Making of the Atomic Bomb

by Richard Rhodes

  5

  Men from Mars

  The first subway on the European continent was dug not in Paris or Berlin but in Budapest. Two miles long, completed in 1896, it connected the thriving Hungarian capital with its northwestern suburbs. During the same year the rebuilding of the grand palace of Franz Josef I, in one of his Dual-Monarchial manifestations King of Hungary, enlarged that structure to 860 rooms. Across the wide Danube rose a grandiose parliament, its dimensions measured in acres, six stories of Victorian mansard-roofed masonry bristling with Neo-Gothic pinnacles set around an elongated Renaissance dome braced by flying buttresses. The palace in hilly, quiet Buda confronted the parliament eastward in flat, bustling Pest. “Horse-drawn droshkies,” Hungarian physicist Theodor von Kármán remembers of that time, carried “silk-gowned women and their Hussar counts in red uniforms and furred hats through the ancient war-scarred hills of Buda.”382 But “such sights hid deeper social currents,” von Kármán adds.

  From the hills of Buda you could look far beyond Pest onto the great Hungarian plain, the Carpathian Basin enclosed 250 miles to the east by the bow of the Carpathian Mountains that the Magyars had crossed to found Hungary a thousand years before. Pest expanded within rings of boulevards on the Viennese model, its offices busy with banking, brokering, lucrative trade in grain, fruit, wine, beef, leather, timber and industrial proauction only lately established in a country where more than 96 percent of the population had lived in settlements of fewer than 20,000 persons as recently as fifty years before. Budapest, combining Buda, Óbuda and Pest, had grown faster than any other city on the Continent in those fifty years, rising from seventeenth to eighth in rank—almost a million souls. Now coffeehouses, “the fountain of illicit trading, adultery, puns, gossip and poetry,” a Hungarian journalist thought, “the meeting places for the intellectuals and those opposed to oppression,” enlivened the boulevards; parks and squares sponsored a cavalry of equestrian bronzes; and peasants visiting for the first time the Queen City of the Danube gawked suspiciously at blocks of mansions as fine as any in Europe.383

  Economic take-off, the late introduction of a nation rich in agricultural resources to the organizing mechanisms of capitalism and industrialization, was responsible for Hungary’s boom. The operators of those mechanisms, by virtue of their superior ambition and energy but also by default, were Jews, who represented about 5 percent of the Hungarian population in 1910. The stubbornly rural and militaristic Magyar nobility had managed to keep 33 percent of the Hungarian people illiterate as late as 1918 and wanted nothing of vulgar commerce except its fruits.384 As a result, by 1904 Jewish families owned 37.5 percent of Hungary’s arable land; by 1910, although Jews comprised only 0.1 percent of agricultural laborers and 7.3 percent of industrial workers, they counted 50.6 percent of Hungary’s lawyers, 53 percent of its commercial businessmen, 59.9 percent of its doctors and 80 percent of its financiers.385, 386 The only other significant middle class in Hungary was a vast bureaucracy of impoverished Hungarian gentry that came to vie with the Jewish bourgeoisie for political power. Caught between predominantly Jewish socialists and radicals on one side and the entrenched bureaucracy on the other, both sides hostile, the Jewish commercial elite allied itself for survival with the old nobility and the monarchy; one measure of that conservative alliance was the dramatic increase in the early twentieth century of ennobled Jews.

  George de Hevesy’s prosperous maternal grandfather, S. V. Schossberger, became in 1863 the first unconverted Jew ennobled since the Middle Ages, and in 1895 de Hevesy’s entire family was ennobled.387 Max Neumann, the banker father of the brilliant mathematician John von Neumann, was elevated in 1913. Von Kármán’s father’s case was exceptional. Mór Kármán, the founder of the celebrated Minta school, was an educator rather than a wealthy businessman. In the last decades of the nineteenth century he reorganized the haphazard Hungarian school system along German lines, to its great improvement—and not incidentally wrested control of education from the religious institutions that dominated it and passed that control to the state. That won him a position at court and the duty of planning the education of a young archduke, the Emperor’s cousin. As a result, writes von Kármán:

  One day in August 1907, Franz Joseph called him to the Palace, and said he wished to reward him for his fine job. He offered to make my father an Excellency.388

  My father bowed slightly and said: “Imperial Majesty, I am very flattered. But I would prefer something which I could hand down to my children.”

