Making of the Atomic Bomb Read online

  The postwar German infection of despair, cynicism and rage at defeat ran a course close to febrile hallucination in Berlin. The university, centrally located between Dorotheenstrasse and Unter den Linden due east of the Brandenburg Gate, was well positioned to observe the bizarre effects. Szilard missed the November 1918 revolution that began among mutinous sailors at Kiel, quickly spread to Berlin and led to the retreat of the Kaiser to Holland, to armistice and eventually to the founding, after bloody riots, of the insecure Weimar Republic. By the time he arrived in Berlin at the end of 1919 more than eight months of martial law had been lifted, leaving a city at first starving and bleak but soon restored to intoxicating life.

  “There was snow on the ground,” an Englishman recalls of his first look at postwar Berlin in the middle of the night, “and the blend of snow, neon and huge hulking buildings was unearthly. You felt you had arrived somewhere totally strange.” To a German involved in the Berlin theater of the 1920s “the air was always bright, as if it were peppered, like New York late in autumn: you needed little sleep and never seemed tired.24 Nowhere else did you fail in such good form, nowhere else could you be knocked on the chin time and again without being counted out.” The German aristocracy retreated from view, and intellectuals, film stars and journalists took its place; the major annual social event in the city where an imperial palace stood empty was the Press Ball, sponsored by the Berlin Press Club, which drew as many as six thousand guests.25, 26

  Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed his first glass-walled skyscraper in postwar Berlin.27 Yehudi Menuhin made his precocious debut, with Einstein in the audience to applaud him.28 George Grosz sorted among his years of savage observation on Berlin’s wide boulevards and published Ecce Homo.29 Vladimir Nabokov was there, observing “an elderly, rosy-faced beggar woman with legs cut off at the pelvis . . . set down like a bust at the foot of a wall and . . . selling paradoxical shoelaces.” Fyodor Vinberg, one of the Czar’s departed officers, was there, publishing a shoddy newspaper, promoting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he had personally introduced into Germany from Russia—a new German edition of that pseudo-Machiavellian, patently fraudulent fantasy of world conquest sold more than 100,000 copies—and openly advocating the violent destruction of the Jews.30, 31 Hitler was not there until the end, because he was barred from northern Germany after his release from prison in 1924, but he sent rumpelstiltskin Joseph Goebbels to stand in for him; Goebbels learned to break heads and spin propaganda in an open, lusty, jazz-drunk city he slandered in his diary as “a dark and mysterious enigma.”32

  In the summer of 1922 the rate of exchange in Germany sank to 400 marks to the dollar. It fell to 7,000 to the dollar at the beginning of January 1923, the truly terrible year. One hundred sixty thousand in July. One million in August. And 4.2 trillion marks to the dollar on November 23, 1923, when adjustment finally began. Banks advertised for bookkeepers good with zeros and paid out cash withdrawals by weight. Antique stores filled to the ceiling with the pawned treasures of the bankrupt middle class. A theater seat sold for an egg. Only those with hard currency—mostly foreigners—thrived at a time when it was possible to cross Germany by first-class railroad carriage for pennies, but they also earned the enmity of starving Germans. “No, one did not feel guilty,” the visiting Englishman crows, “one felt it was perfectly normal, a gift from the gods.”33

  The German physicist Walter Elsasser, who later emigrated to the United States, worked in Berlin in 1923 during an interlude in his student years; his father had agreed to pay his personal expenses. He was no foreigner, but with foreign help he was able to live like one:

  In order to make me independent of [inflation], my father had appealed to his friend, Kaufmann, the banker from Basle, who had established for me an account in American dollars at a large bank. . . . Once a week I took half a day off to go downtown by subway and withdrew my allowance in marks; and it was more each time, of course. Returning to my rented room, I at once bought enough food staples to last the week, for within three days, all the prices would have risen appreciably, by fifteen percent, say, so that my allowance would have run short and would not have permitted such pleasures as an excursion to Potsdam or to the lake country on Sundays. . . . I was too young, much too callous, and too inexperienced to understand what this galloping inflation must have meant—actual starvation and misery—to people who had to live on pensions or other fixed incomes, or even to wage earners, especially those with children, whose pay lagged behind the rate of inflation.34

