by P. D. Smith
86. Ingo Cornils, ‘The Martians are Coming! War, Peace, Love and Scientific Progress in H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and Kurd Lasswitz’s Auf zwei Planeten’, Comparative Literature, 55 (2003), 24–5.
87. Wernher von Braun, epigraph in Kurd Lasswitz, Two Planets, trans. Hans H. Rudnick (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), 7; quoted in Robert Markley, Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 127–8.
Chapter 11
1. Szilard, CW2, 13.
2. ibid.
3. Interview with Rose Scheiber; quoted in William Lanouette with Bela Silard, Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, The Man Behind the Bomb (University of Chicago Press, 1994; 1st edn 1992), 112.
4. See Szilard, CW2, 14.
5. Meitner to Hahn, 21 Mar. 1933; quoted in Ruth Lewin Sime, Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press (1996), 136.
6. Szilard, CW2, 14.
7. P. D. Smith, Metaphor and Materiality: German Literature and the World-View of Science 1780–1955 (Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, 2000), 267; and Sime, 139.
8. Max Born, My Life: Recollections of a Nobel Laureate (London: Taylor & Francis, 1978; 1st edn 1975), 251.
9. Toronto Star Weekly, 8 Apr. 1933; quoted in Sime, 142.
10. Fritz Stern, Einstein’s German World (London: Allen Lane, 2000),
157.
11. Einstein to Haber, 9 Aug. 1933; quoted in Margit Szöllösi-Janze, Fritz Haber, 1868–1934: Eine Biographie (Munich: Beck, 1998), 684.
12. Christopher Frayling, Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema (London: Reaktion, 2005), 70, 83.
13. Interview with Alice Danos; quoted in Lanouette, 70.
14. Francis Simon to Szilard, 23 Aug. 1938; quoted in Lanouette, 171.
15. Szilard to Francis Simon, 9 Sep. 1938; quoted in Lanouette, 171.
16. Szilard, CW2, 15.
17. Advertisements in The Times on 14 Mar., 10 May and 14 Nov. 1933. Unfortunately the ornate Imperial has been replaced by a utilitarian concrete structure. The Hotel Russell (or the Russell Hotel as it is now called) remains, in all its late Victorian splendour.
18. Szilard, taped interview, May 1960; in CW2, 19.
19. Ehrenfest to Donnan, 22 Aug. 1933; quoted in Lanouette, 125.
20. Born, 261.
21. Szöllösi-Janze, 680–89.
22. Edward Teller with Judith Shoolery, Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2001), 90.
23. Teller, quoted in Peter Goodchild, Edward Teller: The Real Dr Strange-love (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), 33.
24. Szilard writing to an unknown addressee from the Imperial Hotel, 11 Aug. 1933; in CW2, 35.
25. Rutherford, quoted in ‘Splitting the Atom’, Times (21 Nov. 1932), 19.
26. Quoted in ‘The British Association: Breaking Down the Atom’, Times (12 Sep. 1933), 7.
27. David Wilson, Rutherford: Simple Genius (London: Hodder, 1983), 95.
28. Rutherford, quoted in ‘The British Association’, Times (12 Sep. 1933),
7.
29. Szilard, taped interview, May 1960; in CW2, 17.
30. ibid.; and Szilard, ‘Rough Draft, Outline for Book’, June 1960, in CW2,
17. In Szilard’s Collected Works, autobiographical statements from more than one source have here been woven into a narrative.
31. Quoted in ‘The British Association’, Times (12 Sep. 1933), 7.
32. ‘Bombardment of the Atom’, Times (12 Oct. 1933), 7.
33. J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (London: Book Club Associates, 1979; 1st edn 1973), 369.
34. Szilard to Sir Hugo Hirst, from 6 Halliwick Rd, London, 17 Mar. 1934; in CW2, 38.
35. H. G. Wells, The Last War [The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind] (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001; 1st edn 1914), 18.
36. ibid., 13.
37. Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy, trans. Walter Arndt (New York: Norton, 1976), lines 382–3.
38. Wells, The Last War, 18.
39. ibid., 20.
40. ibid., 21.
41. Goethe, lines 1110–17.
42. Wells, The Last War, 23.
43. Glenn Seaborg, ‘Nuclear Fission and Transuranium Elements Fifty Years Ago’, Journal of Chemical Education, 66 (May 1989), 380.
44. Wells, The Last War, 21.
45. ibid., 23.
