Making of the Atomic Bomb (eBook)

Chapter 1 Moonshine In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilard waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change. A trace of rain had fallen during the night, Tuesday, September 12, 1933, dawned cool, humid and dull. Drizzling rain would begin again in early afternoon. When Szilard told the story later he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none, he often walked to think. In any case another destination intervened. The stoplight changed to green. Szilard stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woe, the shape of things to come. Leo Szilard, the Hungarian theoretical physicist, born of Jewish heritage in Budapest on February 11, 1898, was thirty-five years old in 1933. At five feet, six inches he was not tall even for the day. Nor was he yet the 'short fat man,' round-faced and potbellied, 'his eyes shining with intelligence and wit' and 'as generous with his ideas as a Maori chief with his wives,' that the French biologist Jacques Monod met in a later year. Midway between trim youth and portly middle age, Szilard had thick, curly, dark hair and an animated face with full lips, flat cheekbones and dark brown eyes. In photographs he still chose to look soulful. He had reason. His deepest ambition, more profound even than his commitment to science, was somehow to save the world. The Shape of Things to Come was H. G. Wells' new novel, just published, reviewed with avuncular warmth in The Times on September 1. 'Mr. Wells' newest 'dream of the future' is its own brilliant justification,' The Times praised, obscurely. The visionary English novelist was one among Szilard's network of influential acquaintances, a network he assembled by plating his articulate intelligence with the purest brass. In 1928, in Berlin, where he was a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin and a confidant and partner in practical invention of Albert Einstein, Szilard had read Wells' tract The Open Conspiracy. The Open Conspiracy was to be a public collusion of science-minded industrialists and financiers to establish a world republic. Thus to save the world. Szilard appropriated Wells' term and used it off and on for the rest of his life. More to the point, he traveled to London in 1929 to meet Wells and bid for the Central European rights to his books. Given Szilard's ambition he would certainly have discussed much more than publishing rights. But the meeting prompted no immediate further connection. He had not yet encountered the most appealing orphan among Wells' Dickensian crowd of tales. Szilard's past prepared him for his revelation on Southampton Row. He was the son of a civil engineer. His mother was loving and he was well provided for. 'I knew languages because we had governesses at home, first in order to learn German and second in order to learn French.' He was 'sort of a mascot' to classmates at his Gymnasium, the University of Budapest's famous Minta. 'When I was young,' he told an audience once, 'I had two great interests in life, one was physics and the other...