by P. D. Smith
Leo Szilard too was overwhelmed by the historic nature of just such a moment. Like Holsten, he wandered through the streets of Bloomsbury with the knowledge of life and death, of good and evil, seething in his brain:
He was oppressed, he was indeed scared, by his sense of the immense consequences of his discovery. He had a vague idea that night that he ought not to publish his results, that they were premature, that some secret association of wise men should take care of his work and hand it on from generation to generation until the world was riper for its practical application. He felt that nobody in all the thousands of people he passed had really awakened to the fact of change; they trusted the world for what it was, not to alter too rapidly, to respect their trusts, their assurances, their habits, their little accustomed traffics and hard-won positions.44
These are Holsten’s thoughts, but this could as well be Szilard walking round Russell Square, twenty years after Wells was writing. Like Holsten, Szilard now faced a terrible decision: whether to make public his discovery and risk his ideas being exploited to create atomic weapons, or to keep his fatal knowledge secret.
The similarities between the two scientists are indeed striking. Both the fictional and the real scientist were born at the beginning of the atomic age, Holsten in the year X-rays were discovered, 1895, and Szilard in the year radium was discovered, 1898. Szilard had read Wells’s novel just the previous year. It is clear that he saw the novel as prophetic, and frequently referred to it in relation to key moments in both his life and the discovery of atomic energy. He shared Holsten’s dreams and his nightmares. To Leo Szilard in 1933, he was Holsten. It is a remarkable fusion of the scientific and the fictional.
Holsten tries to predict the effect of his discovery on humanity as he walks around London. But in the end he decides that ‘it is not for me to reach out to consequences I cannot foresee… I am a little instrument in the armoury of Change. If I were to burn all these papers, before a score of years had passed some other man would be doing all this…’45 Such self-justification has now become familiar. Science (so the argument goes) is not the product of one mind alone, as is art or literature: it is a Leviathan whose steady progress is the result of many minds. Suppressing the findings of one scientist is futile. It is only a matter of time before another will make that same discovery.
But Leo Szilard decided to try to stop the scientific Leviathan. Unlike Holsten, he would eventually opt for secrecy, a decision which offended the beliefs of most scientists. Rather than write up his idea in a scientific paper for publication, Leo Szilard worked out the details of critical mass and a self-sustaining chain reaction with neutrons, and then patented it. In 1935, after several failed attempts to convince the military of its value, he gave the patent to the British Admiralty on conditions of absolute secrecy.
Not until 1939 would Szilard see the experimental proof of his idea, late one February evening in a Columbia University laboratory in New York. In the meantime he spent six years desperately trying to prevent Hitler’s physicists from discovering his secret and making an atomic bomb.
12
Wings over Europe
Out of the libraries come the killers.
Mothers stand despondently waiting,
Hugging their children and searching the sky,
Looking for the latest inventions of the professors.