  So must Szilard have lived, except that no one recalls ever seeing him cook for himself; he preferred the offerings of delicatessens and cafés. He would have understood what inflation meant and some of the reasons for its extremity. But though Szilard was preternaturally observant—“During a long life among scientists,” writes Wigner, “I have met no one with more imagination and originality, with more independence of thought and opinion”—his recollections and his papers preserve almost nothing of these Berlin days.35 Germany’s premier city at the height of its postwar social, political and intellectual upheaval earns exactly one sentence from Szilard: “Berlin at that time lived in the heyday of physics.” That was how much physics, giving extraordinary birth during the 1920s to its modern synthesis, meant to him.36

  * * *

  Four years of study usually preceded a German student’s thesis work. Then, with a professor’s approval, the student solved a problem of his own conception or one his professor supplied. “In order to be acceptable,” says Szilard, it “had to be a piece of really original work.”37 If the thesis found favor, the student took an oral examination one afternoon and if he passed he was duly awarded a doctorate.

  Szilard had already given a year of his life to the Army and two years to engineering. He wasted no time advancing through physics. In the summer of 1921 he went to Max von Laue and asked for a thesis topic. Von Laue apparently decided to challenge Szilard—the challenge may have been friendly or it may have been an attempt to put him in his place—and gave him an obscure problem in relativity theory. “I couldn’t make any headway with it. As a matter of fact, I was not even convinced that this was a problem that could be solved.”38 Szilard worked on it for six months, until the Christmas season, “and I thought Christmastime is not a time to work, it is a time to loaf, so I thought I would just think whatever comes to my mind.”

  What he thought, in three weeks, was how to solve a baffling inconsistency in thermodynamics, the branch of physics that concerns relationships between heat and other forms of energy. There are two thermodynamic theories, both highly successful at predicting heat phenomena. One, the phenomenological, is more abstract and generalized (and therefore more useful); the other, the statistical, is based on an atomic model and corresponds more closely to physical reality. In particular, the statistical theory depicts thermal equilibrium as a state of random motion of atoms. Einstein, for example, had demonstrated in important papers in 1905 that Brownian motion—the continuous, random motion of particles such as pollen suspended in a liquid—was such a state.39 But the more useful phenomenological theory treated thermal equilibrium as if it were static, a state of no change. That was the inconsistency.

  Szilard went for long walks—Berlin would have been cold and gray, the grayness sometimes relieved by days of brilliant sunshine—“and I saw something in the middle of the walk; when I came home I wrote it down; next morning I woke up with a new idea and I went for another walk; this crystallized in my mind and in the evening I wrote it down.”40 It was, he thought, the most creative period of his life. “Within three weeks I had produced a manuscript of something which was really quite original. But I didn’t dare to take it to von Laue, because it was not what he had asked me to do.”

  He took it instead to Einstein after a seminar, buttonholed him and said he would like to tell him about something he had been doing.

  “Well, what have you been doing?” Szilard remembers Einstein saying.41

  Szi
lard reported his “quite original” idea.

  “That’s impossible,” Einstein said. “This is something that cannot be done.”

  “Well, yes, but I did it.”

  “How did you do it?”

  Szilard began explaining. “Five or ten minutes” later, he says, Einstein understood. After only a year of university physics, Szilard had worked out a rigorous mathematical proof that the random motion of thermal equilibrium could be fitted within the framework of the phenomenological theory in its original, classical form, without reference to a limiting atomic model—“and [Einstein] liked this very much.”

