Leo Szilard, H. G. Wells, & the Green Left - Selection and comments by Peter Myers, November 1, 2004; update January 2, 2005. My comments are shown {thus}. Write to me at mailto:myers@cyberone.com.au.

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Leo Szilard helped create the first nuclear chain reaction, and initiated the letter to Roosevelt that got the Manhattan Project under way.

Later, he warned of the dangers of nuclear weapons, and crusaded for World Government.

He credited H. G. Wells, in a science fiction novel published in 1914, with first putting the idea of a nuclear chain reaction into his mind. He was also impressed with Wells' book The Open Conspiracy (for World Government) (1928 edition), and "joined" this movement along with other Jewish scientists associated with the Manhattan Project; the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists being a vehicle for them. Szilard also met Wells in person.

They supported Communism in principle, but not necessarily as practised in the Soviet Union.

One can detect "Green" ideas in Szilard too - for example, a concern over "ecological crises". In today's terms, they belong to the "Green Left" - Mikhail Gorbachev's camp. Gorbachev was a promoter of "Convergence" between the Soviet Union and the West: convergence.html.

Agents monitoring Szilard recorded: "Subject is of Jewish extraction, ... associates mostly with people of Jewish extraction. He is inclined to be rather absent-minded and eccentric ..."

A globalist, he wrote, 'the question that all proponents of a "new globalism" would necessarily face: What shape would power have to take if it was not to rest on fear and manipulation?'

Some key words to note in the text are:

ecological : "a strangely insecure atmosphere of global ecological crises"

ozone: "the 1989 treaty to protect the earth's ozone layer"

one world or none : "a 1946 contribution to the pamphlet One World or None"

elitism : "the socialist elitism that he thought necessary to reform the world"

elite: "a society guided by an intellectual elite"

(1) William Lanouette With Bela Silard, GENIUS IN THE SHADOWS: A Biography of Leo Szilard The Man Behind the Bomb (2) Michael Bess, REALISM, UTOPIA, AND THE MUSHROOM CLOUD: Four Activist Intellectuals and Their Strategies for Peace, 1945-1989 (3) Szilard in the One World Or None report of 1946 (4) Pavel Sudoplatov on Szilard and the Atomic Spies (5) H. G. Wells as a Green (6) Ben-Ami Shillony says Judaism is "the first religion to make world peace a central element in its eschatology" (7) Karl Marx vs the "Cult of Nature" (8) A Middle position on "Green" issues

(1) GENIUS IN THE SHADOWS: A Biography of Leo Szilard The Man Behind the Bomb

William Lanouette With Bela Silard Foreword by JONAS SALK

University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994

{p. 96} In his hours of thinking and talking - questioning and quibbling at studio parties, arguing in cafes and classrooms - the spare and ad hoc life that Szilard led enabled his mind to range wildly across the scientifc disciplines. Political and social forces were driving and changing the Berlin society he enjoyed, and while studying the newspapers and listening to the cafes' clientele, Szilard almost daily pondered Germany's fate. By the mid-1920s Szilard believed that the Weimar Republic, Germany's postwar government, was doomed to fail. Lacking procedures that might nurture and elevate new leaders, the overly complicated Weimar constitution could only grind itself down in a friction of conflict; in effect, an entropy of governance.

But Szilard still believed that democracy in Germany might survive for "one or two generations," and he devised a rational scheme to help postpone the republic's collapse and, perhaps, to prepare for transition to some healthier form of government. Drawing on the example of the Youth Movement (Jungendbewegung) that had flourished in Germany before the world war, Szilard called his organization the Bund, to his mind a closely bound alliance of like-minded young people. When Szilard brainstormed with Polanyi about the Bund, he praised The Open Conspiracy: Blueprints for a World Revolution by H. G. Wells and thought that the first twenty pages of this book, which was published in 1928, posed succinctly the problems that the world faced.

