Howard Epstein
Szilard: The Father of the Manhattan Project

Howard Epstein - Szilard: The Father of the Manhattan Project

- It’s customary to start these talks with a joke, so let me tell you the joke. The budget for the movie “Oppenheimer” was $100 million yet Leo Szilard gets a walk on part of, ooh, several nanoseconds. How funny this is ought to become clear to you. This is the second in my series Unsung Jewish Heroes. The first was Chaim Weizmann, and at least when I speak about him, lost to posterity though he is, I can joke that in every Israeli city there is a street named after him. Now, it is my privilege to introduce you to another forgotten great, Leo Szilard, the man who saved, possibly, 10 million Japanese and American lives. And, in his case, there are just two eponymous streets, one in his native city of Budapest and the other at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. And there is nothing else material by which Szilard may be remembered. So, although one could justifiably lay claim to his being so brilliant a scientist that he is, arguably, second only to Albert Einstein, who was, last century, the most famous man on earth, outside the scientific community, no one remembers Szilard, yet his range of talents and achievements is jaw-dropping. I expect that, by now, most of you have seen the blockbuster movie “Oppenheimer” and, if you were paying close attention, you might have seen Leo Szilard get that walk-on part lasting all of several nanoseconds, yet here, ladies and gentlemen, is the rub. The father of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer, would not have got the job. There would just not have been a job for him to get without the father of the Manhattan Project, and that was Leo Szilard. Incidentally, this presentation comes from one chapter of my forthcoming work on Adolf Hitler, “Hitler’s Fatal Mistakes, Why The Mad Genius”, which is what Churchill called him, was no genius. We shall encounter some of those mistakes, this afternoon.

This then, is the story of the conception, the embryo, and the birth of the Manhattan Project, America’s programme to build an atomic bomb, and about the man who hastened its creation, such that it had the effect of saving possibly 10 million lives. That number comes from the American Navy Department. Whilst a large number of immigrants, almost all of them Jews, into the United States, were involved in the evolution of the atomic bomb, Szilard stands out as the only fixture on the critical path to the bomb, from the very outset of the story in 1933 down to President Roosevelt’s commitment to build it at the end of 1941. So who was Leo Szilard? He was Leo Spitz, as he started life, born on the 11th of February, 1898, into a Jewish family in Budapest in Hungary. His parents were Tekla and Louis, an engineer, who changed the family name to Szilard, meaning solid, when Leo was two. He was to be the eldest of three children. As you see, the family was rooted firmly in the middle class. In 1916, at the age of 18, Szilard left school with a prize for exceptional ability in mathematics and went to study engineering, following in his father’s footsteps, at university. A year later, he was conscripted into the Hungarian army, to fight in the Great War, and commissioned as an officer. Later, the Spanish flu pandemic arrived and he had the great, good fortune to contract the flu, which undoubtedly saved his life as, while Szilard was in hospital, the whole of his regiment was wiped out in military action near Trieste.

In 1919, after the Great War, Szilard wanted to resume his education, but the Budapest University of Technology was then decidedly hostile to Jews. Finding the situation unacceptable, he took what was, then, the obvious route. He made his way to Germany. Szilard, by now, a young man of extraordinary inquisitiveness, ingenuity, and drive, enrolled at the technical University of Berlin and switched to physics. His lecturers included such greats as Nobel prize winners, Albert Einstein and Max Planck. Szilard’s fellow Hungarian students included Eugene Wigner and John von Neumann, both of whom would later be recruited for the Manhattan Project. In 1922, Szilard obtained his PhD. His prizewinning doctoral dissertation on thermodynamics was highly praised by Einstein himself. The possessor of a hyperactive mind, Szilard was always moving on to the next project. In 1928, he submitted patent applications for the electron microscope and the linear accelerator and, the following year, applied for one for the cyclotron, a particle accelerator. In 1928, sorry… Between 1926 and 1930, he worked with Einstein to develop a refrigerator with no moving parts. He did not build all the devices that came into his fertile mind, nor did he publish all his ideas in scientific journals. So, the credit for them often went to others. The Nobel Prize for the cyclotron went to Earnest Lawrence, in 1939, and that for the electron microscope was awarded to Ernst Ruska, in 1986.