Bertolt Brecht, 1940
War was in the air in 1933. Leo Szilard foresaw a Europe divided into two armed camps, and he believed that an accidental war, triggered by a misunderstanding, was now a real possibility. ‘Suppose if you have a large German and a large French air force,’ he said in August, and ‘the false alarm is spread in Paris that the German air force has left the German airports, [then] no French government, even the most pacifist one, could take the responsibility for holding back their air force to wait for confirmation of that rumour.’ Szilard would be ‘astonished’ if such an accidental war did not happen ‘within the next 5 or 10 years’.1
Surveying scientific and world events from his chair in the lobby of the Imperial Hotel, Leo Szilard might well have read the Times review of Wells’s latest book, The Shape of Things to Come, at the beginning of September 1933. Once again, Wells had donned his prophet’s robes. This time he predicted that the next war would start in 1940 and would be fought with weapons of mass destruction. But their use would not be restricted to the battlefield, as in the last war. This time air raids with gas bombs would wipe out whole cities. He imagined the appalling effects of such a raid on the city Szilard had just left, Berlin:
We went down Unter den Linden and along the Sieges Allee, and the bodies of people were lying everywhere, men, women and children, not scattered evenly, but bunched together very curiously in heaps, as though their last effort had been to climb on to each other for help. This attempt to get close up to someone seems to be characteristic of death by this particular gas. Something must happen in the mind. Everyone was crumpled up in the same fashion and nearly all had vomited blood. The stench was dreadful, although all this multitude had been alive twenty-four hours ago. The body corrupts at once. The archway into the park was almost impassable…2
H. G. Wells had been one of the first to realize the potential of aircraft in warfare. To the 1941 edition of The War in the Air, written way back in 1907, Wells added a bitter epitaph: ‘I told you so. You damned fools.’ But Wells was not the only Cassandra in town. In 1933, E. M. Forster observed that ‘war has moved from chivalry to chemicals’.3 Another novel that year described gas bombs being dropped on London: ‘Oxford Street, Piccadilly, the Mall, Trafalgar Square, the Strand, Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill, were carpeted with the dead. The entrance to every tube station was piled high with the bodies of those who had made one last mad effort to escape from the poison gas.’4
In the 1930s, the prospect of gas warfare led to anxiety in the press and popular fiction alike. The idea of whole cities being annihilated within minutes was widely accepted. It was reported that a mere 42 tons of Lewisite could wipe out the entire population of London. In 1932, a German novel speculated – with more than a little Schadenfreude– about a devastatingly effective pre-emptive air strike on France by Britain. In the novel, a lethal mix of high-explosive bombs, incendiaries and mustard gas is dropped on all of France’s major industrial towns and communication centres.5 Ironically, it would be German cities that would, within ten years, experience the appalling force of air power.
A popular British novel from the previous year, The Gas War of 1940 by Miles (aka Stephen Southwold), describes a world war breaking out on 3 September 1940 with a German blitzkrieg on Poland. Gas air raids are central to the story:
In a dozen parts of London that night people died in their homes with the familiar walls crashing about them in flames; thousands rushed into the streets to be met by blasts of flame and explosion and were blown to rags; they came pouring out of suddenly darkened theatres, picture-houses, concert and dance halls, into the dark and congested streets to be crushed or trodden to death.6
End-of-the-world stories like these became so popular with Germans in the interwar period that they even coined a word for them – Weltuntergangsromane. Once Hitler came to power, British newspapers began to carry ominous stories about Germany’s preparations for war. On 6 September 1933, The Times ran an article on a new German study of military science. It was a handbook for total war, which even promoted the use of biological weapons. Modern warfare was a ‘bloody battle’ and ‘a contest of material’, the author argued. War is about ‘gas and plague, it is tank and aircraft horror’. As well as advising German schools to teach military science to children as young as six, the book promoted the idea that war was not merely destructive, but ‘the eternal renewer; it creates as it destroys’.7 Although much less common as a fictional theme at this time, biological warfare did appear in British civil servant Bernard Newman’s 1931 novel Armoured Doves.
The possibility of an atomic war also featured in public fears. In the
same year that Leo Szilard read Wells’s novel about atomic bombs, the former diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson, husband of Vita Sackville-West, revisited the subject. His novel Public Faces, a stylish satire on British politics, raised the possibility that atomic bombs would be the weapons that won the next war.
While he was with the Foreign Office, Nicolson had been sent on a mission to Béla Kun’s Soviet-style government at Budapest in 1919. His novel certainly made an impression on one young Hungarian scientist. Edward Teller, then in Göttingen, recalled how he was told to read the novel by the other physicists in the department. They had all been fascinated by Nicolson’s account of how politicians might deal with the responsibility of possessing the most powerful weapon ever invented – a superweapon handed to them by physicists. It is clear that in Nicolson’s view, politicians could not be trusted with such weapons of mass destruction.
