prepared to submit his plans. Napoleon scoffed: ships without sails? “Bah! Away with your visionists!”
The young inventor, Sachs concluded, was Robert Fulton. Roosevelt laughed easily; probably he laughed at that.
Sachs cautioned the President to listen carefully: what he had now to impart was at least the equivalent of the steamboat inventor's proposal to Napoleon. Not yet ready to listen, Roosevelt scribbled a message and summoned an aide. Shortly the aide returned with a treasure, a carefully wrapped bottle of Napoleon brandy that the Roosevelts had preserved in the family for years. The President poured two glasses, passed one to his visitor, toasted him and settled back.
Sachs had made a file for Roosevelt's reading of Einstein's letter and Szilard's memorandum. But neither document had suited his sense of how to present the information to a busy President. “I am an economist, not a scientist,” he would tell friends, “but I had a prior relationship with the President, and Szilard and Einstein agreed I was the right person to make the relevant elaborate scientific material intelligible to Mr. Roosevelt. No scientist could sell it to him.” Sachs had therefore prepared his own version of the fission story, a composite and paraphrase of the contents of the Einstein and Szilard presentations. Though he left those statements with Roosevelt, he read neither one of them aloud. He read not Einstein's subsequently famous letter but his own eight-hundred-word summation, the first authoritative report to a head of state of the possibility of using nuclear energy to make a weapon of war. It emphasized power production first, radioactive materials for medical use second and “bombs of hitherto unenvisaged potency and scope” third. It recommended making arrangements with Belgium for uranium supplies and expanding and accelerating experiment but imagined that American industry or private foundations would be willing to foot the bill. To that end it proposed that Roosevelt “designate an individual and a committee to serve as a liaison” between the scientists and the Administration.
Sachs had intentionally listed the peaceful potentials of fission first and second among its prospects. To emphasize the “ambivalence” of the discovery, he said later, the “two poles of good and evil” it embodied, he turned near the end of the discussion to Francis Aston's 1936 lecture, “Forty Years of Atomic Theory” — it had been published in 1938 as part of a collection,
Personally I think there is no doubt that sub-atomic energy is available all around us, and that one day man will release and control its almost infinite power. We cannot prevent him from doing so and can only hope that he will not use it exclusively in blowing up his next door neighbor.
“Alex,” said Roosevelt, quickly understanding, “what you are after is to see that the Nazis don't blow us up.”
“Precisely,” Sachs said.
Roosevelt called in Watson. “This requires action,” he told his aide.
Meeting afterward with Sachs, Watson went by the book. He proposed a committee consisting initially of the director of the Bureau of Standards, an Army representative and a Navy representative. The Bureau of Standards, established by Act of Congress in 1901, is the nation's physics laboratory, charged with applying science and technology in the national interest and for public benefit. Its director in 1939 was Dr. Lyman J. Briggs, a Johns Hopkins Ph.D. and a government scientist for forty-three years who had been nominated by Herbert Hoover and appointed by FDR. The military representatives were Lieutenant Colonel Keith F. Adamson and Commander Gilbert C. Hoover, both ordnance experts.
“Don't let Alex go without seeing me again,” Roosevelt had directed Watson. Sachs met the same evening with Briggs, briefed him and proposed he and his committee of two get together with the physicists working on fission. Briggs agreed. Sachs saw the President again and declared himself satisfied. That was good enough for Roosevelt.
Briggs set a first meeting of the Advisory Committee on Uranium for October 21 in Washington, a Saturday. Sachs proposed to invite the emigres; to counterbalance them Briggs invited Tuve, who found a schedule conflict and deputized Richard Roberts as his stand-in. Fermi, still nursing his Navy grievance, refused to attend but was willing to allow Teller to speak in his behalf. On the appointed day the Hungarian conspiracy breakfasted with Sachs at the Carleton Hotel, the out-of-towners having arrived the night before. From the hotel they proceeded to the Department of Commerce. The meeting then counted nine participants: Briggs, a Briggs assistant, Sachs, Szilard, Wigner, Teller, Roberts, Adamson for the Army and Hoover for the Navy.
Szilard began by emphasizing the possibility of a chain reaction in a uranium-graphite system. Whether such a system would work, he said, depended on the capture cross section of carbon and that was not yet sufficiently known. If the value was large, they would know that a large-scale experiment would fail. If the value was extremely small, a large-scale experiment would look highly promising. An intermediate value would necessitate a large-scale experiment to decide. He estimated the destructive potential of a uranium bomb to be as much as twenty thousand tons of high-explosive equivalent. Such a bomb, he had written in the memorandum Sachs carried to Roosevelt, would depend on fast neutrons and might be “too heavy to be transported by airplane,” which meant he was still thinking of exploding natural uranium, not of separating U235.
Adamson, openly contemptuous, butted in. “In Aberdeen,” Teller remembers him sneering, “we have a goat tethered to a stick with a ten-foot rope, and we have promised a big prize to anyone who can kill the goat with a death ray. Nobody has claimed the prize yet.” As for twenty thousand tons of high explosive, the Army officer said, he'd been standing outside an ordance depot once when it blew up and it hadn't even knocked him down.
Restraining himself, Wigner spoke after Szilard, supporting his compatriot's argument.
Roberts raised serious objection. He was convinced that Szilard's optimism for a chain reaction was premature and his notion of a fast-neutron weapon made of natural uranium misguided. Roberts had co-authored a review of the subject just one month before. It agreed with Szilard that “there are not yet sufficient data to say definitely whether or not a uranium powerhouse is a possibility.” But it also assessed — because the DTM had begun assessing — the question of the fast-neutron fission of natural uranium and found, because of resonance capture and extensive scattering of fast neutrons, that it was “very unlikely that the fast neutrons can produce a sufficient number of fissions to maintain a [chain] reaction.”
The DTM physicist also pointed out that other lines of research might be more promising than a slow- neutron chain reaction in natural uranium. He meant isotope separation. At the University of Virginia Jesse Beams, formerly Ernest Lawrence's colleague at Yale, was applying to the task the high-speed centrifuges he was developing there. Roberts thought answers to these questions might require several years of work and that research should be left in the meantime to the universities.
Briggs spoke up to defend his committee. He argued vigorously that any assessment of the possibilities of fission at a time when Europe was at war had to include more than physics; it had to include the potential impact of the development on national defense.
Szilard was “astonished,” as he told Pegram the next day, at Sachs' “active and enthusiastic” participation in the meeting. Sachs seconded Briggs and the Hungarians. “The issue was too important to wait,” he recalled his argument, “and the important thing was to be helpful because if there was something to it there was danger of our being blown up. We had to take time by the forelock, and we had to be ahead.”
Then it was Teller's turn. For himself, he announced in his deep, heavily accented voice, he strongly supported Szilard. But he had also been given the task of serving as messenger for Fermi and Tuve, who had discussed these issues in New York and had come to some agreement about them. “I said that this needed a little support. In particular we needed to acquire a good substance to slow down the neutrons, therefore we needed pure graphite, and this is expensive.” Jesse Beams' centrifuge work also required support, Teller added.
“How much money do you need?” Commander Hoover wanted to know.
Szilard had not planned to ask for money. “The diversion of Government funds for such purposes as ours appears to be hardly possible,” he explained to Pegram the next day, “and I have therefore myself avoided to make any such recommendation.” But Teller answered Hoover promptly, probably speaking for Fermi: “For the first year of this research we need six thousand dollars, mostly in order to buy the graphite.” (“My friends blamed me because the great enterprise of nuclear energy was to start with such a pittance,” Teller reminisces; “they haven't forgiven
