Doomsday Men

by P. D. Smith

  The discovery of the neutron earned Chadwick the honour of being portrayed in the physicists’ Faust in Copenhagen a couple of weeks later. But even as the physicists were performing their skit, two other scientists at the Cavendish Laboratory were homing in on the centre of the atom without the benefit of the neutron. John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton succeeded in accelerating protons to a sufficiently high speed to shatter an atom. To do this they had effectively built a gun that fired subatomic particles.

  With its spark-gap spheres and glass vacuum tubes held together with plasticine, their apparatus would not have seemed out of place in the laboratory of Rotwang, the mad scientist in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, or Henry Frankenstein in James Whale’s 1931 film of Shelley’s classic. The operator of this early particle accelerator had to sit in a lead-lined tea chest. Uncomfortable and primitive it might have been, but it worked, and it became the ancestor of such engineering triumphs as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva. On 14 April, the day after the Copenhagen Conference finished, Cockcroft and Walton fired protons at lithium atoms. Each lithium atom struck by a proton split into two alpha particles, essentially helium nuclei. It was the first time that a machine had shattered an atomic nucleus.

  The press pounced on the story, eager to herald the dawn of the Atomic Age and a revolutionary new energy source. But Cockcroft and Walton’s boss, Rutherford, rebuked the journalists. Although the energy released was relatively large, he told them, only one proton in ten million penetrated a target nucleus. Atomic engines were not just around the corner. Warming to his subject, and always pleased to confound the fourth estate, Rutherford denied that the search for new sources of power interested any of his scientists at the Cavendish. ‘The urge and the fascination of a search into one of the deepest secrets of nature,’ was their only motive, he boasted.24

  It was a noble claim. But however pure their motives, the secrets of nature that Rutherford and his physicists were revealing would have profound implications for everyone on the planet. The physicist Paul Langevin was no friend of the press that had once revealed his secret love affair with Marie Curie. But he knew that physics was about a lot more than a few men in tweed jackets tinkering with atoms. Physics was going to change the world. ‘You’re taking it all much too seriously,’ he told a young historian who had just fled Hitler’s Germany:

  Hitler? It won’t be long before he breaks his neck like all other tyrants. I’m much more worried about something else. It is something which, if it gets into the wrong hands, can do the world a good deal more damage than that fool who will sooner or later go to the dogs. It is something which – unlike him – we shall never be able to get rid of: I mean the neutron.25

  The discovery of a new particle and a machine to smash an atom were astonishing enough, but there was more to come. On the day after Chadwick submitted his note on the discovery of the neutron to Nature, an American scientific journal received a paper from Harold C. Urey announcing a new isotope of hydrogen known as deuterium, or heavy hydrogen. It would later become the fuel of the hydrogen bomb.

  As scientists gradually assembled the knowledge that would later allow them to construct nuclear weapons, the German military began funding research into the missiles that would deliver them. In the spring of 1932 a black sedan car pulled up at an abandoned arsenal in a northern suburb of Berlin. Inside was an officer from the Army Ordnance Department. Walter Dornberger had come to see a group of young, starry-eyed scientists and engineers who had called themselves the Society for Space Travel (Verein für Raumschifffahrt). Somewhat optimistically, they had renamed the 120 -hectare piece of scrubland they were using for their experiments, Berlin’s Rocketport. That day Dornberger met a dynamic fair-haired student who wanted to be the Columbus of space. His name was Wernher von Braun.

  Dornberger took an immediate liking to the 20-year-old Prussian Junker and hired him to design rocket motors for the German army. Once Hitler was in power, Dornberger became head of the Third Reich’s missile programme. At one meeting, as Dornberger was explaining to the Führer the potential of Wernher von Braun’s missiles, a ‘strange, fanatical light’ came into Hitler’s eyes. ‘What I want is annihilation!’ exclaimed the Führer.26 After the war, Dornberger and von Braun found a new paymaster. Dornberger took his engineering and organizational expertise to the New World, first working for the US Department of Defense and later becoming vice president of the Bell Aircraft Corporation. Von Braun also found a warm welcome in America, initially designing rockets for the US military and later for the space race. He later recalled that first meeting with Dornberger:

  That was the beginning. The Versailles Treaty hadn’t placed any restrictions on rockets, and the army was desperate to get back on its feet. We didn’t care much about that, one way or the other, but we needed money, and the army seemed willing to help us. In 1932, the idea of war seemed to us an absurdity. The Nazis weren’t yet in power. We felt no moral scruples about the possible future abuse of our brainchild. We were interested solely in exploring outer space. It was simply a question with us of how the golden cow would be milked most successfully.27

  Outer space may well have been Wernher von Braun’s goal, but his first rockets were designed for earthbound targets. In September 1944 the first of his ballistic missiles, the V-2 (V for Vergeltungswaffe, ‘vengeance weapon’), hurtled down on London at supersonic speed. Its one-ton warheads killed 2,700 Londoners during the war. When the first V-2 hit London, von Braun is said to have commented drily to his colleagues, ‘The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet.’28 He and his colleagues even had plans for a rocket that could hit New York. From intercontinental ballistic missiles to atomic and hydrogen bombs, the seeds of the cold-war technologies of mass destruction were already being sown in 1932, the year before Hitler came to power.

  Leo Szilard claimed to have read Goethe’s Faust at the age of six. Four years later he read The Tragedy of Man, a dramatic poem inspired by Faust. Written in the 1860s, this work by Imre Madách (now a classic of the Hungarian theatre) also explores the human quest for understanding and power over nature. It retells for the scientific age the Biblical story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden for daring to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

  The Tragedy of Man made a deep impression on Leo Szilard. There was one scene in particular that he often recalled in later life. In it, Lucifer shows Adam the future of life on earth. The dying sun has become ‘a dull, red sphere’, and a new ice age has descended on the planet. Adam despairs that earth has become ‘a gigantic grave’ and all human achievements, whether scientific or artistic, have been lost. In contrast, Lucifer gloats at man’s helplessness: ‘Science could not avert earth’s destiny,’ he says.29

  These apocalyptic scenes anticipate the icy wastelands seen by H. G. Wells’s Time Traveller as he journeys forward to the earth’s dying days. The second law of thermodynamics shocked the nineteenth century with its notion of a heat death for the universe, the result of entropy. The idea that the arrow of time decreed the unavoidable end of everything suggested to writers that all human endeavour would ultimately prove futile. For Madách, our tragedy was that we have the wit to grasp the laws of nature, but not the power to change them.

  Leo Szilard never forgot his countryman’s poem. As he told a journalist in 1945, The Tragedy of Man influenced his whole life and taught him that human survival often depended on a ‘narrow margin of hope’.30 This thought would sustain him through the bleak and frightening years that followed the dropping of the atomic bomb, when nuclear war seemed imminent. The poem also filled him with a passionate desire to prove Lucifer wrong. It became his lifelong purpose to show that – as he said to Niels Bohr in 1950 – science really could ‘save the world’.31

  Szilard returned from his trip to America in May 1932. The collaboration with the mathematicians at Princeton had not been a great success. Instead, he had spent most of his time getting to know the physicists at
New York University, where he became great friends with the head of physics, Professor Richard T. Cox. Before he left, Szilard organized a petition among his fellow scientists protesting against Japan’s attack on the Chinese port of Shanghai in February of that year. It was the first of Szilard’s many attempts to involve scientists in politics. Clearly, the world very much needed to be saved.

  In Berlin at the beginning of the 1930s, even scientists couldn’t ignore politics. Eva Striker (now Eva Zeisel), the niece of the Hungarian chemist Michael Polanyi, moved to Berlin at this time. A gifted designer of ceramics, she recalls there was a pervasive feeling of ‘hopelessness and disgust with Western civilization’ at the time.32 Brutal street fights between Nazis and Communist gangs were common. According to Stephen Spender, there was ‘a sensation of doom to be felt in the Berlin streets’.33

  But despite this, for Eva Striker and many others, Berlin remained ‘the center of the world’.34 Striker’s parties, held in her central Berlin studio with its high windows, drew together artists, scientists and intellectuals from across the city. The expressionist painter Emil Nolde, who lived in the same building, and Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler, for a while Eva’s lover, were often seen there. ‘My studio became an annex of the Romanisches Café,’ she said, ‘the Forum Romanum for the exchange of ideas on how best to save the world.’35 Among those at Eva Striker’s parties ever keen to discuss plans for saving the world was Leo Szilard.