Chapter 12
1. Szilard, writing to an unknown addressee from the Imperial Hotel, 11 Aug. 1933; in CW2, 35.
2. H. G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution (London: Hutchinson, 1933), book 2, ch. 9, 214–15.
3. E. M. Forster, Spectator (17 Mar. 1933), 368–9; quoted in Martin Ceadel, ‘Popular Fiction and the Next War, 1918–39’, in Frank Gloversmith, ed., Class, Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), 169.
4. Ladbroke Black, The Poison War (London: Stanley Paul & Co.,1933), 252; in Ceadel, 161.
5. ‘Major von Helders’ [Robert Knauss], Luftkrieg-1936: Die Zertrümmerung von Paris (Berlin: Verlag Tradition Wilhelm Kolk, 1932); promptly published in English as The War in the Air, 1936, trans. Claud W. Sykes (John Hamilton: London, 1932); see I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763–3749 (Oxford University Press, 1992), 155.
6. ‘Miles’ [Stephen Southwold], The Gas War of 1940 (London: Scholartis Press, 1931); quoted in Clarke, 159.
7. Ewald Banse, Wehrwissenschaft (Leipzig: Armanen, 1933); quoted in ‘German War Science: Nazi Manual for Schools’, Times (6 Sep. 1933), 9.
8. Harold Nicolson, Public Faces (London: Constable, 1932), 18.
9. ibid., 97.
10. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Penguin, 1963; 1st edn 1932), 179.
11. Huxley, ‘Foreword’, Brave New World, 9.
12. ‘Archbishop’s Appeal’, Times (28 Dec. 1937), 9.
13. Winston S. Churchill, Departmental minute, War Office, Churchill papers: 16/16, 12 May 1919; quoted in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Companion volume 4, Part 1: January 1917–June 1919 (London: Heinemann, 1977), 649.
14. Nichols and Browne, Wings over Europe (1928), in Montrose J. Moses, ed., Dramas of Modernism and their Forerunners (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1931), 518.
15. ibid., 519.
16. ibid., 511.
17. ibid., 544–5.
18. Frédéric Joliot, ‘Chemical Evidence of the Transmutation of Elements’, Nobel Lecture, 12 Dec. 1935: see
19. Szilard, taped interview, May 1960; in CW2, 19.
20. Szilard, CW2, 19–20.
21. CW2, 18.
22. CW1, 529, 615.
23. Isaac R. Nathanson, ‘The World Aflame’, Amazing Stories (Jan. 1935), 45–6.
24. ibid., 47.
25. ibid., 48.
26. Quoted in A. S. Eve, Rutherford (Cambridge University Press, 1939),
102.
27. Nathanson, 52.
28. ibid., 44.
29. ibid., 76.
30. ibid., 75.
31. This response (recalled by Szilard in 1949) was made in 1938; quoted in Lewis L. Strauss, Men and Decisions (London: Macmillan, 1963), 165.
32. William Lanouette with Bela Silard, Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, The Man Behind the Bomb (University of Chicago Press, 1994; 1st edn 1992), 142.
33. Quoted in Eric Lax, The Mould in Dr Florey’s Coat (London: Little, Brown & Co., 2004), 207.
34. Lanouette, 143.
35. George Marx, The Voice of the Martians (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1997), 28.
36. Szilard, taped interview, May 1960; in CW2, 20.
37. Bohr to Szilard, 4 Feb. 1936; in Leo Szilard Papers, Mandeville Special Collections Library, Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego, box 4, folder 34; quoted in Lanouette, 157.
38. James Whale, dir., The Invi
sible Man (Universal, 1933).
39. This is the view of the editors of Szilard’s collected works: CW2, 19, n.
40. Szilard, CW1, 186.
41. Szilard, ‘Draft of Memorandum on the Sino-Japanese War’, 24 Apr. 1934; in CW2, 37–8.
Chapter 13
1. Jack London, ‘The Unparalleled Invasion’, written in 1906, 1st published in McClure’s in 1910; in The Short Stories of Jack London (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 278.
2. Jack London, ‘The Yellow Peril’, San Francisco Examiner (25 Sep. 1904); see H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 37.
3. London, ‘The Unparalleled Invasion’, 272, 275–6, 274.
4. ibid., 277.
5. ibid., 279.
6. ibid., 281.
7. United States Chemical Corps, Summary of Major Events and Problems, Fiscal Year 1959 (Edgewood, Md: Army Chemical Center, 1960); quoted in Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare (London: Arrow, 2002), 169–70.