  The Emperor nodded his agreement and ordained that my father be given a place in the hereditary nobility. To receive a predicate of nobility, my father had to be landed. Fortunately he owned a small vineyard near Budapest, so the Emperor bestowed upon him the predicate “von Szolloskislak” (small grape). I have shortened it to von, for even to me, a Hungarian, the full title is almost unpronounceable.

  Jewish family ennoblements in the hundred years prior to 1900 totaled 126; in the short decade and a half between 1900 and the outbreak of the Great War the insecure conservative alliance bartered 220 more.389 Some thousands of men in these 346 families were ultimately involved. They were thus brought into political connection, their power of independent action siphoned away.

  Out of the prospering but vulnerable Hungarian Jewish middle class came no fewer than seven of the twentieth century’s most exceptional scientists: in order of birth, Theodor von Kármán, George de Hevesy, Michael Polanyi, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Edward Teller. All seven left Hungary as young men; all seven proved unusually versatile as well as talented and made major contributions to science and technology; two among them, de Hevesy and Wigner, eventually won Nobel Prizes.

  The mystery of such a concentration of ability from so remote and provincial a place has fascinated the community of science. Recalling that “galaxy of brilliant Hungarian expatriates,” Otto Frisch remembers that his friend Fritz Houtermans, a theoretical physicist, proposed the popular theory that “these people were really visitors from Mars; for them, he said, it was difficult to speak without an accent that would give them away and therefore they chose to pretend to be Hungarians whose inability to speak any language without accent is well known; except Hungarian, and [these] brilliant men all lived elsewhere.”390 That was amusing to colleagues and flattering to the Hungarians, who liked the patina of mystery that romanticized their pasts. The truth is harsher: the Hungarians came to live elsewhere because lack of scientific opportunity and increasing and finally violent anti-Semitism drove them away. They took the lessons they learned in Hungary with them into the world.

  They all began with talent, variously displayed and remembered. Von Kármán at six stunned his parents’ party guests by quickly multiplying sixfigure numbers in his head.391 Von Neumann at six joked with his father in classical Greek and had a truly photographic memory: he could recite entire chapters of books he had read.392 Edward Teller, like Einstein before him, was exceptionally late in learning—or choosing—to talk.393 His grandfather warned his parents that he might be retarded, but when Teller finally spoke, at three, he spoke in complete sentences.

  Von Neumann too wondered about the mystery of his and his compatriots’ origins. His friend and biographer, the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, remembers their discussions of the primitive rural foothills on both sides of the Carpathians, encompassing parts of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, populated thickly with impoverished Orthodox villages. “Johnny used to say that all the famous Jewish scientists, artists and writers who emigrated from Hungary around the time of the first World War came, either directly or indirectly, from those little Carpathian communities, moving up to Budapest as their material conditions improved.”394 Progress, to people of such successful transition, could be a metaphysical faith. “As a boy,” writes Teller, “I enjoyed science fiction. I read Jules Verne. His words carried me into an exciting world. The possibilities of man’s improvement seemed unlimited. The achievements of science were fanta
stic, and they were good.”395

  Leo Szilard, long before he encountered the novels of H. G. Wells, found another visionary student of the human past and future to admire. Szilard thought in maturity that his “addiction to the truth” and his “predilection for ‘Saving the World’ ” were traceable first of all to the stories his mother told him.396 But apart from those, he said, “the most serious influence on my life came from a book which I read when I was ten years old. It was a Hungarian classic, taught in the schools, The Tragedy of Man.”

