able to form any judgment about him, I nevertheless think that it could not do any harm to try this way and I also think that in this regard he is in a position to fulfill his promise.”
Szilard met Sachs shortly after returning from Peconic — between Sunday and Wednesday. Unable at midweek to reach Wigner en route to California, he tracked down Teller, who thought Sachs' proposal preferable to the plan they had previously worked out. Drawing on the first Einstein draft, Szilard now prepared a draft letter to Roosevelt. He wrote it in German because Einstein's English was insecure, added a cover letter and mailed it to Long Island. “Perhaps you will be able to tell me over the telephone whether you would like to return the draft with your marginal comments by mail,” he proposed in the cover letter, “or whether I should come out to discuss the whole thing once more with you.” If he visited Peconic again, Szilard wrote, he would ask Teller to drive him, “not only because I believe his advice is valuable but also because I think you might enjoy getting to know him. He is particularly nice.”
Einstein preferred to review a letter to the President in person. Teller therefore delivered Szilard to Peconic, probably on Sunday, July 30, in his sturdy 1935 Plymouth. “I entered history as Szilard's chauffeur,” Teller aphorizes the experience. They found the Princeton laureate in old clothes and slippers. Elsa Einstein served tea. Szilard and Einstein composed a third text together, which Teller wrote down. “Yes, yes,” Teller remembers Einstein commenting, “this would be the first time that man releases nuclear energy in a direct form rather than indirectly.” Directly from fission, he meant, rather than indirectly from the sun, where a different nuclear reaction produces the copious radiation that reaches the earth as sunlight.
Einstein apparently questioned if Sachs was the best man to carry the news to Roosevelt. On August 2 Szilard wrote Einstein hoping “at long last” for a decision “upon whom we should try to get as middle man.” He had seen Sachs in the interim; the economist, who certainly coveted the assignment of representing Albert Einstein to the President, had generously listed the financier Bernard Baruch or Karl T. Compton, the president of MIT, as possible alternates. On the other hand, he had strongly endorsed Charles Lindbergh, though he must have known that Roosevelt despised the famous aviator for his outspoken pro-German isolationism. Szilard wrote that he and Sachs had discussed “a somewhat longer and more extensive version” of the letter Einstein had written with Szilard at their second Peconic meeting; he now enclosed both the longer and shorter versions and asked Einstein to return his favorite along with a letter of introduction to Lindbergh.
Einstein opted for the longer version, which incorporated the shorter statement that had originated with him but carried additional paragraphs contributed by Szilard in consultation with Sachs. He signed both letters and returned them to Szilard in less than a week with a note hoping “that you will finally overcome your inner resistance; it's always questionable to try to do something too cleverly.” That is, be bold and get moving. “We will try to follow your advice,” Szilard rejoined on August 9, “and as far as possible overcome our inner resistances which, admittedly, exist. Incidentally, we are surely not trying to be too clever and will be quite satisfied if only we don't look too stupid.”
Szilard transmitted the letter in its final form to Sachs on August 15 along with a memorandum of his own that elaborated on the letter's discussion of the possibilities and dangers of fission. He had not given up contacting Lindbergh — he drafted a letter to the aviator the following day — but he seems to have decided to try Sachs in the meantime, probably in the interest of moving the project on; he pointedly asked Sachs either to deliver the letter to Roosevelt or to return it.
One of the discussions Szilard had added to the longer draft that Einstein chose concerned who should serve as liaison between “the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America.” In his letter of transmittal to Sachs, Szilard now tacitly offered himself for that service. “If a man, having courage and imagination, could be found,” he wrote, “and if such a man were put — in accordance with Dr. Einstein's suggestion — in the position to act with some measure of authority in this matter, this would certainly be an important step forward. In order that you may be able to see of what assistance such a man could be in our work, allow me please to give you a short account of the past history of the case.” The short account that followed, an abbreviated and implicit
Szilard's offer was as innocent of American bureaucratic politics as it was bold. It was surely also the apotheosis of his drive to save the world. By this time the Hungarians at least believed they saw major humanitarian benefit inherent in what Eugene Wigner would describe in retrospect as “a horrible military weapon,” explaining:
Although none of us spoke much about it to the authorities [during this early period] — they considered us dreamers enough as it was — we did hope for another effect of the development of atomic weapons in addition to the warding off of imminent disaster. We realized that, should atomic weapons be developed, no two nations would be able to live in peace with each other unless their military forces were controlled by a common higher authority. We expected that these controls, if they were effective enough to abolish atomic warfare, would be effective enough to abolish also all other forms of war. This hope was almost as strong a spur to our endeavors as was our fear of becoming the victims of the enemy's atomic bombings.
From the horrible weapon which they were about to urge the United States to develop, Szilard, Teller and Wigner — “the Hungarian conspiracy,” Merle Tuve was amused to call them — hoped for more than deterrence against German aggression. They also hoped for world government and world peace, conditions they imagined bombs made of uranium might enforce.
Alexander Sachs intended to read aloud to the President when he met with him. He believed busy people saw so much paper they tended to dismiss the printed word. “Our social system is such,” he told a Senate committee in 1945, “that any public figure [is] punch-drunk with printer's ink… This was a matter that the Commander in Chief and the head of the Nation must know. I could only do it if I could see him for a long stretch and read the material so it came in by way of the ear and not as a soft mascara on the eye.” He needed a full hour of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's time.
History intervened to crowd the President's calendar. Having won the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia simply by taking them, having signed the Pact of Steel with Italy on May 22 and a ten-year treaty of non-aggression and neutrality with the USSR on August 23, Adolf Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland beginning at 4:45 a.m. on September 1, 1939, and precipitated the Second World War. The German invasion fielded fifty-six divisions against thirty Polish divisions strung thinly across the long Polish frontier; Hitler had ten times the aircraft, including plentiful squadrons of Stuka dive-bombers, and nine divisions of Panzer tanks against Polish horse cavalry armed with swords and spears. The assault was “a perfect specimen of the modern Blitzkrieg,” writes Winston Churchill: “the close interaction on the battlefield of army and air force; the violent bombardment of all communications and of any town that seems an attractive target; the arming of an active Fifth Column; the free use of spies and parachutists; and above all, the irresistible forward thrusts of great masses of armour.”
The mathematician Stanislaw Ulam had just returned from visiting Poland, bringing with him on a student visa his sixteen-year-old brother, Adam:
Adam and I were staying in a hotel on Columbus Circle. It was a very hot, humid, New York night. I could not sleep very well. It must have been around one or two in the morning when the telephone rang. Dazed and perspiring, very uncomfortable, I picked up the receiver and the somber, throaty voice of my friend the topologist Witold Hurewicz began to recite the horrible tale of the start of war: “Warsaw has been bombed, the war has begun,” he said. This is how I learned about the beginning of World War II. He kept describing what he had heard on the radio. I turned on my own. Adam was asleep; I did not wake him. There would be time to tell him the news in the morning. Our father and sister were in Poland, so were many other relatives. At that moment, I suddenly felt as if a curtain had fallen on my past life, cutting it off from my future. There has been a different color and meaning to everything ever since.
One of Roosevelt's first acts was to appeal to the belligerents to refrain from bombing civilian populations. Revulsion against the bombing of cities had grown in the United States since at least the Japanese bombing of Shanghai in 1937. When Spanish Fascists bombed Barcelona in March 1938, Secretary of State Cordell Hull had condemned the atrocity publicly: “No theory of war can justify such conduct,” he told reporters. “… I feel that I am speaking for the whole American people.” In June the Senate passed a resolution condemning the “inhuman
