The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Carpathians of Transylvania: Bela Kun. Arthur Koestler, a boy of fourteen then in Budapest, heard for the first time “the rousing tunes of the Marseillaise and of the Internationale which, during the hundred days of the Commune, drowned the music-loving town on the Danube in a fiery, melodious flood.”

It was a little more than a hundred days: 133. They were days of confusion, hope, fear, comic ineptitude and some violence. Toward the end of the war von Karman had returned to Budapest from aeronautics work with the Austro-Hungarian Air Force, where he had participated in the development of an early prototype of the helicopter. De Hevesy had also returned. Von Karman helped reorganize and modernize the university in the brief days of the Republic and even served as undersecretary for universities during the Kun regime. He remembered its naivete more than its violence: “So far as I can recall, there was no terrorism in Budapest during the one hundred days of the Bolsheviks, although I did hear of some sadistic excesses.” Lacking a qualified physicist, the university hired de Hevesy as a lecturer on experimental physics during the winter of 1918-19. Undersecretary von Karman appointed him to a newly established professorship of physical chemistry in March, but de Hevesy found Commune working conditions unsatisfactory and went off in May to Denmark to visit Bohr. The two old friends agreed he would join Bohr's new institute in Copenhagen as soon as it was built.

Arthur Koestler remembers that food was scarce, especially if you tried to buy it with the regime's ration cards and nearly worthless paper money, but for some reason the same paper would purchase an abundance of Commune-sponsored vanilla ice cream, which his family therefore consumed for breakfast, lunch and dinner. He mentions this curiosity, he remarks, “because it was typical of the happy-go-lucky, dilettantish, and even surrealistic ways in which the Commune was run.” It was, Koestler thought, “all rather endearing — at least when compared to the lunacy and savagery which was to descend upon Europe in years to come.”

The Hungarian Soviet Republic affected von Neumann and Teller far more severely. They were not admirers like young Koestler nor yet members of the intellectual elite like de Hevesy and von Karman. They were children of businessmen — Max Teller was a prosperous attorney. Max von Neumann took his family and fled to Vienna. “We left Hungary,” his son testified many years later, “very soon after the Communists seized power… We left essentially as soon as it was feasible, which was about 30 or 40 days later, and we returned about 2 months after the Communists had been put down.” In Vienna the elder von Neumann joined the group of Hungarian financiers working with the conservative nobility to overthrow the Commune.

Lacking protective wealth, the Tellers stuck it out grimly in Budapest, living with their fears. They made forays into the country to barter with the peasants for food. Teller heard of corpses hung from lampposts, though as with von Karman's “sadistic excesses” he witnessed none himself. Faced with an overcrowded city, the Commune had socialized all housing. The day came for the Koestlers as for the Tellers when soldiers charged with requisitioning bourgeois excesses of floor space and furniture knocked on their doors. The Koestlers, who occupied two threadbare rooms in a boarding house, were allowed to keep what they had, Arthur discovering in the meantime that working people were interesting and different. The Tellers acquired two soldiers who slept on couches in Max Teller's two office rooms, connected to the Teller apartment. The soldiers were courteous; they sometimes shared their food; they urinated on the rubber plant; but because they searched for hoarded money (which was safely stashed in the cover linings of Max Teller's law books) or simply because the Tellers felt generally insecure, their alien presence terrified.

Yet it was not finally Hungarian communism that frightened Edward Teller's parents most. The leaders of the Commune and many among its officials were Jewish — necessarily, since the only intelligentsia Hungary had evolved up to that time was Jewish. Max Teller warned his son that anti-Semitism was coming. Teller's mother expressed her fears more vividly. “I shiver at what my people are doing,” she told her son's governess in the heyday of the Commune. “When this is over there will be a terrible revenge.”