H. G. Wells had been warning for years that the lack of understanding of science at the highest levels of society meant that opportunities for social progress were lost and increased the likelihood of an abuse of power – atomic power. In Nicolson’s Public Faces the world is taken to the brink of war when rogue elements in the British Government try to intimidate other nations with atomic weapons developed in secret using a plutonium-like element. An atomic bomb is, as the British Cabinet swiftly realizes, a ‘weapon of world dominion’.8
In a show of force, an atomic bomb is dropped into the Atlantic from a rocket-plane. With a hundred rockets like these armed with atomic bombs, ‘we could rule the world’, boasts the Air Minister.9 But the demonstration goes catastrophically wrong. The huge atomic explosion sets off a devastating tidal wave which kills tens of thousands of people in America. Britain’s political leaders are shocked by what has been done in their name and, after calling on the world to disarm, they dispose of their atomic weapons.
Public Faces appeared in 1932, the same year as Aldous Huxley’s satire on a planned scientific society, Brave New World. Huxley’s novel describes how, after a devastating Nine Years’ War fought with biological and chemical weapons, ‘there was a choice between World Control and destruction’. It was a choice that Wells and many scientists believed would soon face the world. But Huxley was deeply sceptical about a society ruled by technocrats. In the new utopia, even science has to be censored to preserve the status quo. As one of its leaders says, ‘what’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you?’10 However, in 1946, Huxley noted that his omission of nuclear energy from his biological dystopia was a ‘vast and obvious failure of insight’.11
Biological, chemical and atomic weapons were already the cause of widespread anxiety, as can be seen from the fiction of the period, although the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ did not become common until 1937. That year the Archbishop of Canterbury used the phrase for what is thought to be the first time in his Christmas sermon. ‘Who can think without horror of what another widespread war would mean,’ he told his congregation, ‘waged as it would be with all the new weapons of mass destruction?’12
The winning combination of aeroplanes and weapons of mass destruction had been tried and tested in the years immediately after World War I. In 1919 Winston Churchill advocated the use of the newly formed RAF to drop gas bombs – in this instance tear gas – to quell ‘uncivilised tribes’ in Iraq and elsewhere, who were rebelling against the British Empire. ‘I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas,’ said Churchill. Such weapons would, he hoped, ‘spread a lively terror’ among the victims.13 The next year, a rebellion of a hundred thousand tribesmen in Iraq was crushed from the air. Nine thousand Iraqis were killed for the loss of just nine RAF men.
Aircraft had initially been welcomed as an unambiguous sign of human progress. For writers such as Rudyard Kipling (‘As Easy as ABC’, 1912), the figure of the aviator had embodied hopes for a new scientific future that would soar up and away, leaving behind the petty constraints of the past. Now, in a time of international tension, the sight of strange aircraft above a city brought a frisson of fear to the people on the ground.
Robert Nichols and Maurice Browne’s play Wings over Europe, first performed in New York in 1928, explores the relationship between science, politics and the superweapon in an age of aerial warfare. It depicts the explosive encounter between an idealistic scientist and the obdurate conservatism of the British Government. The action takes place around the Cabinet Table in Number 10 Downing Street, a setting which anticipates the memorable scenes across the War Room table in Dr Strangelove. As in Nicolson’s Public Faces, the spotlight is on the politicians and how they respond to the dawn of the atomic age.
The scientist, Francis Lightfoot, announces to the British Prime Minister that he has just made the discovery of the century – atomic energy. ‘Yesterday, Man was a slave; to-day he’s free. Matter obeys him,’ proclaims the elated Lightfoot.14 Breathlessly, he outlines to the Cabinet how atomic energy will utterly transform life and society: limitless energy; the power to transmute elements, creating gold on demand (thus upsetting the monetary system which was based on the gold standard); and weapons of unimaginable power which – once the knowledge spreads – will be available to any nation, indeed to any individual.