  Thus emboldened, Szilard took his paper—its title would be “On the extension of phenomenological thermodynamics to fluctuation phenomena”—to von Laue, who received it quizzically and took it home. “And next morning, early in the morning, the telephone rang. It was von Laue. He said, ‘Your manuscript has been accepted as your thesis for the Ph.D. degree.’ ”42

  Six months later Szilard wrote another paper in thermodynamics, “On the decrease of entropy in a thermodynamic system by the intervention of intelligent beings,” that eventually would be recognized as one of the important foundation documents of modern information theory.43 By then he had his advanced degree; he was Dr. Leo Szilard now. He experimented with X-ray effects in crystals, von Laue’s field, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Dahlem until 1925; that year the University of Berlin accepted his entropy paper as his Habilitationsschrift, his inaugural dissertation, and he was thereupon appointed a Privatdozent, a position he held until he left for England in 1933.44

  One of Szilard’s sidelines, then and later, was invention. Between 1924 and 1934 he applied to the German patent office individually or jointly with his partner Albert Einstein for twenty-nine patents. Most of the joint applications dealt with home refrigeration.45 “A sad newspaper story . . . caught the attention of Einstein and Szilard one morning,” writes one of Szilard’s later American protégés: “It was reported in a Berlin newspaper that an entire family, including a number of young children, had been found asphyxiated in their apartment as a result of their inhalation of the noxious fumes of the [chemical] that was used as the refrigerant in their primitive refrigerator and that had escaped in the night through a leaky pump valve.”46 Whereupon the two physicists devised a method of pumping metallicized refrigerant by electromagnetism, a method that required no moving parts (and therefore no valve seals that might leak) except the refrigerant itself.47 A.E.G., the German General Electric, signed Szilard on as a paid consultant and actually built one of the Einstein-Szilard refrigerators, but the magnetic pump was so noisy compared to even the noisy conventional compressors of the day that it never left the engineering lab.

  Another, oddly similar invention, also patented, might have won Szilard world acclaim if he had taken it beyond the patent stage. Independently of the American experimental physicist Ernest O. Lawrence and at least three months earlier, Szilard worked out the basic principle and general design of what came to be called, as Lawrence’s invention, the cyclotron, a device for accelerating nuclear particles in a circular magnetic field, a sort of nuclear pump. Szilard applied for a patent on his device on January 5, 1929; Lawrence first thought of the cyclotron on about April 1, 1929, producing a small working model a year later—for which he won the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics.48, 49

  Szilard’s originality stopped at no waterline. Somewhere along the way from sixteen-year-old prophet of the fate of nations to thirty-one-year-old open conspirer negotiating publishing rights with H. G. Wells, he conceived an Open Conspiracy of his own. He dated his social invention from “the mid-twenties in Germany.” If so, then he went to see Wells in 1929 as much from enthusiasm for the Englishman’s perspicacity as for his vision.50 C. P. Snow, the British physicist and novelist, writes of Leo Szilard that he “had a temperament uncommon anywhere, maybe a little less uncommon among major scientists.51 He had a powerful ego and invulnerable egocentricity: but he projected the force of that personality outward, with beneficent intention toward his fellow creatures. In that sense, he had a family resemblance to Einstein on a reduced scale.” Beneficent intention in this instance is a document proposing a new organization: Der Bund—the order, the confederacy, or, more simply, the band.52

  The Bund, Szilard writes, would be “a closely knit group of people whose inner bond is pervaded by a religious and scientific spirit”:53

  If we possessed a magical spell with which to recognize the “best” individuals of the rising generation at an early age . . . then we would be able to train them to independent thinking, and through education in close association we could create a spiritual leadership class with inner cohesion which would renew itself on its own.54

  Members of this class would not be awarded wealth or personal glory. To the contrary, they would be required to take on exceptional responsibilities, “burdens” that might “demonstrate their devotion.” It seemed to Szilard that such a group stood a good chance of influencing public affairs even if it had no formal structure or constitutional position. But there was also the possibility that it might “take over a more direct influence on public affairs as part of the political system, next to government and parliament, or in the place of government and parliament.”55

  “The Order,” Szilard wrote at a different time, “was not supposed to be something like a political party . . . but rather it was supposed to represent the state.”56 He saw representative democracy working itself out somehow within the cells of thirty to forty people that would form the mature political structure of the Bund. “Because of the method of selection [and education] . . . there would be a good chance that decisions at the top level would be reached by fair majorities.”

