The Making of the Atomic Bomb

really seriously.” Gunn in turn reported that “it seems almost impossible… to carry through any sort of an agreement [with the Navy] that would be really helpful to you. I regret this situation but see no escape.”

Despite his Olympian ego not even Leo Szilard felt capable of saving the world entirely alone. He called on his Hungarian compatriots now for moral support. Edward Teller had moved to Manhattan for the summer to teach physics at Columbia; Eugene Wigner came up from Princeton to conspire with them. In later years Szilard would recount several different versions of how their conversation went, but a letter he wrote on August 15, 1939, offers reliable contemporary testimony: “Dr. Wigner is taking the stand that it is our duty to enlist the cooperation of the [Roosevelt] Administration. A few weeks ago he came to New York in order to discuss this point with Dr. Teller and me.” Szilard had shown Wigner his uranium-graphite calculations. “He was impressed and he was concerned.” Both Teller and Wigner, Szilard wrote in a background memorandum in 1941, “shared the opinion that no time must be lost in following up this line of development and in the discussion that followed, the opinion crystallized that an attempt ought to be made to enlist the support of the Government rather than that of private industry. Dr. Wigner, in particular, urged very strongly that the Government of the United States be advised.”

But the discussion slipped away from that project into “worry about what would happen if the Germans got hold of large quantities of the uranium which the Belgians were mining in the Congo.” Perhaps Szilard emphasized the futility of the government contacts that he and Fermi had already made. “So we began to think, through what channels could we approach the Belgian government and warn them against selling any uranium to Germany?”

It occurred to Szilard then that his old friend Albert Einstein knew the Queen of Belgium. Einstein had met Queen Elizabeth in 1929 on a trip to Antwerp to visit his uncle; thereafter the physicist and the sovereign maintained a regular correspondence, Einstein addressing her in plainspoken letters simply as “Queen.”

The Hungarians were aware that Einstein was summering on Long Island. Szilard proposed visiting Einstein and asking him to alert Elizabeth of Belgium. Since Szilard owned no car and had never learned to drive he enlisted Wigner to deliver him. They called Einstein's office at the Institute for Advanced Study and learned he was staying at a summer house on Old Grove Pond on Nassau Point, the spit of land that divides Little from Great Peconic Bay on the northeastern arm of the island.

They called Einstein to arrange a day. At this time Szilard also furthered Wigner's proposal to contact the United States government by seeking advice from a knowledgeable emigr6 economist, Gustav Stolper, a Berliner resettled in New York who had once been a member of the Reichstag. Stolper offered to try to identify an influential messenger.

Wigner picked up Szilard on the morning of Sunday, July 16, and drove out Long Island to Peconic. They reached the area in early afternoon but had no luck soliciting directions to the house until Szilard thought to ask for it in Einstein's name. “We were on the point of giving up and going back to New York” — two world-class Hungarians lost among country lanes in summer heat — “when I saw a boy aged maybe seven or eight standing on the curb. I leaned out of the window and I said, ‘Say, do you by any chance know where Professor Einstein lives?’ The boy knew that and he offered to take us there.”

C. P. Snow had visited Einstein at the same summer retreat two years before, also losing his way, and makes the scene familiar:

He came into the sitting room a minute or two after we arrived. There was no furniture apart from some garden chairs and a small table. The window looked out on to the water, but the shutters were half closed to keep out the heat. The humidity was very high.

At close quarters, Einstein's head was as I had imagined it: magnificent, with a humanizing touch of the comic. Great furrowed forehead; aureole of white hair; enormous bulging chocolate eyes. I can't guess what I should have expected from such a face if I hadn't known. A shrewd Swiss once said it had the brightness of a good artisan's countenance, that he looked like a reliable old-fashioned watchmaker in a small town who perhaps collected butterflies on a Sunday.

What did surprise me was his physique. He had come in from sailing and was wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. It was a massive body, very heavily muscled: he was running to fat round the midriff and in the upper arms, rather like a footballer in middle-age, but he was still an unusually strong man. He was cordial, simple, utterly unshy. The large eyes looked at me, as though he was thinking: what had I come for, what did I want to talk about?