In all, Szilard would register 47 patents, 15 of them jointly with Albert Einstein, who became as good a friend as this Hungarian gadfly would have. In 1929, Szilard was recognised as one of the founders of information theory, the study and application of how data and ideas can be codified and shared. He was granted German citizenship the following year. It would turn out to be of limited value to him. Prior to the accession to power of Adolf Hitler, in January, 1933, German scientists, the world leaders in the accumulation of Nobel science prizes had 31. You can see the shorter column on the left-hand side, above the word Germany. So, the UK’s 19 and France is 15. United States was a minnow, at that time, with only six. Yet today, the US is in the lead with 350. The UK is still in second place with, now, 109. France brings up fourth place with 39 and Germany, instead of being first, is third with 93. It is plain to see that Germany yielded first place to America with a dramatic change, not to say interchange, of fortunes between the two nations. There is plain evidence, here, of a brain brain drain from Germany to the United States. Why this should have come about is, once observed, not difficult to understand. At the end of February, 1933, one month after Hitler became German chancellor, the Reichstadt, the German parliament building, was consumed by fire. And the first Nazi crackdown was launched on communists. A string of repressive measures followed with a decree, on the 1st of April, boycotting Jewish owned businesses, Szilard decided Germany was too dangerous for him. It was time for him to move on and he left, on a whim, and a virtually empty train for Vienna, arriving, without any interruption to his journey.

The very next day, all the trains were full and every passenger was interviewed by the German border authorities. Non Aryans were not permitted to leave Germany. Szilard, the man who always had two suitcases packed and ready to go, later observed, “If you want to succeed in this world, you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier. Szilard, who was, of course, both, was on route to London, where we shall join him later. The Reichstag fire was taken by the Nazis as a pretext for the introduction of a succession of laws to exclude Jews and others from mainstream German life. Concentration camps were constructed for all those regarded as undesirable. Jewish owned businesses and the offices of Jewish professionals were boycotted. Civil servants of non Aryan descent were placed in retirement. On the 25th of April, the disingenuously entitled Law Against Overcrowding in Schools and Universities drastically restricted the number of Jewish students permitted to attend public schools and colleges. Books were burned by Aryan university students and journalism was proscribed for non Aryans. Of course, you know what Aryans look like, don’t you? Not the one on the right. This bombardment of exclusionary laws was completely disorientating for the Jews, many of whose families had lived in Germany for several generations. Overnight, they found themselves stripped of their work, their security, their dignity, and their hope. Some consoled themselves that, in what they still regarded as the greatest country in Europe, they were still citizens. It was not to last.

On the 15th of September, 1935, the Reichstadt passed the now notorious, unashamedly racial, Nuremberg Laws, the law for the protection of German blood and German honour and the Reich Citizenship Law. As a result, marriages and other liaisons between Jews and Aryans were outlawed and only people of German descent were to be counted as Reich citizens. That left all the others, mainly the Jews, stripped of their citizenship and rights. Two months later came the definition of who was to be considered Jewish and eligible for the camps, The Jews of Germany, some 522,000 out of a total German population of 76 million, about 0.7%, included some who, despite all the humiliations they were undergoing, hoped it would soon blow over. Others clearly foresaw where Hitler’s egregiously racist and violent policies were leading. At this early stage in the life of the Third Reich, Hitler’s aim was to cleanse German life of the Jews and he was content for them to leave if only they had somewhere to go. Some were able to get to British controlled Palestine, still suffering from having been a three and a half centuries long neglected backwater of the former Ottoman Empire. There was, however, a special group of expectant emigres, with extraordinary talents, who set their sights higher than Palestine. They were aware that they might be of some use and, therefore, welcomed in Great Britain or the United States of America. They were the prize winning scientists, mostly physicists and chemists, who had developed their talents in the German environment of less virulently noxious times, that they had given back fulsomely to the society that had nurtured them, was totally overlooked by the Nazis, also gave no thought to what might be the unintended consequences of their destructive ideology.

In line with the new racial laws, and the public mood engendered by them, journalists, universities, and research institutes dismiss even world famous scientists from their posts for the crimes of being Jewish, having Jewish wives, spouses, or being known to be critical of Nazi policy. Undoubtedly, the person with the highest recognition factor, globally, in the 20th century, was Albert Einstein. He had revolutionised physics with his two interrelated theories of special relativity, in 1905, and general relativity, in 1915. Einstein had settled in Berlin in 1914, was soon elected to chairs of several august scientific institutions. Early in 1933, Einstein was on an international speaking tour, mobbed, as ever, for his celebrity. He took every available opportunity, publicly and forcibly, to forcefully to condemn Hitler’s brutal reaction to the Reichstag fire and the racist laws that followed. In retaliation, the Nazis confiscated his property. He submitted his resignation from the Prussian Academy of Science and never returned to to Germany, soon settling in the United States. His departure from the German scientific community was merely to be the first of many. The widespread damage that the Nazis racial policies inflicted on Germany, to the enduring benefit of America, may be seen in the 2014 report entitled "German Jewish Emigres and US Invention,” which claims to be the first systematic empirical analysis of the effects of German Jewish emigres and US innovation. Jewish emigres from Nazi Germany revolutionised American science. More than 133,000 of them found refuge in the US.

