Conant and Loomis met over lunch and put their differences behind them, in large part because of their mutual friendship with Lawrence. Conant had tried unsuccessfully to hire the brilliant young Berkeley physicist in 1936, but the two had remained close, both personally and professionally. Over the next few months, Lawrence would persuade Loomis to use his considerable influence to help raise funds to support Harvard’s cyclotron project for biomedical research on neutron radiation and radioactive isotopes, which scientists hoped would lead to a new, inexpensive treatment for cancer. Lawrence succeeded in getting Loomis so “steamed up” about Harvard’s project that in May Loomis wrote Conant a check for $5,000 for research in nuclear physics.
While Conant continued to regard the novel as a source of embarrassment, it was the least of the problems Bill had bequeathed him. Far more troubling was the draft of a short story entitled “The Uranium Bomb.” The slim, typed manuscript, bearing the name and address of his literary agent, Madeleine Boyd, was clearly intended for publication. As he quickly skimmed the story, he became increasingly perturbed. The opening scene described a meeting between a callow young chemist, clearly Richards, and a zany Russian physicist named Boris Zmenov, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Leo Szilard. A Hungarian refugee scientist, Szilard was currently working on uranium fission with Fermi, a newly established professor at Columbia. Szilard was known to be extremely vocal about the importance of fission research and the danger of delay in a time of war. In a scene that rang especially true, the Zmenov character, who is convinced the Nazis want to build an atomic bomb, explains there has been a breakthrough in atomic fission: the uranium nucleus has been split, with the liberation of fifty million times as much energy as could be obtained from any other explosive. “A ton of uranium,” Zmenov warns, “would make a bomb which could blow the end of Manhattan island.”
With his unerring instinct for the sensational, Bill had homed in on one of the newest and most controversial developments on the frontier of science: atomic energy’s explosive power. For all Conant knew, Bill had plucked most of his ideas from the front page of the New York Times or from any one of a number of academic journals. The exciting developments had been widely covered: in December 1938 two German physicists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, had discovered fission. Lise Meitner, their colleague, had quickly grasped the significance of their finding and calculated that when a uranium atom was hit by a slow neutron, it would split, dividing into two distinct elements and, in the process, releasing an enormous amount of energy. Meitner, who escaped the Nazis by fleeing to Stockholm, rushed to inform the Danish physicist Niels Bohr of the news prior to his departure for America. By the time Bohr arrived in the United States, a telegram was waiting for him from Meitner’s nephew, the physicist Otto Frisch, reporting that a test had demonstrated the discovery of uranium fission. Bohr and Fermi announced the results at a conference in Washington, and within the first few days of 1939, experiments confirming Frisch’s results were performed in several American laboratories. The uranium atom was so small, however, that the explosion of a single nucleus could not be seen with even the most powerful microscope. No one yet saw how energy in the atomic nucleus could be released in practical quantities.
But as Bill’s story set forth in disturbing detail, a few physicists kept exploring the possibility that under the right conditions, a chain reaction could occur. “To make a uranium bomb,” he theorized, “each exploding nucleus would have to throw off fresh neutrons, which cause more nuclei to explode, and so on, over and over . . . the successive explosions of atoms follow each other so quickly that a colossal amount of power is generated.”
In May 1939 Fermi had published the results of the recent experiments he, Szilard, and others had conducted showing that a fission chain reaction could be made to work. Convinced the Germans would soon recognize the same possibility, Szilard had wanted to take immediate political action. The American scientific establishment needed to be alerted. Steps needed to be taken to guard against the possibility that Hitler’s forces could get ahold of this knowledge. Fermi, who was of a more conservative temperament, thought any practical application was still remote and was inclined to “play down” the danger. So Szilard appealed to his old friend and mentor, Albert Einstein, to warn the president of the United States to the potential military applications of nuclear fission. Although also a refugee scientist, Einstein was world famous and had the necessary stature to lend credibility to their cause. In August Szilard, drawing on Einstein’s first draft, wrote the final version of the letter they would send to Roosevelt advising him that “extremely powerful bombs of a new type” could now be constructed. A mutual acquaintance, Alexander Sachs, a vice president of the Lehman Corporation, with contacts high in the US government, had promised to see that it reached the president.
At the time, Conant was unaware of the Einstein letter. But when the contents of Bill’s desk revealed a raft of letters from Szilard, including several updating the progress of his chain reaction work with Fermi, it was obvious the Hungarian physicist had been a source of information and inspiration. The correspondence indicated that Bill had been in regular contact with Szilard, and had appropriated the cutting-edge science for his dramatic fantasy. If his hypothesis was right, as the scientist in the story boasts, uranium could generate a colossal amount of power—greater than any that science had heretofore known—in a bomb that would “revolutionize civilization.”
