The Making of the Atomic Bomb

they chose to pretend to be Hungarians whose inability to speak any language without accent is well known; except Hungarian, and [these] brilliant men all lived elsewhere.” That was amusing to colleagues and flattering to the Hungarians, who liked the patina of mystery that romanticized their pasts. The truth is harsher: the Hungarians came to live elsewhere because lack of scientific opportunity and increasing and finally violent anti-Semitism drove them away. They took the lessons they learned in Hungary with them into the world.

They all began with talent, variously displayed and remembered. Von Karman at six stunned his parents' party guests by quickly multiplying six-figure numbers in his head. Von Neumann at six joked with his father in classical Greek and had a truly photographic memory: he could recite entire chapters of books he had read. Edward Teller, like Einstein before him, was exceptionally late in learning — or choosing — to talk. His grandfather warned his parents that he might be retarded, but when Teller finally spoke, at three, he spoke in complete sentences.

Von Neumann too wondered about the mystery of his and his compatriots' origins. His friend and biographer, the Polish mathematician Stanis-law Ulam, remembers their discussions of the primitive rural foothills on both sides of the Carpathians, encompassing parts of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, populated thickly with impoverished Orthodox villages. “Johnny used to say that all the famous Jewish scientists, artists and writers who emigrated from Hungary around the time of the first World War came, either directly or indirectly, from those little Carpathian communities, moving up to Budapest as their material conditions improved.” Progress, to people of such successful transition, could be a metaphysical faith. “As a boy,” writes Teller, “I enjoyed science fiction. I read Jules Verne. His words carried me into an exciting world. The possibilities of man's improvement seemed unlimited. The achievements of science were fantastic, and they were good.”

Leo Szilard, long before he encountered the novels of H. G. Wells, found another visionary student of the human past and future to admire. Szilard thought in maturity that his “addiction to the truth” and his “predilection for ‘Saving the World’” were traceable first of all to the stories his mother told him. But apart from those, he said, “the most serious influence on my life came from a book which I read when I was ten years old. It was a Hungarian classic, taught in the schools, The Tragedy of Man.”

A long dramatic poem in which Adam, Eve and Lucifer are central characters, The Tragedy of Man was written by an idealistic but disillusioned young Hungarian nobleman named Imre Madach in the years after the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1848. A modern critic calls the work “the most dangerously pessimistic poem of the 19th century.” It runs Adam through history with Lucifer as his guide, rather as the spirits of Christmas lead Ebenezer Scrooge, enrolling Adam successively as such real historical personages as Pharaoh, Miltiades, the knight Tancred, Kepler. Its pessimism resides in its dramatic strategy. Lucifer demonstrates to Adam the pointlessness of man's faith in progress by staging not imaginary experiences, as in Faust or Peer Gynt, but real historical events. Pharaoh frees his slaves and they revile him for leaving them without a dominating god; Miltiades returns from Marathon and is attacked by a murderous crowd of citizens his enemies have bribed; Kepler sells horoscopes to bejewel his faithless wife. Adam sensibly concludes that man will never achieve his ultimate ideals but ought to struggle toward them anyway, a conclusion that Szilard continued to endorse as late as 1945. “In [Madach's] book,” he said then, “the devil shows Adam the history of mankind, [ending] with the sun dying down. Only a few Eskimos are left and they worry chiefly because there are too many Eskimos and too few seals [the last scene before Adam returns to the beginning again]. The thought is that there remains a rather narrow margin of hope after you have made your prophecy and it is pessimistic.”

Szilard's qualified faith in progress and his liberal political values ultimately set him apart from his Hungarian peers. He believed that group was shaped by the special environment of Budapest at the turn of the century, “a society where economic security was taken for granted,” as a historian paraphrases him, and “a high value was placed on intellectual achievement.” The Minta that Szilard and Teller later attended deeply gratified von Karman when he went there in the peaceful 1890s. “My father [who founded the school],” he writes, “was a great believer in teaching everything — Latin, math, and history — by showing its connection with everyday living.” To begin Latin the students wandered the city copying down inscriptions from statues and museums; to begin mathematics they looked up figures for Hungary's wheat production and made tables and drew graphs. “At no time did we memorize rules from a book. Instead we sought to develop them ourselves.” What better basic training for a scientist?