The National Refugee Service listed roughly 900 lawyers, 2,000 physicians, 1500 writers, 1500 musicians, and, of importance to us today, 2,400 academics. This was some brain drain, a veritable flood of talents, from many fields of endeavour in Germany, would suffer from the evaporation of so much skill and knowledge. More especially, at a stroke, both physics and chemistry were largely denuded of the stars of science and technology, who would be immensely important to the war that Hitler was planning. We begin to see, here, how, through his hatred of the Jews, central to Nazi ideology, Hitler committed one of his fatal mistakes. As a direct result of the Nazis racist laws and the storm that these exceedingly brilliant people foresaw would engulf them if they remained, as my research has identified, at least 34 of the greatest scientists of the 20th century left Germany and Austria. Now, ladies and gentlemen, you are in the presence of greatness. Every name, here, has an awesome scientific story behind it. Of the 34, all but three were Jewish, 17 had won, or went on to win, Nobel prizes in science, and 24 would work on the Manhattan Project, nine of whom were among the Nobel science laureates. In addition to the reverse of the respective roles of America and Germany in the attainment of Nobel science prizes, the numbers of patents registered at the US patents and trademark office, strikingly condemn Hitler for the lasting damage that must have been inflicted on German’s science.

The 2014 report confirms 17.4% of all German and Austrian professors in chemistry were dismissed between 1933 and 1941. US patenting was increased by a minimum 31%. The emigres encouraged innovation by attracting new researchers to their fields. US inventors, who collaborated with emigre professors, began to patent at substantially higher levels in the 1940s and 1950s. It is therefore beyond doubt that German Jewish immigrants into America revolutionised US science and innovation to the long-term detriment of Germany. Ask yourself, from where does most of the innovation we enjoy today emanate? The West Coast of America, the East Coast, both, Israel? Certainly not from Heidelberg, Freiberg, Stuttgart, Dresden, or any of the other German university cities that were once so important that fell from dominance, along with German culture, from what was once the land of poets and thinkers. And too, from the former centrality of the German language in engineering, all gone, thanks to Adolf Hitler. So, we have explored the long-term damage to Germany and the concomitant benefit to America, but the almost immediate, and more crucial, damage may be seen in the context of the atomic bomb. It took the Americans until August, 1945, to ready the bomb for the destruction of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to bring a swift close to a war that could, otherwise, have consumed another one or six or 10 million lives. And, wait, that’s the end of the story. Let’s go back to the very beginning. In February, 1932, at the University of Cambridge, England, James Chadwick discovered the neutron, conceived of a decade earlier by leading British physicist, Lord Ernest Rutherford.

Shortly after that, Leo Szilard, newly arrived in London from Vienna, read English author’s HG Well’s 1914 novel, “The World Set Free.” There is science and there is prescience. Wells, employing the latter, describes new weapons of great destructive capacity. The novelist somehow foresaw the effects of atomic weapons and forecast that they would be so calamitous that war would just not be allowed to happen again. If only. Szilard duly took note. The following April, colleagues of Chadwick split lithium atoms using accelerated protons. In Rome, Enrico Fermi was doing something similar, physics itself. If not yet exactly fissioning was certainly fizzing. Szilard, seeking access to a laboratory and a source of radiation in London, approached physicist Mr. T A Chalmers at St. Bartholomew’s hospital and persuaded him to collaborate on experiments. They assailed an iodine compound with neutrons and discovered a means of isotope separation, which became known as the Szilard-Chalmers process. On the 13th of September, 1933, 10 days after the UK declared war on Germany, something remarkable happened. Szilard read in the London press that Lord Rutherford, in a lecture the previous day, asserted that anyone who looked for a source of power and the transformation of the atom, was talking moonshine. Szilard was, as I’m sure you would’ve been, outraged and he determined, then and there, to prove to the contrary. Outrage led to absent-minded ruminating and, as the lights turned green for him to cross Southampton Row, close to the British Museum, he had his light bulb moment. Szilard realised, in a flash of inspiration, possibly, as bright within his mind as that which would illuminate the New Mexico desert, Alamogordo, a dozen years later, with the first test of an atomic bomb.

There’s a great deal of energy might be generated for a given source using the very neutrons of which Rutherford, himself, had conceived in 1921 and a self-sustaining chain reaction could be instigated. Six months later, in the spring of 1934, Szilard applied for a patent on the concept of a neutron induced nuclear chain reaction. It was granted two years later. He then tried to create such a chain reaction by bombarding beryllium with x-rays. It was unsuccessful. In 1933, Szilard had met Sir William Beveridge, economist, social reformer, and director of the London School of Economics. With his eponymous 1942 report, the basis of the British post World War II welfare state and of the NHS, Beveridge radically, profoundly, and broadly influenced the future of Britain. Szilard was hardly less influential with Beveridge. Together they established the Academic Assistance Council to bring Jewish scientists out of Nazi Germany and find them employment in the UK. Even today, it continues its work as the Council for At-Risk Academics. From 1935 to 1937, Szilard worked as a research physicist at the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University. There he met Professor Frederick Lindemann. A gentile German, anti-Nazi, he would become lord Cherwell and scientific advisor throughout the war to prime minister Churchill. And Szilard renewed his acquaintance with sir Willie Beveridge, who was now master of University College, Oxford. Happy days. They were not to last. In January, 1938, Szilard concluded that another European war was inevitable and still wanting to be at least one day ahead of Hitler, moved to the United States.