Polanyi arranged for Szilard to meet Otto Mandl, a wealthy timber merchant from Vienna then living in London, and during the Easter break in 1929, Szilard made his first journey to England. Mandl had discovered and enjoyed the writings of Wells, and moved by their visionary genius, he had arranged to publish them in Germany. Also, Mandl had married pianist Lili Kraus, who was born in Budapest and studied in Vienna, so Szilard found much to chat about when he called at the couple's home. During his London sojourn, Szilard ate with the Mandls almost every day, and a highlight of the visit was a dinner in late March attended by Wells. Writing Polanyi on April 1, Szilard reported that Mrs. Mandl and the children "are very nice each one for himself and compose a family altogether pleasant to look at." Szilard's English is stilted and affected, his spelling has German lapses, but through it an burst new enthusiasms for the ideas that might drive his own concepts for political reform. Mandl liked Szilard's notion of the Bund, but two other candidates Szilard tried to meet, biologist Julian Huxley and biochemist John B. Haldane, were abroad during the Easter holiday.

{p. 97} Back in Berlin that spring, Szilard taught but one course, "New Ideas in Theoretical Physics," leaving him free to think about the Bund, and the idea sustained his attention much longer than the inventions proposed in physics. "What we want are boys and girls who have the scientific mind and a religious spirit," he wrote in detailed plans for the Bund. He thought about the Bund throughout the summer of 1929 and continued to scribble notes and pose ideas that fall, when he also helped teach a course on "Problems of Atomic Physics and Chemistry." This course brought him to the KWI at least once a week, and at the Physics Institute downtown he joined his friend John von Neumann in teaching "New Questions of Theoretical Physics."

Whenever talk turned to politics around the cafe tables, Szilard expounded his own analysis of postwar economic developments, seeking a balance between laissez-faire capitalism and the socialist elitism that he thought necessary to reform the world. The life-styles predominating in "civilized countries" were closely associated with the ruling economic system, Szilard argued, and were largely determined by underlying economic principles. He complained that there was no sense of community purpose to bind the needs and aspirations of the German nation. And he concluded that some form of parliamentary democracy must be maintained to support laissez-faire capitalism.

From an this brainstorming, Szilard easily became gloomy about the survival of German democracy; he had noted a serious danger sign in February 1929 when he read about a conference in Paris on the rescheduling of Germany's postwar reparations payments. Representing Germany was the flamboyant Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, president of the German Reichsbank, who declared that Germany would not resume payments until she recovered her former colonies. Szilard concluded that "if Hjalmar Schacht believed he could get away with this, things must be rather bad." The practical step Szilard took after reading about that was to transfer his money to a bank in Geneva.

That move would save his personal finances, at least temporarily. But how, Szilard wondered, might he save Germany? Europe? The world? The Bund remained his answer. Szilard envisioned as the ultimate result of the Society of Friends of the Bund a utopia brought about in a society guided by an intellectual elite. "If we possessed a magical spell with which to recognize the 'best' individuals of the rising generation at an early age ..." he wrote, "then we would be able to train them to independent thinking, and through education in close association we could create a spiritual leadership class with inner cohesion which would renew itself ..."

{p. 106} But if saving Europe was impractical what about saving the human race?

The notion took shape in Szilard's mind that fall when Otto Mandl, the man who had introduced him to H. G. Wells in 1929, moved from London to Berlin. ...

In 1932, Szilard's impetus to study biology may have come from the essay "Light and Life," published that year by Danish physicist Niels Bohr. This bold paper urged applying the "complementarity" principle

{p. 107} from quantum mechallics to biology. Just as physics had abandoned conventional physical concepts and created new techniques from quantum mechanics to better explain the atom, Bohr reasoned, so might biology be understood in the same seemingly irrational but ultimatel useful way. A very remote but possible link between Bohr and Szilard may have come through physicist Max Delbruck, who returned to Berlin in the fall of 1932 from a year of study with Bohr in Copenhagen.

Unlike most of his prominent colleagues in physics - among them Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, and Victor Weisskopf - Szilard had never visited or studied at Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen during the 1920s; but he greatly admired Bohr's work and his courage when confroning new ideas. ...