8. Wendy Barnaby, The Plague Makers: The Secret World of Biological Warfare (New York: Continuum, 2000), 9–11.
9. Truman to Elizabeth Virginia (Bess) Wallace, 10 Jan. 1911; quoted in Robert H. Ferrell, ed., Dear Bess: The Letters from Harry to Bess Truman, 1910–1959 (New York: Norton, 1983), 19.
10. Truman to Wallace, 26 May 1913; quoted in Ferrell, 126.
11. Truman to Wallace, 26 Jan. 1911; quoted in Ferrell, 21.
12. Truman to Wallace, 22 June 1911; quoted in Ferrell, 39.
13. Tennyson, Locksley Hall, 1842, lines 119–30 (see e.g.
14. Simon Newcomb, His Wisdom The Defender (New York: Arno Press, 1975; 1st edn 1900), 199.
15. Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–45, and the American Cover-up (London: Routledge, 1997), 5.
16. ibid., 14.
17. In the words of Major General Matsumura Chisho: ibid., 32.
18. ibid., 35.
19. Edison, quoted in NYT (16 Oct. 1915); cited in Franklin, 72.
20. Harris, 44.
21. ibid., 42.
22. Brian Holmsten and Alex Lubertozzi, eds., The Complete War of the Worlds (Napierville, Ill.: Sourcebooks, 2001), 47.
23. Robert Markley, Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 204.
24. ‘Radio Play Upsets Americans – “Martian Invasion” of United States Taken Seriously’, Manchester Guardian (1 Nov. 1938): see http: //books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,,109739,00.html.
25. ‘Mr Wells “Deeply Concerned”: “Unwarranted” Rewriting of his Novel’, Manchester Guardian, 1 Nov. 1938: see http: //books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,,109739,00.html.
26. Markley, 204.
27. ibid., 205.
28. F. N. Maude, ‘Can Science Abolish War?’, Contemporary Review, 93 (Apr. 1908), 471.
29. McClure’s (1909), quoted in I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763–3749 (Oxford University Press, 1992), 134.
30. Orville Wright, quoted in Roger Bilstein, Flight in America 1900–1983: From the Wrights to the Astronauts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 39.
31. Theodore M. Knappen, ‘Chemical Warfare and Disarmament’, Independent, 107 (22 Oct. 1921), 73; quoted in Gilbert F. Whittemore, Jr, ‘World War I, Poison Gas Research, and the Ideals of American Chemists’, Social Studies of Science, 5, no. 2 (May 1975), 158.
32. Will Irwin, ‘The Next War’: An Appeal to Common Sense (New York: E. P Dutton & Co., 1921), 44; quoted in Hugh R. Slotten, ‘Humane Chemistry or Scientific Barbarism? American Responses to World War I Poison Gas, 1915–1930’, Journal of American History, 77 (Sep. 1990), 488.
33. J. B. Priestley, The Doomsday Men: An Adventure (London: Heinemann, 1938), 302.
34. Damian Thompson, The End of Time: Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996), 252.
35. Priestley, 239.
36. ibid., 32–3.
37. ibid., 33, 280.
38. ibid., 289.
39. ibid., 262.
40. Szilard, CW2, 18.
41. Victor Weisskopf, quoted in Charles Weiner, ed., Exploring the History of Nuclear Physics (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1972), 188; cited in Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (London: Penguin, 1988), 206.
42. Segrè, quoted in Robert Jungk, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists (San Diego: Harcourt, 1986; 1st edn 1956), 52.
43. Otto R. Frisch, What Little I Remember (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 114.
44. Frisch, 115.
45. Hahn to Meitner, 19 Dec. 1938; quoted in Otto Hahn, My Life, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (London: Macdonald, 1970), 151.
46. Frisch, 115.
47. ibid., 116.
48. Frisch and Meitner realized this before their chemist colleagues in Berlin. It is suggested in their joint paper, ‘Disintegration of Uranium by Neutrons: A New Type of Nuclear Reaction’, Nature, 143 (11 Feb. 1939), 239–40, written in the first two weeks of January.
49. Frisch, 116.
50. ibid.
51. Meitner to Hahn, 3 Jan. 1939; in Ruth Lewin Sime, Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 242.
52. Einstein, quoted in William L. Laurence, Dawn over Zero: The Story of Atomic Bomb (London: Museum, 1947), 32.
53. Laura Fermi, Atoms in the Family: My Life with Enrico Fermi (University of Chicago Press, 1961; 1st edn 1954), 154.
54. Eugene P. Wigner and Andrew Szanton, The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner (New York: Plenum, 1992), 193.