In July, 1938, Liese Meitner, an Austrian Jewish physicist, feared for her life following the Anschluss, left Germany for Sweden. The following December, she received a letter from her former Berlin colleague, chemist, Otto Hahn, informing her that he and his assistant, Fritz Strassman, both of them opponents of the Nazi creed, had bombarded uranium with neutrons and identified, as the result, the chemical barium. Now, I know what you’re thinking, the same as Meitner. To her and her nephew, Otto Frisch, another physicist who was staying with her at the time, it was obvious this amounted to clear evidence that what Hahn had done was to catalyse nuclear fission. Meitner now hastily communicated the sensational news to Niels Bohr, the Nobel laureate, Danish, Jewish physicist and the guru of the physicists of the interwar years. The German scientists held the lead in the creation of a nuclear weapon. While attending a scientific convention, the first month of the fateful year, 1939, at George Washington University in DC. Niels Bohr, one might say somewhat ingenuously, publicly announced what Meitner told him about Hahn having created nuclear fission. One might also almost say that Schrodinger’s cat was out of the box, but that’s another story altogether. To the world’s most prominent physicists, the news was truly momentous, but they understood that by splitting the atom and achieving nuclear fission, it would be possible to build an atomic bomb and that such a weapon would generate, or rather unleash, unimaginable quantities of energy. Of course, all knew that a monumental task lay ahead, but the grim fact was that, in 1939, on the very verge of war, the murderous Nazi regime was in pole position on the starting grid.

On the morning of the 1st of September, 1939, the German army undertook two invasions, of Poland, triggering World War II, and of the Uranverein, the Iranian club in Berlin, bringing it under army control and total secrecy. The mission of the Uranverein was to build the German bomb. Werner Heisenberg was the principal theoretician of the German project. He had been first the disciple, and later the close personal friend, of Niels Bohr, and we shall return to them later. In 1939, Szilard, now in New York, heard about Hahn’s fissioning of uranium from Eugene Wigner, by then installed at Princeton University. Szilard immediately appreciated that uranium might be the element capable of sustaining the chain reaction that he had patented and had been trying so hard to provoke. He teamed up with Enrico Fermi. His wife was Jewish, which is why he left Italy for America, and who was later recruited for the Manhattan Project at Columbia University, in New York, to research and experiment with neutron emissions. They were agreed that the element uranium might, indeed, sustain the chain reaction. Working all his contacts, Szilard secured the use of the laboratory at Columbia, borrowed $2,000, about $40,000 today, for materials, and obtained from Professor Lindemann, at Oxford University, a beryllium cylinder. In the laboratory at Columbia, bombarding uranium with a radium beryllium neutron source, Szilard stimulated sufficient neutron multiplication to be satisfied that a chain reaction might indeed be possible. Appreciating the consequences of his discovery all too well, Szilard later wrote, “That night, there was little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief.”

In the cold light of the following day, Szilard reflected that, whilst uranium fission he produced generated more neutrons than it consumed, he had not actually provoked a chain reaction. Realising that he needed much greater resources than the funds available to him would allow, he decided to go straight to the top, to no less a person than the president, Franklin D Roosevelt. He had to be recruited for Szilard’s project. And so, once his chain of reasoning, only Albert Einstein would have the gravitas to gain the attention of the American president. Szilard persuaded Wigner and Edward Teller to help him to enlist the support of Einstein. Szilard produced the first draught of a letter to Roosevelt, which explained the possibility of creating nuclear weapons, alerted him to the danger that the Germans might be in the lead, and sought Roosevelt’s commitment for an American programme to create the bomb. On the 2nd of August, 1939, after an abortive first attempt to find Einstein living at the far end of Long Island, they arrived at his home. They explained everything to the great man whose reaction was gornisht or more accurately, I had not thought of that. In any event, Einstein, you will not be surprised to learn was not slow on the uptake. The letter was finessed, unsigned, but don’t just take my word for it. You can hear it from the horse’s mouths.

• What we wanted to say, but we had a problem. How can we say what we had to say in the short enough way so the president can read it? Finally, we decided that atomic energy will rate one and a half pages, single spaced.

• [Narrator] Edward Teller, a third Jewish Hungarian refugee, drove Szilard to Einstein’s house for a final meeting on July 30th.

• I entered history as Szilard’s chauffeur trying to find Einstein at the northern tip of Long Island. Einstein received us in slippers, gave Szilard and his chauffeur some tea, read the letter, and signed.