Space travel was one of the many intellectual fancies that Szilard would set aside, and biology was one that he would eventually rediscover. But the idea that came to haunt Szilard to the end of his life also dawned on him in 1932: his fear of nuclear war. Like the idea of space travel, this danger came to him through Mandl from H. G. Wells. In 1914, Wells published The World Set Free, and when Szilard read the novel, in 1932, he saw science and politics in a new and frightful alliance. Mankind's fate may not necessarily be improved by research, he realized, but in science fiction, at least, it could worsen in catastrophic ways. Wells's novel predicted - correctly - that artificial radioactivity would be discovered in 1933. In the novel, Szilard recalled later, Wells

{quote} then proceeds to describe the liberation of atomic energy on a large scale for industrial purposes, and the deelopment of atomic bombs, and a world war which was apparently fought by an alliance of England, France, and perhaps including America, against Germany and Austria. ... He places this war in the year 1956, and in this war the major cities of the world are all destroyed by atomic bombs. ... {endquote}

Although Szilard regarded the book as fiction at the time, it jarred his thinking about war and peace and science, then and for years to come. Indeed, while Szilard was speculating about biolog, teaching theoretical physics with Schrodinger, and talking about nuclear research with Meitner, he was suffering such profound doubts about his own future.

{p. 132} The young physicists John D. Cockcroft and Emest T. S. Walton managed to split atoms by a new method; not, as Rutherford had done, with naturally radioactive radium but by using high-voltage electricity to speed up streams of hydrogen protons that bombarded small samples of lithium, a light metal. ...

In the same year, physicist James Chadwick identified a third particle in the atom: the "neutron."

... The morning of Rutherford's lecture, September 11, 1933, Szilard awoke with a bad cold and stayed in bed. But the next morning, curious about the talk he had missed, Szilard paged through The Times and spied this intriguing column of type:

THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION

BREAKING DOWN THE ATOM

TRANSFORMATION OF THE ELEMENTS

Farther down the column, Szilard saw:

THE NEUTRON

NOVEL TRANSFORMATIONS

He read on, about Rutherford's survey of "the discoveries of the last quarter century in atomic transmutation," to this summary:

{p. 133} {quote} HOPE OF TRANSFORMING ANY ATOM

What, Lord Rutherford asked in conclusion, were the prospects 20 or 30 years ahead?

High voltages of the order of millions of volts would probably be unnecessary as a means of accelerating the bombarding particles. Transformations might be effected with 30,000 or 70,000 volts . .. [and] we should be able to transform all the elements ultimately.

We might in these processes obtain very much more energy than the proton supplied, but on the average we could not expect to obtain energy in this way. It was a very poor and inefficient way of producing energy, and anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine. {endquote}

"Lord Rutherford was an expert in nuclear physics," Szilard thought, and "an expert is a man who knows what cannot be done." Szilard found that last paragraph "rather irritating because how can anyone know what someone else might invent?" Perhaps, thought Szilard, the famous Lord Rutherford is talking "moonshine."

In the days that followed, he pondered Rutherford's declaration in a routine favored for serious thought: long soaks in the bathtub and long walks in the park. ...

He recalled:

{p. 133} "Walking along Southampton Row, I had to stop for a streetlight, and at the very moment when the light turned green, it occurred to me that Rutherford might be wrong. ..." ...

He recalled:

{quote} As I was waiting for the light to change and as the light changed to green and I crossed the street, it suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by neutrons and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one neutron, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large mass, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction. I didn't see at the

{p. 134} moment just how one would go about finding such an element or what experiments would be needed, but the idea never left me. {endquote}

What he did see at that fateful intersection were two concepts needed to free the energy locked in the atom: the "nuclear chain reaction" and the "critical mass" needed to set off and sustain it.

Szilard quickly seized the implications: "In certain circumstances it might become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction, liberate energy on an industrial scale, and construct atomic bombs." Suddenly the H. G. Wells novel he had read a year before had a grave new meaning. Atomic bombs were science fiction to Wells when he wrote The World Set Free in 1913, and they were frightful to contemplate when Szilard first read about them in 1932. But by the fall of 1933, Rutherford's challenge and Szilard's response were moving atomic bombs away from fiction to scientific fact. Atomic bombs, and the chain reaction that would power them, became Szilard's "obsession," pushing aside his plans for a new career in biology.