Eugene Wigner, small and trim, whose father managed a tannery and who would become one of the leading theoretical physicists of the twentieth century, entered the Lutheran Gimndsium in 1913; John von Neumann followed the next year. “We had two years of physics courses, the last two years,” Wigner remembers. “And it was very interesting. Our teachers were just enormously good, but the mathematics teacher was fantastic. He gave private classes to Johnny von Neumann. He gave him private classes because he realized that this would be a great mathematician.”

Von Neumann found a friend in Wigner. They walked and talked mathematics. Wigner's mathematical talent was exceptional, but he felt less than first-rate beside the prodigious banker's son. Von Neumann's brilliance impressed colleagues throughout his life. Teller recalls a truncated syllogism someone proposed to the effect that (a) Johnny can prove anything and (b) anything Johnny proves is correct. At Princeton, where in 1933 von Neumann at twenty-nine became the youngest member of the newly established Institute for Advanced Study, the saying gained currency that the Hungarian mathematician was indeed a demigod but that he had made a thorough, detailed study of human beings and could imitate them perfectly. The story hints at a certain manipulative coldness behind the mask of bonhomie von Neumann learned to wear, and even Wigner thought his friendships lacked intimacy. To Wigner he was nevertheless the only authentic genius of the lot.

These earlier memories of Gimndsium days contrast sharply with the turmoil that Teller experienced. Part of the difference was personal. Teller was bored in first-year math at the Minta and quickly managed to insult his mathematics teacher, who was also the principal of the school, by improving on a proof. The principal took the classroom display unkindly. “So you are a genius, Teller? Well, I don't like geniuses.” But whatever Teller's personal difficulties, he was also confronted directly, as a schoolboy of only eleven years, with revolution and counterrevolution, with riots and violent bloodletting, with personal fear. What had been usually only implicit for the Martians who preceded him was made explicit before his eyes. “I think this was the first time I was deeply impressed by my father,” he told his biographers. “He said anti-Semitism was coming. To me, the idea of anti- Semitism was new, and the fact that my father was so serious about it impressed me.”

Von Karman studied mechanical engineering at the University of Budapest before moving on to Gottingen in 1906; de Hevesy tried Budapest in 1903 before going to the Technische Hochschule in Berlin in 1904 and on to work with Fritz Haber and then with Ernest Rutherford; Szilard had studied at the Technology Institute in Budapest and served in the Army before the post-Armistice turmoil made him decide to leave. In contrast, Wigner, von Neumann and particularly Teller experienced the breakdown of Hungarian society as adolescents — Teller at the impressionable beginning of puberty — and at first hand.

“The Revolution arrived as a hurricane,” an eyewitness to the Hungarian Revolution of October 1918 recalls. “No one prepared it and no one arranged it; it broke out by its own irresistible momentum.” But there were antecedents: a general strike of half a million workers in Budapest and other Hungarian industrial centers in January 1918; another general strike of similar magnitude in June. In the autumn of that year masses of soldiers, students and workers gathered in Budapest. This first brief revolution began with anti-military and nationalistic claims. By the time the Hungarian National Council had been formed under Count Mindly Karoli (“We can't even manage a revolution without a count,” they joked in Budapest), in late October, there was expectation of real democratic reform: the council issued a manifesto calling for Hungarian independence, an end to the war, freedom of the press, a secret ballot and even female suffrage.

The Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy collapsed in November. Austrian novelist Robert Musil explained that collapse as well as anybody in a dry epitaph: Es ist passiert (“It sort of happened”). Hungary won a new government on October 31 and ecstatic crowds filled the streets of Budapest waving chrysanthemums, which had become the symbol of the revolution, and cheering the truckloads of soldiers and workers that pushed through.

The victory was not easy after all. The revolution hardly extended beyond Budapest. The new government was unable to negotiate anything better than a national dismembering. The founding of the Republic of Hungary, proclaimed on November 16, 1918, was shadowed by another founding on November 20: of the Hungarian Communist Party, by soldiers returning from Russian camps where they had been radicalized as prisoners of war. On March 21, 1919, four months after it began, the Republic of Hungary bloodlessly metamorphosed into the Hungarian Soviet Republic, its head a former prisoner of war, disciple of Lenin, journalist, Jew born in the