• What has become known to history as the Einstein Szilard letter, was delivered to the president in the Oval Office. Don’t think in terms of emails. By Alexander Sachs, a Jewish economist and banker and a close friend of Roosevelt, nine weeks later, on the 11th of October, 1939, at the behest of the president, an advisory committee on uranium was quickly convened, its first session held within the month, and was attended by Szilard, Teller and Wigner. Szilard asked the committee for $6,000, about $105,000 in today’s money, for the acquisition of supplies for experiments, 50 tonnes of uranium oxide and, to control the chain reaction, 50 tonnes of graphite or, alternatively, heavy water. Now, here’s something noteworthy. To make a nuclear reactor work properly, you need to slow the reaction down, otherwise, within the laboratory, you might just detonate an atomic bomb. A controllable nuclear reactor required blocks of graphite. It’s like pencil lead, greasy to the touch, light, mostly carbon, and a very good moderator of the speed of neutrons. Szilard went to the National Carbon Company, a manufacturer of graphite, specifically inquiring whether any impurities were to be found in graphite. Szilard made a crucial discovery. Graphite usually contained boron. Now, Szilard knew that boron was an absorber of neutrons, so he ordered graphite that would be boron free. This provides us with another example of Szilard’s genius.

Had either of them known it, this was the point of departure for Szilard’s American effort and Werner Heisenberg’s German effort for the Uranverein concluded that graphite was unsuitable for use as a neutron moderator, but did not get as far as asking the vital question about let alone seeking boron free graphite. The Germans were seeking heavy water as a moderator, but found, to their cost, that that’s an inferior solution to Szilard’s. Meanwhile, in Great Britain, at the University of Birmingham, Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch, Meitner’s nephew, as you will recall, were working towards the same end as Szilard. They made rapid progress and in March, 1940, a note the Frisch-Peierls memorandum, was sent to his majesty’s government asserting that an atomic bomb could be created from a small amount of uranium-235. This prompted Britain, in June, 1940, to set up a scientific working group, the MAUD committee, to perform the research required to determine if an atomic bomb was feasible. The research was distributed amongst the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Birmingham, and Liverpool. They would examine various means of uranium enrichment, the properties of uranium-235, the use of the then hypothetical element, plutonium, nuclear reactor design, and nuclear weapon design. 15 months of work of the MAUD committee lay ahead. Meanwhile, back in America, one committee led to another. On the 27th of June, that 1940, the National Defence Research Committee, later the Office of Scientific Research and Development, was formed to coordinate, supervise, and conduct scientific research on the problems underlying the development and production and use of mechanisms and devices of warfare and charged with making the crucial decision as to whether or not to recommend to president that the US commit to the massive undertaking of the building of the bomb. Szilard and Teller were members of this committee.

The wheels were grinding slowly and it would take the British to provide the necessary impetus. In the summer of 1941, British research culminated in the MAUD’s report, confirming both the feasibility and necessity of building an atomic bomb for the war effort. It was determined that such a weapon would be small enough and light enough to be carried by a bomber of that time. Churchill’s government thereupon created the deliberately misleadingly named Tube Alloys programme on the 30th of August, 1941. By this, Winston Churchill became the first national leader to approve a nuclear weapons programme. The Britains were four and a half months ahead of the Americans, not that either of them knew it at the time. Now, quickly, an interesting side story. In September, 1941, Heisenberg, tailed by the Gestapo, who did not trust him, took a train for Berlin to Nazi occupied Denmark, to see Bohr. To cut a long story short, Bohr and Heisenberg took a walk in the woods near Bohr’s home. One of Heisenberg’s claim to fame was his so-called Uncertainty Principle, and what he and Bohr discussed has remained uncertain to this day. They could not even agree between themselves, after the war, what they said to one another. Was Heisenberg seeking Bohr’s blessing to build the bomb? Was he there to tell Bohr that the German effort was most unlikely to succeed so the Americans or the Allies shouldn’t waste waste their time on it? Perhaps, but in any event, Bohr’s takeaway from the meeting was almost certainly the opposite of what Heisenberg had intended. Bohr would go on, in 1943, to tell the Manhattan Project that they needed to get their skates on.