  A long dramatic poem in which Adam, Eve and Lucifer are central characters, The Tragedy of Man was written by an idealistic but disillusioned young Hungarian nobleman named Imre Madach in the years after the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1848. A modern critic calls the work “the most dangerously pessimistic poem of the 19th century.”397 It runs Adam through history with Lucifer as his guide, rather as the spirits of Christmas lead Ebenezer Scrooge, enrolling Adam successively as such real historical personages as Pharaoh, Miltiades, the knight Tancred, Kepler. Its pessimism resides in its dramatic strategy. Lucifer demonstrates to Adam the pointlessness of man’s faith in progress by staging not imaginary experiences, as in Faust or Peer Gynt, but real historical events. Pharaoh frees his slaves and they revile him for leaving them without a dominating god; Miltiades returns from Marathon and is attacked by a murderous crowd of citizens his enemies have bribed; Kepler sells horoscopes to bejewel his faithless wife. Adam sensibly concludes that man will never achieve his ultimate ideals but ought to struggle toward them anyway, a conclusion that Szilard continued to endorse as late as 1945. “In [Madach’s] book,” he said then, “the devil shows Adam the history of mankind, [ending] with the sun dying down.398 Only a few Eskimos are left and they worry chiefly because there are too many Eskimos and too few seals [the last scene before Adam returns to the beginning again]. The thought is that there remains a rather narrow margin of hope after you have made your prophecy and it is pessimistic.”

  Szilard’s qualified faith in progress and his liberal political values ultimately set him apart from his Hungarian peers. He believed that group was shaped by the special environment of Budapest at the turn of the century, “a society where economic security was taken for granted,” as a historian paraphrases him, and “a high value was placed on intellectual achievement.”399 The Minta that Szilard and Teller later attended deeply gratified von Kármán when he went there in the peaceful 1890s. “My father [who founded the school],” he writes, “was a great believer in teaching everything—Latin, math, and history—by showing its connection with everyday living.” To begin Latin the students wandered the city copying down inscriptions from statues and museums; to begin mathematics they looked up figures for Hungary’s wheat production and made tables and drew graphs. “At no time did we memorize rules from a book. Instead we sought to develop them ourselves.”400 What better basic training for a scientist?

  Eugene Wigner, small and trim, whose father managed a tannery and who would become one of the leading theoretical physicists of the twentieth century, entered the Lutheran Gimnásium in 1913; John von Neumann followed the next year. “We had two years of physics courses, the last two years,” Wigner remembers. “And it was very interesting. Our teachers were just enormously good, but the mathematics teacher was fantastic. He gave private classes to Johnny von Neumann. He gave him private classes because he realized that this would be a great mathematician.”401

  Von Neumann found a friend in Wigner. They walked and talked mathematics. Wigner’s mathematical talent was exceptional, but he felt less than first-rate beside the prodigious banker’s son. Von Neumann’s brilliance impressed colleagues throughout his life. Teller recalls a truncated syllogism someone proposed to the effect that (a) Johnny can prove anything and (b) anything Johnny proves is correct.402 At Princeton, where in 1933 von Neumann at twenty-nine became the youngest member of the newly established Institute for Advanced Study, the saying gained currency that the Hungarian mathematician was indeed a demigod but that he had made a thorough, detailed study of human beings and could imitate them perfectly.403 The story hints at a certain manipulative coldness behind the mask of bonhomie von Neumann learned to wear, and even Wigner thought his friendships lacked intimacy.404 To Wigner he was nevertheless the only authentic genius of the lot.405

  These earlier memories of Gimnásium days contrast sharply with the turmoil that Teller experienced. Part of the difference was personal. Teller was bored in first-year math at the Minta and quickly managed to insult his mathematics teacher, who was also the principal of the school, by improving on a proof. The principal took the classroom display unkindly. “So you are a genius, Teller? Well, I don’t like geniuses.”406 But whatever Teller’s personal difficulties, he was also confronted directly, as a schoolboy of only eleven years, with revolution and counterrevolution, with riots and violent bloodletting, with personal fear. What had been usually only implicit for the Martians who preceded him was made explicit before his eyes. “I think this was the first time I was deeply impressed by my father,” he told his biographers. “He said anti-Semitism was coming. To me, the idea of anti-Semitism was new, and the fact that my father was so serious about it impressed me.”407

  Von Kármán studied mechanical engineering at the University of Budapest before moving on to Göttingen in 1906; de Hevesy tried Budapest in 1903 before going to the Technische Hochschule in Berlin in 1904 and on to work with Fritz Haber and then with Ernest Rutherford; Szilard had studied at the Technology Institute in Budapest and served in the Army before the post-Armistice turmoil made him decide to leave. In contrast, Wigner, von Neumann and particularly Teller experienced the breakdown of Hungarian society as adolescents—Teller at the impressionable beginning of puberty—and at first hand.