55. Szilard interview, May 1960; in CW2, 53.
56. Wigner and Szanton, 193–4.
57. Szilard to Strauss, 25 Jan. 1939; in CW2, 62.
58. Szilard to Director of Navy Contracts, 26 Jan. 1939; in CW2, 60. Szilard wrote to explain the situation on 2 Feb. 1939: CW2, 61.
59. Headlines quoted in William Lanouette with Bela Silard, Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, The Man Behind the Bomb (University of Chicago Press, 1994; 1st edn 1992), 180; and Lennard Bickel, The Deadly Element: The Story of Uranium (London: Macmillan, 1980), 103.
60. ‘Is World on Brink of Releasing Atomic Power?’, Science Service (30 Jan. 1939); quoted in Lanouette, 184.
61. An Early Time – Edward Teller, Los Alamos Laboratory film (n.d.); quoted in Lanouette, 181.
62. Quoted in Bickel, 105.
63. Joseph Rotblat, ‘Leaving the Bomb Project’, BAS, 41 (Aug. 1985), 17.
64. Szilard, in CW2, 54.
65. Lew Kowarski, interview in Bickel, 110.
66. ibid., 111.
67. Quoted in Lewis L. Strauss, Men and Decisions (London: Macmillan 1963), 165.
68. Szilard, memo to A. H. Compton, 12 Nov. 1942; in CW2, 55. It is interesting to note that this was written before even the Chicago pile had been built.
69. Paul Harteck to War Office, 24 Apr. 1939; quoted in Peter Wyden, Day One: Before Hiroshima and After (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 32.
70. NYT (30 Apr. 1939), 35; quoted in Rhodes, 297.
71. Wigner to Szilard, 17 Apr. 1939; in CW2, 87.
72. Wigner and Szanton, 198.
73. ibid., 199.
74. Quoted in P. D. Smith, Einstein (London: Haus Publishing, 2003), 121.
75. Quoted in Wigner and Szanton, 200.
76. Szilard, ‘Memorandum about the Einstein Letter’, 18 Apr. 1955; in CW2, 83.
77. Szilard, taped interview, May 1960; in CW2, 84.
78. ibid.
79. Janet Coatesworth, interview in Lanouette, 202.
80. Einstein to Roosevelt, 2 Aug. 1939; in CW2, 95. A facsimile of the letter is downloadable from http: //www.lanl.gov/history/road/birthofmodern physics.shtml.
Chapter 14
1. Pierrepont B. Noyes, The Pallid Giant: A Tale of Yesterday and Tomorrow (New York: Revell, 1927), 21.
2. ibid., 24.
3. ibid., 23.
4. ibid., 197–8.
5. ibid., 259.
6. William L. Laurence, Dawn over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb (London: Museum, 1947), 97.
7. ibid., pp. xvii, 180.
8. ibid., 152.
9. ‘Leo Szilard Dies; A-Bomb Physicist’, NYT (31 May 1964), 77.
10. Edward Teller with Judith Shoolery, Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2001), 148.
11. Szilard, taped interview, May 1960; in CW2, 85.
12. Eugene P. Wigner and Andrew Szanton, The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner (New York: Plenum, 1992), 203.
13. Szilard, taped interview, May 1960; in CW2, 85.
14. Wigner and Szanton, 203.
15. Teller, 149.
16. On this crucial failure, see especially Paul Lawrence Rose, Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: A Study in German Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 134–5.
17. Interview with Bethe, in William Lanouette with Bela Silard, Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, The Man Behind the Bomb (University of Chicago Press, 1994; 1st edn 1992), 222.
18. Interview with Elizabeth Silard, in Lanouette, 224.
19. Otto R. Frisch, What Little I Remember (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 126.
20. O. R. Frisch and R. Peierls, ‘On the Construction of a “Super-bomb”, Based on a Nuclear Chain Reaction in Uranium’, memo, Mar. 1940; in Ferenc Morton Szasz, British Scientists and the Manhattan Project: The Los Alamos Years (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 143.
21. ibid., 144, 145.
22. ibid., 144–5, 146.
23. Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), 814–15.
24. Oliphant interview; in Lennard Bickel, The Deadly Element: The Story of Uranium (London: Macmillan, 1980), 164.
25. Mark Oliphant, ‘The Beginning: Chadwick and the Neutron’, BAS, 38 (Dec. 1982), 17.
26. Lawrence, quoted in Bickel, 165.
27. Conant, quoted in James G. Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (Stanford University Press, 1993), 153.