In America, near the end of 1941, a crucial meeting of the OSRD was held, which Szilard and Teller attended. A timetable was produced. Achieve a chain reaction by January, 1943, start manufacturing plutonium in nuclear reactors by January, 1944, and produce an atomic bomb, JaJa, by January, 1945. The go decision was taken. The president would be recommended to start the programme to build the bomb. The date of the meeting was Saturday, the 6th of December, 1941. What happened The following morning? The world awoke to the news that the Japanese had launched a devastating attack on Pearl Harbour. Roosevelt referred to the 7th of December, 1941, as “a date that will live in infamy” and America was at war with Japan. It had taken Szilard eight years and two months since he first conceived of how to create an atomic bomb with his perception of a nuclear chain reaction in reaction to Rutherford’s defeatism through his patent via the experimentation at St. Bart, Cavendish in Columbia and his order for pure graphite down to persuading a high level American committee to recommend to the president of the United States to build the bomb. Could it properly be asserted that the bomb could have been deployed over Japan in August, 1945, without Szilard’s involvement? I think not. Churchill’s war, up to this time, had been going badly. In Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Greece, Crete, and North Africa, Britain had experienced only losses and defeat, what the British Prime Minister would refer to rather than as the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning, the turning of the tide at the second battle of El Alamein, in October, November, 1942, which saved from German invasion, the Yishuv of Palestine in the oil fields of the Gulf was still almost a year into the future.

America too was licking its wounds. The US Pacific fleets had just been almost completely destroyed at Pearl Harbour and the US occupied Philippines attacked by the Japanese the following day. America had enough on its plate without looking for more enemies, so there was no certainty that America would declare war on Germany and join into the European war. After all, in World War I, America allied with Britain for 1917 against Germany, refrained from ever declaring war on Britain’s other enemy, the Ottoman Empire. Two days before Pearl Harbour on the 5th of December, 1941, the Soviet army launched a massive counter attack against the Wehrmacht at the gates of Moscow. The war in Russia was about to become Hitler’s worst nightmare. Yet the setback at Moscow did not prevent the Fuhrer from committing yet another of his fatal mistakes. On the 11th of December, four days after Pearl Harbour, Hitler declared war on America. Roosevelt, later caving into Churchill’s tragic persuasion, resolved that the war in Europe should be America’s top priority over that against Japan and nothing less than total victory, as the allies objective. On the 19th of January, 1942, Roosevelt formally instigated the Manhattan Engineer District, charged with building the bomb. It morphed into the Manhattan Project at the end of 1942. Szilard began to receive the necessary materials for a large-scale chain reaction experiment, uranium and boron-free graphite. At the direction, this appears in the movie, by the way, at the direction of Szilard and Fermi, a graphite block nuclear reactor, called Chicago Pile-1, was built in a squash court under the grandstand of Stag Field, the University of Chicago’s football ground. I must tell you there were, I think it comes through in the film, they weren’t sure whether they might blow up the whole of Chicago.

On the 2nd of December, 1942, one month ahead of the target date, bombarding uranium with a radium beryllium neutron source, as they had at Columbia, in 1939, they induced the first successful nuclear chain reaction, vindicating, Szilard’s atomic theories and all his efforts since 1933. He was the first to conceive of a nuclear chain reaction and he was involved in its eventual realisation in Chicago, nine years later, Szilard and Fermi still believed that enormous amounts of uranium would be required for an atomic bomb. Elucidation and a solution were about to be provided by the British. Initially, the British project was larger and more advanced than the American effort, but partly because Britain was with within bombing range of its German enemy, and mainly because the Brits just did not have the resources, it would eventually cost the Americans $2 billion, about $32 billion today. Once the US entered the war, the British government was prepared to disclose its secrets of Tube Alloys to the Americans. Britain shelved their separate nuclear ambitions and Tube Alloys was subsumed into the Manhattan Project, which was greatly energised by it, not least as to suitability of uranium 235, which would be used in the Hiroshima bomb little boy. The Nagasaki bomb, Fat Man, would be fueled by plutonium. Poor primary research and production sites were established for the Manhattan Project, metallurgical laboratory of the University of Chicago, a plutonium production facility at Hanford, Washington State, a uranium facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which explains why there is a street there named after Leo Szilard, and a weapons research and design laboratory at Los Alamos, set up as late as September, 1943, as a clandestine, centralised facility, so called to coordinate the scientific research for the development of the bomb. In its location in the deserts of New Mexico, commended itself as an isolated place of safety where its remarkable scientists and engineers, about 13,000 of them, would be kept remote from the general population.

The director was the theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, J Robert Oppenheimer. Hey, Rob, you owe your job to Leo. According to Wigner, if the uranium project could have been run on ideas alone, no one but Leo Szilard would’ve been needed. But Szilard’s ideas were only part of his achievement in bringing the Americans to the timely point of commitment to making the atomic bomb. It was his relentless drive, his indefatigable and repeated experimentation, his ability to recruit the very persons he would need for each breakthrough, and his determination to get to his goal of the American’s commitment to build the bomb, that sets him apart from all other contributors. From his light bulb moment, I hope you can read this clearly, ‘cause there isn’t time to go through it. From his light bulb moment in London, in September, 1933, when he conceived of the idea of a nuclear chain reaction, to his being a contributor to the meeting on the 6th of December, 1941, and the Americans made the recommendation for the commitment he sought, and taken eight years of single-minded, usually solitary, focus and energy, and you can see on this timeline, his name appears on almost every line. Hitler was right in one of his observations, made in his second book, not “Mein Kampf,” the other one that didn’t get a title. The Americans had the greatest space, Lebensraum, manpower, and financial clout, with the addition of the European emigre geniuses, the most destructive weapon imaginable was destined to be an American one.