Conant was skeptical. Bill’s doomsday scenario reflected the hysterical tone of the newspaper articles claiming that physicists had unlocked the power of the sun and could now destroy the world in a fiery atomic explosion. He was familiar with Bohr’s warnings about the destructive potential of fission but had seen nothing that persuaded him it was anywhere near to being ready for use as a weapon. There was little proof that any of this was feasible. Still, the bomb story made him uneasy. The scientific material accurately represented the facts as they were known—too accurately. None of it was classified, but only because no official secrecy policy had yet been established. All of this would have been unsettling enough, but in March 1940 it seemed demonstrably unsafe. Conant decided to err on the side of caution. He called Madeleine Boyd’s office and made sure Bill’s story would never see the light of day. He demanded she return all copies of the story to him, and locked them in the bottom drawer of his desk.
That should have been the end of the matter except for his son Ted’s “great nose for unusual news.” The teenager stumbled across a finished draft of the story tucked in among the boxes of books, technical journals, and radio equipment his uncle had left him. He immediately announced his intention of submitting the story to several science-fiction magazines. Conant rarely lost his composure, but in this instance his temper got the better of him. The story was “outlandish,” he snapped. It was “ridiculous” to even consider publishing it. A terrible row ensued. When Ted hotly objected that confiscating the story was a form of censorship, Conant cut him off, stating with awkward finality that it was a question of the “family honor.”
“I conceded the argument, but not because I believed him,” recalled Ted. “He was not someone who talked in terms of ‘family honor.’ It was such an odd thing for him to say, so completely out of character, I knew something must be up.”
* * *
By the time Conant suppressed “The Uranium Bomb,” any mention of atomic energy’s military significance filled him with unease. While the country was still resolutely isolationist, and most Americans had been lulled into a false sense of calm by the months of “phony war” in Europe, the former chemist was acutely conscious of the need to prepare for the worst. The US Army, in its present ill-equipped condition, was no match for Hitler’s military machine. Advances in military technology, from new, more powerful explosives, to the developments in aviation, meant the country was more vulnerable to attack than at any time in its history. Given the superiority of German airp
ower, America’s ocean barriers would not keep it safe. The uncertainty about the war that had plagued Conant was gone, replaced by the conviction that Hitler had to be stopped from controlling Europe. What distressed him was the public’s apparent indifference to what was taking place three thousand miles across the Atlantic, and ignorance about the necessity of readying its defenses.
While Congress endlessly debated repeal of the Neutrality Acts, the country continued to sit on its hands: American men could not volunteer for Allied armies; citizens could not make private loans to the Allies; military and aviation secrets were being withheld from Britain and France; and companies were continuing to trade with nations that supplied Germany with strategic materials. As he watched Poland’s surrender and the German army’s rapid progress in the autumn of 1939, Conant could not believe, in the midst of such a catastrophe, that another academic year would proceed “without pause or interruption.” The outposts of democracy were falling one by one, with terrifying implications for free people everywhere, yet Americans—the young in particular—remained aloof. Convinced that noninvolvement was a prescription for disaster, he took to the pulpit of Harvard’s Memorial Church in late September to sound the alarm. Another world war was “now at hand,” he declared. Intelligent people could no longer “pretend to be neutral”:
“Every ounce of our sympathies is with those who are fighting on the French and British side,” he argued. “The forces of violence must be beaten by superior violence and yet without engendering bitterness or hate. Reason must triumph over unreason without being converted in its hour of victory to the very thing it would destroy.”
Whether or not they agreed, the boys who jammed the church “listened intently,” Patty told her mother. Even she found the speech “deeply impressive,” she added, “especially as he has always been so temperate in what he has said, and this time he expressed himself so forcibly with intense earnestness.”
Now that he was openly speaking his mind, Conant waged a personal campaign to alert the country to the need for preparedness. He also began to emerge as a strong exponent of the view that the United States must move to a belligerent status. Although he stopped short of advocating intervention, he argued that a triumphant Nazi regime would be “so inimical” to American values and interests that “from motives of self-interest alone this nation must be ready to supply arms and implements of war to those who face the totalitarian power.” No matter what, the United States could not afford to underestimate such a dangerous enemy. The experience of the slow-moving civilian committees and cumbersome military bureaucracy in the last war had taught him the need to focus attention on the “tasks at home”: the planning, procurement, and security precautions that must be undertaken. “Gigantic steps in preparedness will be necessary,” he maintained, “to enable the United States to breathe in peace in a world of war.”
For months now, Conant had been quietly conferring with other scientific leaders and university heads behind the scenes on how to organize educational institutions, laboratories, and personnel for the war effort. “I hope you are making progress with that plan for enlisting scientific men of the country on a research basis for preparedness,” he wrote Vannevar Bush, a shrewd Yankee engineer and inventor who had created the most powerful analog computers of the 1930s and was now the guiding force behind the Carnegie Institution, the late Andrew Carnegie’s massive investment in the future of American science. “Let me urge the importance of this step.” Bush, who like Conant had spent World War I battling military policy makers—a submarine-detection device he invented was never adopted—had been using his new Washington office to try to influence the army and the navy toward a more scientific approach to the problems of warfare. He had already begun sounding out his colleagues about creating a new overall organization to coordinate defense research, and bent Conant’s ear on the topic when the two met on May 24, 1940, at a small informal luncheon in New York.