  “The Revolution arrived as a hurricane,” an eyewitness to the Hungarian Revolution of October 1918 recalls. “No one prepared it and no one arranged it; it broke out by its own irresistible momentum.”408 But there were antecedents: a general strike of half a million workers in Budapest and other Hungarian industrial centers in January 1918; another general strike of similar magnitude in June. In the autumn of that year masses of soldiers, students and workers gathered in Budapest. This first brief revolution began with anti-military and nationalistic claims. By the time the Hungarian National Council had been formed under Count Mihály Károli (“We can’t even manage a revolution without a count,” they joked in Budapest), in late October, there was expectation of real democratic reform: the council issued a manifesto calling for Hungarian independence, an end to the war, freedom of the press, a secret ballot and even female suffrage.

  The Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy collapsed in November. Austrian novelist Robert Musil explained that collapse as well as anybody in a dry epitaph: Es ist passiert (“It sort of happened”).409 Hungary won a new government on October 31 and ecstatic crowds filled the streets of Budapest waving chrysanthemums, which had become the symbol of the revolution, and cheering the truckloads of soldiers and workers that pushed through.

  The victory was not easy after all. The revolution hardly extended beyond Budapest. The new government was unable to negotiate anything better than a national dismembering. The founding of the Republic of Hungary, proclaimed on November 16, 1918, was shadowed by another founding on November 20: of the Hungarian Communist Party, by soldiers returning from Russian camps where they had been radicalized as prisoners of war. On March 21, 1919, four months after it began, the Republic of Hungary bloodlessly metamorphosed into the Hungarian Soviet Republic, its head a former prisoner of war, disciple of Lenin, journalist, Jew born in the Carpathians of Transylvania: Béla Kun. Arthur Koestler, a boy of fourteen then in Budapest, heard for the first time “the rousing tunes of the Marseillaise and of the Internationale which, during the hundred days of the Commune, drowned the music-loving town on the Danube in a fiery, melodious flood.”410

  It was a little more than a hundred days: 133. They were days of con
fusion, hope, fear, comic ineptitude and some violence. Toward the end of the war von Kármán had returned to Budapest from aeronautics work with the Austro-Hungarian Air Force, where he had participated in the development of an early prototype of the helicopter. De Hevesy had also returned. Von Kármán helped reorganize and modernize the university in the brief days of the Republic and even served as undersecretary for universities during the Kun regime. He remembered its naïveté more than its violence: “So far as I can recall, there was no terrorism in Budapest during the one hundred days of the Bolsheviks, although I did hear of some sadistic excesses.”411 Lacking a qualified physicist, the university hired de Hevesy as a lecturer on experimental physics during the winter of 1918–19. Undersecretary von Kármán appointed him to a newly established professorship of physical chemistry in March, but de Hevesy found Commune working conditions unsatisfactory and went off in May to Denmark to visit Bohr. The two old friends agreed he would join Bohr’s new institute in Copenhagen as soon as it was built.

  Arthur Koestler remembers that food was scarce, especially if you tried to buy it with the regime’s ration cards and nearly worthless paper money, but for some reason the same paper would purchase an abundance of Commune-sponsored vanilla ice cream, which his family therefore consumed for breakfast, lunch and dinner. He mentions this curiosity, he remarks, “because it was typical of the happy-go-lucky, dilettantish, and even surrealistic ways in which the Commune was run.” It was, Koestler thought, “all rather endearing—at least when compared to the lunacy and savagery which was to descend upon Europe in years to come.”412

  The Hungarian Soviet Republic affected von Neumann and Teller far more severely. They were not admirers like young Koestler nor yet members of the intellectual elite like de Hevesy and von Kármán. They were children of businessmen—Max Teller was a prosperous attorney. Max von Neumann took his family and fled to Vienna. “We left Hungary,” his son testified many years later, “very soon after the Communists seized power. . . . We left essentially as soon as it was feasible, which was about 30 or 40 days later, and we returned about 2 months after the Communists had been put down.”413 In Vienna the elder von Neumann joined the group of Hungarian financiers working with the conservative nobility to overthrow the Commune.414