Had Hitler retained it first, he would have deployed it, as the US did over Japan, to devastating effect and the whole world might, to this day, be living under the jack boot of the Third Reich, some 75 years into the 1,000 that Hitler claimed for it. Ironically, his fundamental hatred for the Jews, another of his fatal mistakes, served the interests of the Americans and drove out of Europe the very people indispensable to the realisation of Hitler’s ambitions. It is plain that without the acquisition from Europe, vast amounts of talent, much of it directly connected to nuclear physics and Szilard’s ubiquity on that critical path to Chicago Pile-1 going critical when it did, America certainly could not have developed the atomic bomb in time to forestall the invasion of the Japanese home islands by incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is thought that the alternative would’ve been a debilitating fight over every inch of the home islands of Japan in which death toll would’ve been in the millions with a weaponizing of every seven-year-old boy and girl and up. Indeed, according, as I say, to the Navy Department, this saved 10 million, the bomb saved 10 million Japanese lives. The beneficent timing of the atomic bomb endeavour, and the consequent saving of all those American and Japanese lives, was accordingly the achievement of Leo Szilard. As to the timing, the achievement of Leo Szilard… I think I’ve got time to read this to you, which is important. It came to Szilard that his fundamental disposition should be to save the world. When he was 10, he read “The Tragedy of Man” a Hungarian epic poem in which humanity faces extinction yet continues to survive by maintaining a narrow margin of hope. With this hope, his hope, his foresight, Szilard brought about improbable scientific and political feats.

Apart from those about which you’ve heard, such as many attempts after VE Day to prevent the use of the bomb over Japan and, ultimately, the installation of the Washington-Moscow hotline. In addition, Szilard published a novel, “The Voice of the Dolphins,” a parable of the technical prowess and moral limitation of our times. For essentially his entire adult life, Szilard sought to increase the likelihood that the results of basic scientific research, which have so greatly increased humanity’s ability to manipulate the natural world, especially since World War II, would be used for humanity’s benefit. In the last months of his life, after he finally married his long-term friend, Trude Weiss, in 1951, he stopped living with two suitcases packed and settled down in San Diego as a biologist, where he worked with Jonas Salk, the nemesis of polio. Sadly, five months after joining the Salk Institute at La Jolla, Szilard died in his sleep of a heart attack, in May, 1964 at the age of 66, his modesty ensuring that few, apart now from us, have heard of him and the opportunity he gave to Robert Oppenheimer. I’ll try and answer some questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Please pronounce his name as Silard. Okay, but the important thing to me was the accent over the A. So I said Szilard, but if you like Silard.

Voice of the dolphin, well, I got to that. Hitler, somebody said the difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits. The book I’m writing is full of his limitations.

Rabi von Neumann, oh, Rabi. Rabi became chief scientific advisor to Eisenhower as president. Von Neumann was the inventor of the algorithm which controls our lives.

Berta, I dunno a lot about Meitner Teller, who said, he said, “I entered history as Bohr’s chauffeur,” because they needed to find Einstein. They were in Manhattan and they rented the car and drove out one Sunday looking all over Long Island. It’s a long island. They didn’t find him. The next Sunday they rented the car again and drove out along to the end of Long Island and didn’t find Einstein, but they were filling the car with gas in the evening and in the gas station, Szilard, Silard, saw a boy with a fishing rod and he said, “Do you know an old man with white hair that likes fishing?” He said, “Oh, you mean uncle Albert. He’s in that house over there.” By such filaments does the future of the world hang.

Maria Erdi’s father went to the same school in Budapest as Szilard, Teller, Von Neumann, and from where many of the most famous hung. The second chapter of “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” could we have the very last slide please? The very last. The second chapter of this book is called Men from Mars, and that’s a reference to the Hungarians who were at Los Alamos.

Q: Why were they referred to as martians?

A: Because they were incredibly clever and they had an impenetrable language. No doubt the Hungarians were in a class of their own. Ian Fermi established chain reaction took place central to the bomb, so at least the godfather of the bomb. But my point is that the timing of the Manhattan, the creation of the Manhattan Project was entirely Szilard’s. Without him it would not have happened, at least when it did. If there’s one person of faith one might consider who is not forgotten, but escaped death often, I’m awfully sorry, I can’t take that in. It was only later that the evicted scientists managed to get to the US. There was a restriction on immigration accepted in this country where the atom bomb was first developed. It was only the alarm bells were ringing that German scientists…

Well, yes, I think I said that, that Germany was first on the starting grid, in pole position on the starting grid. Amelia gave a lecture on this subject last week, so we ought to get together and compare notes. In the early 60s, as a teenager, Hashomer Hatzair, socialist Zionist youth movement in New York, we all read “The Voice of the Dolphins” by Leo Szilard, which was also read by everyone in the SANE Anti-nuclear Movement.