‘One man can easily release enough force to destroy civilization,’ says Lightfoot with irrepressible enthusiasm, trying to explain the potential of atomic weapons. ‘He touches a spring; the atoms about the piece of mechanism begin to redistribute themselves at an undreamt-of-speed – at such a speed that not only he, but his house, his street, his borough, London itself, disappears, if he so wishes… is blown up…’15
The politicians do not share the scientist’s enthusiasm. In fact, they are horrified by this vision of atomic anarchy and by the idea that their traditional view of the world is about to be turned upside down. Scientific revolutions are fine, but social revolutions are a step too far. Perhaps in this new atomic age – horror of horrors! – politicians will lose their grip on power.
‘Physics and politics are not quite the same,’ says the Prime Minister, gently trying to prepare Lightfoot for disappointment. ‘Yours is a perfect world of form and number.’16 By contrast, the world of politics is anything but perfect. Lightfoot, bursting with Wellsian visions of how society should be reformed in the atomic age, is bitterly disillusioned when the politicians ask him to suppress his revolutionary discovery.
As his dream of the future collapses before his eyes, Lightfoot is transformed from a saviour scientist into a mad scientist. He tries to blackmail the British Government, threatening to annihilate the whole of Britain with an atomic explosion unless they allow the revolution to occur. Doomsday is averted only when Lightfoot is killed in a freak accident. But just as the politicians think that it’s safe to return to their outmoded way of life, they receive an ultimatum from a group of scientists who have also developed atomic weapons. Their aeroplanes, laden with atomic bombs, are already in the air above London and ‘the capitals of every civilized country’ in the world. Clearly, nothing can stand in the way of scientific progress – but is social progress similarly inevitable? At the end of the play, the politicians can no longer avoid facing the reality of the atomic age: ‘Gentlemen, those wings even now sound over Europe. Are we with them or against them?’17
* * *
By the beginning of 1934, Leo Szilard had moved out of genteel Russell Square. He was now living a twenty-minute walk away at the Strand Palace Hotel, where the rooms were cheaper. His savings were dwindling, but he still needed time to think. January had brought remarkable news: Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie announced that they had created radioactivity artificially. The actual discovery had taken place at the end of 1933, just as Wells had predicted in The World Set Free. After bombarding aluminium foil with alpha particles, they found that it continued to be radioactive even after the alpha source was removed.
In 1935 they received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for what was widely reg
arded as one of the great discoveries of the century. In his acceptance speech, Frédéric echoed the warning given by his father-in-law, Pierre Curie. Before long, he said, scientists would be able to create ‘transmutations of an explosive type’. He even suggested that a catastrophic chain reaction might be possible, an atomic ‘cataclysm’ which could spread through all matter, transforming the planet into a fiery supernova.18 His warning preyed on the minds of the Manhattan Project scientists right up to the final hours before the Trinity atomic test in 1945. The possibility of a doomsday bomb began to seem more like fact than fiction.
For Leo Szilard, artificial radioactivity was further evidence that he was on the right track: if alpha particles could do this, what might neutrons do? Physics had become ‘too exciting for me to leave it’, Szilard later recalled.19 He settled into his room at the Strand Palace Hotel and dedicated his life to dreaming up experiments with artificial radioactivity and neutrons. But for a serious scientist like Szilard, even dreaming required a rigorous routine:
I remember that I went into my bath – I didn’t have a private bath, but there was a bath in the corridor in the Strand Palace Hotel – around 9 o’clock in the morning. There is no place as good to think as a bathtub. I would just soak there and think, and around 12 o’clock the maid would knock and say, ‘Are you all right, sir?’ Then I usually got out and made a few notes, dictated a few memoranda. I played around this way, doing nothing, until summer came around.20
The result of this aquatic brainstorming was Szilard’s patent, which detailed for the first time the concept of critical mass and a self-sustaining chain reaction with neutrons. This formed the scientific basis of the 1942 atomic pile constructed at Chicago University, as well as the atomic bomb. His patent, filed on 12 March 1934, is one of the founding documents of the atomic age. But for now, only Leo Szilard knew its significance, ‘and I knew it because I had read H. G. Wells’.21