“We were all drawn together by the one thing we deeply shared—worry,” Bush recalled. The phony war had ended in April, and in the course of only two weeks, the German blitzkrieg had torn across the flatlands of Belgium, Holland, and France, and reached the shores of the English Channel. The British expeditionary forces, on the brink of annihilation, were miraculously being evacuated from Dunkirk by a makeshift armada of fishing boats and other scrounged vessels. But Hitler’s panzer divisions had poured into France, and the occupation of Paris was imminent. On May 10 the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, had resigned in disgrace, and Winston Churchill had taken over, promising his country “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” The swift events transpiring in Europe drove home the need for action. Conant, Frank Jewett, and the others present at the lunch that day all shared Bush’s conviction that it was going to be “a highly technical struggle,” that America was woefully unprepared, and that the military system as it existed, and had operated in World War I, would never be able to produce the weapons they would need.
“We all agreed it was high time for America to wake up,” recalled Conant, noting that the unanimity of opinion around the table spurred him to resume his role as an outspoken interventionist. The best the British could hope for fighting alone was an armed truce. Only American intervention could turn the tide.
However, the mind-set of his scientific colleagues differed sharply from that of his Harvard associates. Conant found many of his fellow academics glum and defeatist—persuaded that it would be a short war, and the outcome was already a foregone conclusion. When he told William Claflin, Harvard’s treasurer, that he was considering making a speech urging the United States to “get in and help,” Claflin responded, “No, be realistic. Hitler’s going to win; let’s be friends with him.”
The common sentiment seemed to be that Britain did not have a chance. The island would not be able to withstand the first German assault. Better by far to start building a relationship with the future power. Conant was appalled by the pessimism. It was a “bad point of view,” he wrote in his diary, “but typical of the business appeasement group.” What depressed him more was how little they understood about the real issue: that a military and naval victory for Germany would endanger the institutions of democracy in the Western world. America’s security was inextricably linked to Britain’s independence and Allied control of the Atlantic. People needed to be educated about what was at stake. Three days later, he ignored his long-standing injunction against joining committees and became a charter member of William Allen White’s newly rechristened Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, which advocated lending military material support to Britain as the best way to keep the United States out of the war.
On May 29, 1940, as three destroyers loaded with troops were sunk off Dunkirk, and the Nazis’ armored divisions closed in on Paris, Conant went on national radio to urge “immediate aid” for the Allies. Distancing himself from Harvard by stating that he would be presenting his personal views, Conant went on to argue clearly and forcefully that the country must “rearm at once.” Hitler’s war machine had to be stopped. A Nazi victory in England and France was but a prelude to world domination. “I shall mince no words,” he stated. “I believe the United States should take every action possible to ensure the defeat of Hitler. And let us face honestly the possible implications of such a policy. The actions we propose might eventuate in war. But fear of war is no basis for national policy.”
“It is not too late,” he warned, his own tardiness in alerting the country to the Nazi menace adding weight to his words, “but it is long past time to act.”
His speech had the desired effect and made the stand in support of neutrality “not an easy one to uphold,” an editorial in the Crimson conceded grudgingly. “From that moment,” observed historian Paul F. Douglass, “Conant became the foremost voice urging total American involvement. He became honorary chairman of White’s committee and its most effective publicist. From his deep personal conviction, he kept hammering on one theme: ‘Fear of
war is no basis for national policy.’ ” It was his favorite refrain, and the one he became known for as he increasingly became the public face—and voice—of the interventionist cause.
Having appealed to Americans to “Let your voice be heard” and write to the president or their congressman in favor of war aid, Conant followed up with his own telegram to Roosevelt on June 5: “VENTURE TO WIRE YOU PERSONALLY IN SUPPORT OF VIEWS SET FORTH IN MY RADIO TALK OF MAY 29 PARTICULARLY URGING THAT ALL PLANES WHICH CAN BE SPARED WITHOUT ENDANGERING OUR SECURITY BE RELEASED QUICKLY TO ALLIES.”
The message to the president had been motivated by his desire to take an even more prominent role in speeding up the process of rearmament. After the invasion of France, public opinion had begun to shift. Conant was delighted by the reception to his broadcast. A bulging bag of fan mail arrived at his office in University Hall, along with a congratulatory cable from White telling him the government was following his recommendations and releasing large amounts of aid: “WAS SEMI-OFFICIALLY ASSURED 200 PLANES LEFT NEWFOUNDLAND SATURDAY TO FLY TO ALLIES. MORE SOON. WASHINGTON IS FEELING THE IMPULSE OF OUR WORK.”
Man of the Hour Page 25