Yes, unfortunately, H G Wells’ idea that wars would become dangerous to humanity ever to take place again, wasn’t realised. Albert Einstein with Szilard, click here, thank you.

Q: Will history repeat itself? Will present events in Israel trigger a brain drain of highly skilled Jewish academics and scientists to the United States of America?

A: I’m also fearful of that, Monte Golden.

Sally’s iPhone, thank you for imaging that. Full of fascinating information. Sorry, not very modest of me to read that out. And also for underlining the results of the brain drain. One of my college friends had emigre fathers who were PhD graduates of the Max Planck Institute and the grandfather was professor of paediatrics at Vienna, and the grandmother was an ophthalmologist.

Rob, no question about it, the German Jews, were something special, or the European Jews, were absolutely special. Wait till people realise there might never have been an atomic bomb without the Jews. That’ll make us popular.

Thank you to Lockdown University. Great, good, thank you very much. Whole podcast, yes, I’ve heard the whole podcast on the bomb about Szilard, several episodes. Very, very good, I agree. Not as well known as the others, Betty Lowenstein, because he of his modesty and he was a gadfly, always moving on to other things. By the way, as with Oppenheimer, in the movie, he was regarded with great suspicion, mainly because he was a foreigner and Jewish and tailed by the FBI and Groves wanted to limit Szilard’s room for manoeuvre, but failed. I think it was Stimson who talked Groves out of it. Szilard left the Manhattan Project. Well, he was still involved in Chicago, so I don’t agree, I’m sorry Jack Salem, with your proposition. He switched to genetics.

Yes, I think I got to that when I mentioned the Salk Institute.

Q: Why did they have to drop the second bomb? Well, this is greatly debated. Was it a massive retribution for Pearl Harbour? Did they want to make sure that the plutonium bomb would work as well as the uranium bomb? Was it that because the Japanese didn’t react quickly enough?

A: The Russians had a great deal to answer for in that. I’ll tell you what the Japanese prime minister said when he was finally heard, when the God like Japanese, sorry, emperor, said, “The outcome of the war has not gone entirely to our best interests.” That’s what you call euphemism. There was a lot of activity in the Imperial Palace in Tokyo after the first bomb and they couldn’t get their heads around it, mostly.

Q: What did I think of the film?

A: I’d like to see it with subtitles. I couldn’t understand much of what they said. It was a magnificent script, what I heard of it. I think they owed more to Szilard than was admitted, but it was a great piece of work, yes. A lot better than “Dunkirk.”

Would you mind repeating or summarising how he saved the… Yes, if they had to invade the Japanese Home Islands, the US Navy Department estimate 10 million Japanese and a million American soldiers would’ve died. The Japanese would’ve fought over every inch of it. There are probably still Japanese in some of the forests in the Pacific who don’t know that war has come to an end. Until the Japanese emperor said to them, from now on, we have to be a peace loving nation, they were feral and vile. In China, they were absolutely the most bestial of people, rivalling the Nazis. And then they were told to behave themselves and they have done ever since 1945.

Q: Did he go to Los Al?

A: I’m not sure that Szilard ever went to Los Alamos. And there were lots of silly things in the movie like Oppenheimer going to see Einstein to ask whether a chain reaction would be unstoppable. Never happened. Szilard, oh, joined, oh Robert, hi. With your wonderful old professor, Joseph Rotblat, was also in the Manhattan Project to found the Pugwash Conferences. Yes, that led to the non-proliferation treaties, I agree, and to the hotline and Rotblat got a Nobel peace prize. Fancy being a student of Rotblat, amazing.

JW three had the film in subtitles. I’m told that home, in Manchester, had it round the corner from where I live, but I didn’t know that. Our maternal grandfather and his brother were both physicists in Berlin. Their doctorates were about splitting of the atom.. Grandfather was patents director at AEG and state patents official. His brother holding the Iron Cross and Red Cross World War II. He saw taken away, was kicked out of his professorship at the university, denied access to libraries, committed suicide three days after Kristallnacht.

If you want to be even more horrified than that, read the most amazing, compelling book by Lord Finkelstein, Danny Finkelstein. You have to read it, but it’s horrendous. Went with a physics professor at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland to hear Szilard talk about his urgent fight for peace. The auditoriums was full of students, faculty, and citizens inspired by his passion. No question, he was an amazing fellow. These three books that I show, only three of those that I read, of those, the most informative is the centre one. The most informative about Szilard is the William Lanouette one, with his sister’s participation. But the most interesting and fascinating book is cast in Copenhagen. I won’t tell you anything about it. You must read it, it’s something amazing.

And that, I think is that, thank you very much.