

There was no point in talking to Groves, Szilard reasoned in March 1945, nor to Bush or Conant for that matter. Secrecy barred discussion with middle-level authorities. “The only man with whom we were sure we would be entitled to communicate,” Szilard recalls, “was the President.” He prepared a memorandum for Franklin Roosevelt and traveled to Princeton to enlist once again the durable services of Albert Einstein.

Except for some minor theoretical calculations for the Navy, Einstein had been excluded from wartime nuclear development. Bush explained why to the director of the Institute for Advanced Study early in the war:

I am not at all sure that if I place Einstein in entire contact with his subject he would not discuss it in a way that it should not be discussed… I wish very much that I could place the whole thing before him… but this is utterly impossible in view of the attitude of people here in Washington who have studied into his whole history.

The great theoretician whose letter to Roosevelt helped alert the United States government to the possibility of an atomic bomb was thus spared by concern for security and by hostility to his earlier outspoken politics — his pacifism and probably also his Zionism — from contributing to that weapon's development. Szilard could not show Einstein his memorandum. He told his old friend simply that there was trouble ahead and asked for a letter of introduction to the President. Einstein complied.

From Chicago Szilard approached Roosevelt through his wife. Eleanor Roosevelt agreed to see him on May 8 to pursue the matter. Thus fortified, he wandered to Arthur Compton's office to confess his out-of-channel sins. Compton surprised him by cheering him on. “Elated by finding no resistance where I expected resistance,” Szilard reports, “I went back to my office. I hadn't been in my office for five minutes when there was a knock on the door and Compton's assistant came in, telling me that he had just heard over the radio that President Roosevelt had died…

“So for a number of days I was at a complete loss for what to do,” Szilard goes on. He needed a new avenue of approach. Eventually it occurred to him that a project as large as the Met Lab probably employed someone from Kansas City, Missouri, Harry Truman's original political base. He found a young mathematician named Albert Cahn who had worked for Kansas City boss Tom Pendergast's political machine to earn money for graduate school. Cahn and Szilard traveled to Kansas City later that month, dazzled Pendergast's hoodlum elite with who knows what Szilardian tale “and three days later we had an appointment at the White House.”

Truman's appointments secretary, Matthew Connelly, barred the door. After he read the Einstein letter and the memorandum he relaxed. “I see now,” Szilard remembers him saying, “this is a serious matter. At first I was a little suspicious, because the appointment came through Kansas City.” Truman had guessed the subject of Szilard's concern. At the President's direction Connelly sent the wandering Hungarian to Spartansburg, South Carolina, to talk to a private citizen named Jimmy Byrnes.

A University of Chicago dean, a scientist named Walter Bartky, had accompanied Szilard to Washington. For added authority Szilard enlisted Nobel laureate Harold Urey and the three men boarded the overnight train south. Compartmentalization was working: “We did not quite understand why we were sent by the President to see James Byrnes… Was he to… be the man in charge of the uranium work after the war, or what? We did not know.” Truman had alerted Byrnes that the delegation was on its way. The South Carolinian received it warily at his home. He read the letter from Einstein first — “I have much confidence in [Szilard's] judgment,” the theoretician of relativity testified — then turned to the memorandum.

It was a prescient document. It argued that in preparing to test and then use atomic bombs the United States was “moving along a road leading to the destruction of the strong position [the nation] hitherto occupied in the world.” Szilard was referring not to a moral advantage but to an industrial: as he wrote elsewhere that spring, U.S. military strength was “essentially due to the fact that the United States could outproduce every other country in heavy armaments.” When other countries acquired nuclear weapons, as they would in “just a few years,” that advantage would be lost: “Perhaps the greatest immediate danger which faces us is the probability that our ‘demonstration’ of atomic bombs will precipitate a race in the production of these devices between the United States and Russia.”

Much of the rest of the memorandum asked the sort of questions the Interim Committee was also asking about international controls versus attempting to maintain an American monopoly. But Szilard echoed Bohr in pleading for what no one among the national leaders concerned with the problem seemed able to grasp, that “these decisions ought to be based not on the present evidence relating to atomic bombs, but rather on the situation which can be expected to confront us in this respect a few years from now.” By present evidence the bombs were modest and the United States held them in monopoly; the difficulty was deciding what the future would bring. Szilard first offended Byrnes in his memorandum by concluding that “this situation can be evaluated only by men who have first-hand knowledge of the facts involved, that is, by the small group of scientists who are actively engaged in this work.” Having thus informed Byrnes that he thought him unqualified, Szilard then proceeded to tell him how his inadequacies might be corrected:

If there were in existence a small subcommittee of the Cabinet (having as its members the Secretary of War, either the Secretary of Commerce or the Secretary of the Interior, a representative of the State Department, and a representative of the President, acting as the secretary of the Committee), the scientists could then submit to such a committee their recommendations.

It was H. G. Wells' Open Conspiracy emerging again into the light; it amused Byrnes, a man who had climbed to the top across forty-five years of hard political service, not at all:

Szilard complained that he and some of his associates did not know enough about the policy of the government with regard to the use of the bomb. He felt that scientists, including himself, should discuss the matter with the Cabinet, which I did not feel desirable. His general demeanor and his desire to participate in policy making made an unfavorable impression on me.

Byrnes proceeded to demonstrate the dangers of a lack of firsthand knowledge, Szilard remembers:

When I spoke of my concern that Russia might become an atomic power, and might become an atomic power soon, if we demonstrated the power of the bomb and if we used it against Japan, his reply was, “General Groves tells me there is no uranium in Russia.”

So Szilard explained to Byrnes what Groves, busy buying up the world supply of high-grade ore, apparently did not understand: that high-grade deposits are necessary for the extraction of so rare an element as radium but that low-grade ores, which undoubtedly existed in the Soviet Union, were entirely satisfactory where so abundant an element as uranium was concerned.

To Szilard's argument that using the atomic bomb, even testing the atomic bomb, would be unwise because