  Szilard pursued one version or another of his Bund throughout his life. It appears as late as 1961, by then suitably disguised, in his popular story “The Voice of the Dolphins”: a tankful of dolphins at a “Vienna Institute” begin to impart their compelling wisdom to the world through their keepers and interpreters, who are U.S. and Russian scientists; the narrator slyly implies that the keepers may be the real source of wisdom, exploiting mankind’s fascination with superhuman saviors to save it.57

  A wild burst of optimism—or opportunism—energized Szilard in 1930 to organize a group of acquaintances, most of them young physicists, to begin the work of banding together. He was convinced in the mid-1920s that “the parliamentary form of democracy would not have a very long life in Germany” but he “thought that it might survive one or two generations.” Within five years he understood otherwise.58, 59 “I reached the conclusion something would go wrong in Germany . . . in 1930.” Hjalmar Schacht, the president of the German Reichsbank, meeting in Paris that year with a committee of economists called to decide how much Germany could pay in war reparations, announced that Germany could pay none at all unless its former colonies, stripped from it after the war, were returned. “This was such a striking statement to make that it caught my attention, and I concluded that if Hjalmar Schacht believed he could get away with this, things must be rather bad. I was so impressed by this that I wrote a letter to my bank and transferred every single penny I had out of Germany into Switzerland.”60

  A far more organized Bund was advancing to power in Germany with another and more primitive program to save the world. That program, set out arrogantly in an autobiographical book—Mein Kampf—would achieve a lengthy and bloody trial. Yet Szilard in the years ahead would lead a drive to assemble a Bund of sorts; submerged from view, working to more urgent and more immediate ends than utopia, that “closely knit group of people” would finally influence world events more enormously even than Nazism.

  * * *

  Sometime during the 1920s, a new field of research caught Szilard’s attention: nuclear physics, the study of the nucleus of the atom, where most of its mass—and therefore its energy—is concentrated. He was familiar with the long record of outstanding work in the general field of radioactivity
of the German chemist Otto Hahn and the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner, who made a productive team at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. No doubt he was also alert as always to the peculiar tension in the air that signaled the possibility of new developments.

  The nuclei of some light atoms could be shattered by bombarding them with atomic particles; that much the great British experimental physicist Ernest Rutherford had already demonstrated. Rutherford used one nucleus to bombard another, but since both nuclei were strongly positively charged, the bombarded nucleus repelled most attacks. Physicists were therefore looking for ways to accelerate particles to greater velocities, to force them past the nucleus’ electrical barrier. Szilard’s design of a cyclotron-like particle accelerator that could serve such a purpose indicates that he was thinking about nuclear physics as early as 1928.

  Until 1932 he did no more than think. He had other work and nuclear physics was not yet sufficiently interesting to him. It became compelling in 1932. A discovery in physics opened the field to new possibilities while discoveries Szilard made in literature and utopianism opened his mind to new approaches to world salvation.

  On February 27, 1932, in a letter to the British journal Nature, physicist James Chadwick of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, Ernest Rutherford’s laboratory, announced the possible existence of a neutron. (He confirmed the neutron’s existence in a longer paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society four months later, but Szilard would no more have doubted it at the time of Chadwick’s first cautious announcement than did Chadwick himself; like many scientific discoveries, it was obvious once it was demonstrated, and Szilard could repeat the demonstration in Berlin if he chose.61, 62) The neutron, a particle with nearly the same mass as the positively charged proton that until 1932 was the sole certain component of the atomic nucleus, had no electric charge, which meant it could pass through the surrounding electrical barrier and enter into the nucleus. The neutron would open the atomic nucleus to examination. It might even be a way to force the nucleus to give up some of its enormous energy.