  In the elections of September 1930, the Nazis had received almost 20 per cent of the vote. Szilard wrote to Einstein: ‘From week to week I detect new symptoms, if my nose doesn’t deceive me, that peaceful [political] development in Europe in the next ten years is not to be counted on.’ Never one to overlook practicalities, he added: ‘Indeed, I don’t know if it will be possible to build our refrigerator in Europe.’36 Szilard did in fact have an excellent nose for impending disaster. From the mid-1920s he had begun to doubt that democracy would survive in Germany. ‘I thought that it might survive one or two generations’, he later recalled.37 Early on, he decided that the future of Germany lay in the hands of its young people, and for this reason he hatched one of his earliest schemes for saving the world: his plan for ‘Der Bund’ – The League.

  Leo Szilard’s League would be for ‘boys and girls who have the scientific mind and a religious spirit’.38 He envisaged that the brightest young people would be identified at an early age and brought together to form what he called a ‘spiritual leadership class with inner cohesion’.39 After all, as New York Times science editor Waldemar Kaempffert put it in 1945, ‘religion may preach the brotherhood of man; science practices it’.40 Szilard wanted the League to set an example of purpose and community to society as a whole. It would offer a ‘life of sacrifice and service’: ‘The sacrifice shall be so severe that this path will only be followed by those who are imbued with the desired spirit.’41

  Szilard’s elite group would influence public opinion and politics, either by directing government or advising it. The League will, he wrote, ‘represent some form of structure in public life, which would leave an imprint on the whole spiritual life of the community’.42 His idea of a secular sect that guides and inspires society anticipates the ‘Order’ described in Hermann Hesse’s great novel The Glass Bead Game (1943).

  In 1928 Szilard read H. G. Wells’s The Open Conspiracy. Wells called for an ‘intellectual rebirth’ in society and warned of ‘such war as man has never known before’.43 He concluded with a rousing vision of the future:

  The Open Conspiracy is the awaking of mankind from a nightmare, an infantile nightmare, of the struggle for existence and the inevitability of war. The light of day thrusts between our eyelids, and the multitudinous sounds of morning clamour in our ears. A time will come when men will sit with history before them or with some old newspaper before them and ask incredulously, ‘Was there ever such a world?’44

  Wells argued that to avoid war and improve society, what was needed was an ‘Open Conspiracy’ of society’s elite – industrialists, scientists, technocrats. Wells had described this elite as early as 1905 in A Modern Utopia. Then he had named them the Samurai.

  After World War I, during which nations mobilized their scientific, technological and industrial resources to an unprecedented degree, many people – including Hugo Gernsback – thought that the society of the future would be led by an elite of technocrats. J. J. Connington’s novel Nordenholt’s Million had described how a ruthlessly efficient industrialist steps in to save humankind when feckless politicians have failed. The subtext to this and other novels was beguiling but dangerous: government by committee is inefficient; in the scientific age, we need strong individuals who will take decisive action based on science and statistics.

  Leo Szilard was hugely impressed by The Open Conspiracy in 1928. He told friends that in the opening pages Wells had summarized the urgent problems facing the world, including the need for a new social and political order. It was, after all, only what Leo Szilard had himself been saying. In February 1929 he wrote to Wells praising his book. ‘Let me tell you,’ he said, ‘speaking for myself and many friends of mine, we are very glad and think it rather important you have written the Open Conspiracy.’ Szilard requested a meeting with the famous English writer. Shrewdly, he asked his friend Einstein to add a greeting to the letter, praising Wells as ‘one of the great pioneers in the struggle toward better socialistic structures’.45