… The hours went on. I have a hazy memory that several people drifted in and out of the room, but I do not remember who they were. Stifling heat. There appeared to be no set time for meals. He was already, I think, eating very little, but he was still smoking his pipe. Trays of open sandwiches — various kinds of wurst, cheese, cucumber — came in every now and then. It was all casual and Central European. We drank nothing but soda water.

Similarly settled, Szilard told Einstein about the Columbia secondary-neutron experiments and his calculations toward a chain reaction in uranium and graphite. Long afterward he would recall his surprise that Einstein had not yet heard of the possibility of a chain reaction. When he mentioned it Einstein interjected, “Damn habe ich gar nicht gedachtl” — “I never thought of that!” He was nevertheless, says Szilard, “very quick to see the implications and perfectly willing to do anything that needed to be done. He was willing to assume responsibility for sounding the alarm even though it was quite possible that the alarm might prove to be a false alarm. The one thing most scientists are really afraid of is to make fools of themselves. Einstein was free from such a fear and this above all is what made his position unique on this occasion.”

Einstein hesitated to write Queen Elizabeth but was willing to contact an acquaintance who was a member of the Belgian cabinet. Wigner spoke up to insist again that the United States government should be alerted, pointing out, Szilard goes on, “that we should not approach a foreign government without giving the State Department an opportunity to object.” Wigner suggested that they send the Belgian letter with a cover letter through State. All three men thought that made sense.

Einstein dictated a letter to the Belgian ambassador, a more formal contact appropriate to their State Department plan, and Wigner took it down in longhand in German. At the same time Szilard drafted a cover letter. Einstein's was the first of several such compositions — they served in succession as drafts — and the origin of most of the statements that ultimately found their way into the letter he actually sent.

Wigner carried the first Einstein draft back to Princeton, translated it into English and on Monday gave it to his secretary to type. When it was ready he mailed it to Szilard. Then he left Princeton to drive to California on vacation.

A message from Gustav Stolper awaited Szilard at the King's Crown. “He reported to me,” Szilard wrote Einstein on July 19, “that he had discussed our problems with Dr. Alexander Sachs, a vice-president of the Lehman Corporation, biologist and national economist, and that Dr. Sachs wanted to talk to me about this matter.” Eagerly Szilard arranged an appointment.

Alexander Sachs, born in Russia, was then forty-six years old. He had come to the United States when he was eleven, graduated from Columbia in biology at nineteen, worked as a clerk on Wall Street, returned to Columbia to study philosophy and then went on to Harvard with several prestigious fellowships to pursue philosophy, jurisprudence and sociology. He contributed economics text to Franklin Roosevelt's campaign speeches in 1932; beginning in 1933 he worked for three years for the National Recovery Administration, joining the Lehman Corporation in 1936. He had thick curls and a receding chin and looked and sounded like the comedian Ed Wynn. His associates at the NRA used to point him out to visiting firemen under that nom de guerre as ultimate proof, if the NRA itself was not sufficient, of Roosevelt's gift for radical innovation. Sachs communicated in dense, florid prose (he had been thinking that spring of writing a book entitled The Inter-War Retreat from Reason as Exemplified in the Mis-history of the Recent Past and in the Contemporaneous Conduct of International Political and Economic Affairs by the United States and Great Britain) but could coruscate in committee.

Sachs heard Szilard out. Then, as Szilard wrote Einstein, he “took the position, and completely convinced me, that these were matters which first and foremost concerned the White House and that the best thing to do, also from the practical point of view, was to inform Roosevelt. He said that if we gave him a statement he would make sure it reached Roosevelt in person.” Among those who valued Sachs' opinions and called him from time to time for talks, it seems, was the President of the United States.

Szilard was stunned. The very boldness of the proposal won his heart after all the months when he had confronted caution and skepticism: “Although I have seen Dr. Sachs once,” he told Einstein, “and really was not