In the summer of 1919, as the Commune faltered, eleven-year-old Edward and his older sister Emmi were packed off to safety at their maternal grandparents' home in Rumania. They returned in the autumn; by then Admiral Nicholas Horthy had ridden into Budapest on a white horse behind a new national army to install a violent fascist regime, the first in Europe. The Red Terror had come and gone, resulting in some five hundred deaths by execution. The White Terror of the Horthy regime was of another order of magnitude: at least 5,000 deaths and many of those sadistic; secret torture chambers; a selective but unrelenting anti-Semitism that drove tens of thousands of Jews into exile. A contemporary observer, a socialist equally biased against either extreme, wrote that he had “no desire whatever to palliate the brutalities and atrocities of the proletarian dictatorship; its harshness is not to be denied, even if its terrorists operated more with insults and threats than with actual deeds. But the tremendous difference between the Red and the White Terror is beyond all question.” A friend of the new regime, Max von Neumann brought his family home.

In 1920 the Horthy regime introduced a numerus clausus law restricting university admission which required “that the comparative numbers of the entrants correspond as nearly as possible to the relative population of the various races or nationalities.” The law, which would limit Jewish admissions to 5 percent, a drastic reduction, was deliberately anti-Semitic. Though he was admitted to the University of Budapest and might have stayed, von Neumann chose instead to leave Hungary at seventeen, in 1921, for Berlin, where he came under the influence of Fritz Haber and studied first for a chemical engineering degree, awarded at the Technical Institute of Zurich in 1925. A year later he picked up a Ph.D. summa cum laude in mathematics at Budapest; in 1927 he became a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin; in 1929, at twenty-five, he was invited to lecture at Princeton. He was professor of mathematics at Princeton by 1931 and accepted lifetime appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study in 1933.

Von Neumann experienced no personal violence in Hungary, only upheaval and whatever anxiety his parents communicated. He nevertheless felt himself scarred. His discussion with Stanislaw Ulam went on more ominously from identifying Carpathian villages as the ultimate places of origin of Hungary's talented expatriates. “It will be left to historians of science,” Ulam writes, “to discover and explain the conditions which catalyzed the emergence of so many brilliant individuals from that area… Johnny used to say that it was a coincidence of some cultural factors which he could not make precise: an external pressure on the whole society of this part of Central Europe, a feeling of extreme insecurity in the individuals, and the necessity to produce the unusual or else face extinction.”

Teller was too young to leave Hungary during the worst of the Horthy years. This was the adolescent period, as Time magazine paraphrased Teller later, when Max Teller “dinned into his son two grim lessons: 1) he would have to emigrate to some more favorable country when he grew up and 2) as a member of a disliked minority he would have to excel the average just to stay even.” Teller added a lesson of his own. “I loved science,” he told an interviewer once. “But also it offered a possibility for escaping this doomed society.” Von Karman embeds in his autobiography a similarly striking statement about the place of science in his emotional life. When the Hungarian Soviet Republic collapsed he retreated to the home of a wealthy friend, then found his way back to Germany. “I was glad to get out of Hungary,” he writes of his state of mind then. “I felt I had had enough of politicians and government upheavals… Suddenly I was enveloped in the feeling that only science is lasting.”

That science can be a refuge from the world is a conviction common among men and women who turn to it. Abraham Pais remarks that Einstein “once commented that he had sold himself body and soul to science, being in flight from the T and the ‘we’ to the ‘it.’” But science as a means of escaping from the familiar world of birth and childhood and language when that world mounts an overwhelming threat — science as a way out, a portable culture, an international fellowship and the only abiding certitude — must become a more desperate and therefore a more total dependency. Chaim Weizmann gives some measure of that totality in the harsher world of the Russian Pale when he writes that “the acquisition of knowledge was not for us so much a normal process of education as the storing up of weapons in an arsenal by means of which we hoped later to be able to hold our own in a hostile world.” He remembers painfully that “every division of one's life was a watershed.”

Teller's experience in Hungary before he left it in 1926, at seventeen, for the Technical Institute at Karlsruhe was far less rigorous than Weiz-mann's in the Pale. But external circumstance is no sure measure of internal wounding, and there are not many horrors as efficient for the generation of deep anger and terrible lifelong insecurity as the inability of a father to protect his child.

“In the last few years,” Niels Bohr wrote the German theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld at Munich in April 1922, “I have often felt myself scientifically very lonesome, under the impression that my effort to develop the principles of the quantum theory systematically to the best of my ability has been received with very little understanding.” Through the war years Bohr had struggled to follow, wherever it might lead, the “radical change” he had introduced into physics. It led to frustration. However stunning Bohr's prewar results had been, too many