  Even H. G. Wells was not immune to praise from the most famous scientist of the age. Szilard’s ploy worked, and the following month he travelled to London where he met and dined with Wells. The writer was at the peak of his fame. He was perhaps the most widely read author in the English language. Both Stalin and Roosevelt (who became President in November 1932) were fans. Szilard eagerly explained his idea for the League, or, as he told Einstein in a letter from England, ‘our plan’.46

  Unfortunately, this was not a good time for Wells: his wife had died a year or so earlier, and he was in the process of moving house. Although he was keen to encourage like-minded people, Wells never became too closely involved with them, however enthusiastic they were. Whether it was the stress of moving or because he couldn’t make up his mind about the Hungarian scientist’s ‘plan’, Szilard’s requests for a further ‘hour or two’ of his time, either in England or during Wells’s forthcoming French holiday, were unsuccessful.47

  Although his visit did not secure the support of the English writer, while he was in London Szilard met someone whose influence would prove decisive. Otto Mandl was a successful Viennese businessman and H. G. Wells fan. He had organized the translation of Wells’s works into German and had himself translated and edited many of Wells’s books, including The Open Conspiracy. The two men soon found that they shared the same bold vision of the future, and Szilard became a close friend of Mandl and his wife, the Hungarian pianist Lili Kraus.

  A year later, Leo Szilard made another trip to London to rally support for the League. This time he met the radical writer and journalist H. N. Brailsford. Afterwards, Brailsford wrote to their mutual friend, Albert Einstein, about the young scientist and his bold plans. Szilard clearly had ‘the religious spirit’ that he hoped to impart to other young members of his organization, Brailsford said, but frankly he doubted whether the scientist could organize such an ambitious movement.48

  In his reply, Einstein said that Szilard had ‘assembled a circle of excellent young people, mostly physicists, who are in sympathy with his ideas. But as yet there is no organization of any kind.’ He complimented Szilard for being ‘a fine, intelligent man, who is ordinarily not given to illusions’. However, although he was sympathetic to Szilard’s aims, he also doubted that the League would ever exist. Einstein added: ‘Perhaps, like many such people, he is inclined to overestimate the significance of reason in human affairs.’49

  In 1932, Leo Szilard found himself at a turning point. Indeed, as his hopes for a lucrative refrigerator design rapidly faded, the 34 -year-old e
ntered a period of profound uncertainty and self-doubt that seriously worried his friends. At Princeton he had again decided that he did not want to pursue physics on a purely abstract and mathematical level. He even considered giving up science altogether. In October he wrote to his friend Eugene Wigner that there were ‘more noble causes than to do science’. Clearly, Szilard was thinking of his utopian vision for society, the League. But he did admit that, ‘of course, physics interests me still one full magnitude more than refrigerators’.50

  Throughout his restless life, Szilard struggled to find an intellectual home: a position or institution where he could put down roots and be free to dream up bold and grand designs for science and humanity. Academia was too restricting for such an unconventional and footloose thinker. He had hoped that the revolutionary electromagnetic pump would guarantee his financial freedom by providing a flow of royalties. Now, as that project reached its end, Wigner and other friends became concerned about his ‘depressed’ state of mind and what he was going to do with his life.51 Significantly, despite his personal lack of direction – he even considered starting again in an entirely new field, biology – Szilard picked nuclear physics as the most intriguing area of science. James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron and the splitting of the atom by two other members of Rutherford’s team were momentous enough, but it was a novel that really fired his imagination.

  When he returned from America in May 1932, Szilard found that Mandl and his wife were now living in Berlin. It was here that Szilard had what he later called a ‘memorable conversation’ with him. It centred on Szilard’s favourite topic: the future of humankind and how to save us from our self-destructive instincts. Otto Mandl told Szilard that he now knew how ‘to save mankind from a series of ever-recurring wars that could destroy it’. According to Mandl, there was a ‘heroic streak’ in humankind. ‘Man is not satisfied with a happy idyllic life,’ he said, ‘he has the need to fight and to encounter danger.’ In order to satisfy this desire for heroism, humanity needed to save itself by launching ‘an enterprise aimed at leaving the earth’.