"The thought did not come entirely out of the clear sky," he said later, but seeing both the mechanism and its fateful implications when he did was Szilard's special insight. The chain-reaction concept was common in chemistry, studied by Szilard's friend Michael Polanyi and others, and an atomic bombardment process similar to Szilard's had appeared in the Nature account of Rutherford's speech on "transmutation":

{quote} Beryllium, of mass 9 and charge 4, when bombarded, captures an alpha particle of mass 4 and charge 2, giving rise to a structure of rnass 12 and charge 6 and emitting a neutron of mass 1 and charge zero. {endquote}

To enhance this process, Szilard substituted a neutron for the alpha particle that bombarded the beryllium. "I was wondering whether Rutherford was right when it occurred to me that neutrons, in contrast to alpha particles, do not ionize [or electrically charge] the substance through which they pass. Consequently, neutrons need not stop until they hit a nucleus with which they may react." Szilard further assumed that when one neutron entered the nucleus, two might be expelled, creating a chain reaction that seemed awesome. Two calculations fired his imagination, and his fears.

First, if a neutron could strike an atom's nucleus with such force that it would emit two neutrons, then with each collision the freed neutrons might double in number. ...

{p. 135} Second, the amount of energy released could be huge. If Einstein's calculations of 1905 were accurate, then his famous formula E=mc2 assured that Energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light (whose symbol is c) squared. The number for mass was minute, but the nunlber for light speed in this equation is immense, and at least in theory, the amount of energy latent in matter was also immense.

What allowed Szilard to put together the stray clues about a nuclear chain reaction, clues that scientists working directly in atomic research had overlooked? No conclusive answer is possible, given the mysteries of Szilard's creative mind and the scant details he recalled. But this much is clear: While teaching discussion courses at the University of Berlin, Szilard followed developments in nuclear physics by reading scientific journals. He also questioned anyone who knew about a subject, often with the precision of a prosecuting attorney. Unlike his colleagues in nuclear physics, Szilard was no experimentalist. Instead, he was free to speculate haphazardly - intuitively - about the implications of other scholars' practical works, not bound to move each insight only as far as its next logical step and experiment. ...

{p. 136} By whatever means Szilard conceived the nuclear chain reaction, as soon as he had, he turned his mind on himself and tried to prove the idea right or wrong. He retreated to his room at the Imperial. Thinking. Scribbling calculations. Sketching hasty schematic pattems. For a week or more he saw no one, broke his meditation only to eat meals sent up by room service, and each night fen exhausted into bed to sleep. Szilard soaked for hours at a time in his bathtub, dozed and daydreamed on his bed, and forced his impulsive vision at the traffic light into twin hypotheses. Not only did he see a chain-reaction mechanism to release the atom's energy; he also realized why a critical mass of material was necessary: Only with many atoms close together could the neutrons reach other nuclei and not escape.

Having fled Nazi Germany that spring, Szilard also saw beyond his hypotheses to their political implications. He had feared for months that the Nazis were preparing for war and now worried that in the coming conflict Germany might be the first to build - and use - atomic bombs.

By mid-October, Szilard moved out of the Imperial Hotel, perhaps to find quieter or cheaper quarters, and rented a flat at 97 Cromwen Road, in a block of Victorian row houses a few doors west of Gloucester Road. There he continued his calculations, but apparently found it difficult to concentrate. A glance at the morning papers would have been distraction enough. Germany had quit the foundering League of Nations, and rhetoric at the Nazi party's rallies in Nuremberg was increasingly anti-Semitic and bellicose. No longer just a political aberration, the Nazi party was now the German state.

{p. 140} Even more than lightning-powered accelerators, however, it was his nuclear-chain-reaction concept that energized Szilard's thinking. His self-proclaimed "obsession" with chain reactions distracted Szilard from the refugee-settlement work for the Academic Assistance Council (AAC), and by March 1934 he had reduced his ideas to paper. In a fifteen-page patent application he named bervllium as the element most likely to be split by neutrons and, in turn, free other neutrons in a spontaneous frenzy of energy. In fact, beryllium would never split as Szilard expected; he was misled by incorrect published data about the element's atomic weight. But, intuitively, Szilard also named uranium and thorium - the only two natural elements that would eventually sustain chain reactions. He filed the patent on Monday, March 12, 1934, handing in a typed manuscript sprinkled with penned corrections and x-ed-out words. Then he began to dream about the atom's new commercial uses, perhaps replacing coal and oil as the world's industrial fuel; about its social implications, perhaps bringing abundant energy to developing countries now starved for water and minerals, and - unavoidably - about its potential as a weapon of mass destruction, perhaps giving Adolf Hitler "atomic bombs" to terrorize the world.

His patent filed, Szilard wrote to Sir Hugo Hirst, founder of General Electric (U.K), then on holiday at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, and in a playful letter urged him to read "a few pages" from The World Set Free by H. G. Wells. In the book Szilard cited an "interesting and amusing" section that had predicted in 1914 how artificial radioactivity would be produced in 1933, just as it had been by the Joliot-Curies. ...

Also in mid-March, Szilard's mentor and friend Albert Einstein wrte to support a Rockefeller Foundation grant that would finance Szilard's research at NYU, praising him as "an especially intelligent and many-

{p. 141} sided scientist, etraordinarily rich in ideas." ...

For an his involvement with nuclear research, Szilard could not ignore the pull of politics. It caught him when he picked up the Manchester Guardian on the morning of April 24 and read that Japan had rejected all interference, by the League of Nations or by any country, in its invasion of Manchuria. This invasion, and Japan's arrogance, upset Szilard's "sense of proportion," the moral and ethical balance that he sought in nature and in modern life. Szilard ripped the article from the page and with a letter mailed it to Lady Murray, the wife of classical scholar Gilbert Murray, then president of the International Committee of Intellectual Cooperation and chairman of the League of Nations Union. "We felt [at NYU in 1932] that a mere protest would not be of any value," Szilard wrote, "but that a definite pledge on the part of the leading scientists, thougn of rather limited value in itself, would serve to 'keep the faith' in the cause of justice." ...

{end}

(2) Michael Bess, REALISM, UTOPIA, AND THE MUSHROOM CLOUD: Four Activist Intellectuals and Their Strategies for Peace, 1945-1989

Louise Weiss (FRANCE)

Leo Szilard (USA)

E. P Thompson (ENGLAND)

Danilo Dolci (ITALY)

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993

{endnotes omitted}

{p. 39} the ques-

{p. 40} tion that all proponents of a "new globalism" would necessarily face: What shape would power have to take if it was not to rest on fear and manipulation? A central problem, for Leo Szilard, E. P. Thompson, and Danilo Dolci, was how to answer this question concretely, while taking into account the harsh but undeniable realities so incisively underscored by Weiss.

{p. 41} Peace through Cooperative Diplomacy: Leo Szilard's Vision of a Superpower Duopoly

Nobody should renounce even the boldest hopes before human nature has been given every opportunity to demonstrate its limits. - Leo Szilard, 1930

{p. 42} Like Louise Weiss, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard experienced the ending of the Second World War as a singularly traumatic and ambiguous moment. Weiss had returned to her shattered home in Paris during the summer of 1944, following on the heels of the fleeing Nazis. For Szilard, the point of dark and transformative insight did not come until a year later, in August 1945.

Szilard, too, had suffered personally at the hands of Nazism. As a Jewish university professor in Berlin, he had been forced to flee, eventually making his way like so many others to the United States. With the help of his friend Albert Einstein, he had persuaded Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 that the Germans might be wen on the way to building an atomic bomb; and he had devoted himself for three frenetic years to the production of plutonium in the Manhattan Project. Like so many other scientists, he had agonized over his moral responsibility in creating this fearsome new weapon, but he had reasoned that if somebody was going to possess nuclear bombs, it had better be the United States rather than Hitler's Germany. Now, in August 1945, he saw emblazoned in the newspaper headlines the news about Hiroshima's obliteration. Never one to avoid unpleasant truths, he knew that in a very real sense the bomb had been his idea: his own hands had leveled that city.

For several months Szilard had been urgently seeking to promote discussion among Manhattan Project scientists and to contact the policymakers in Washington, for he feared that within a few short years a deadly nuclear arms race would take shape between the United States and the Soviet Union. In one farsighted letter to Roosevelt, he predicted the coming era of nuclear-tipped intercontinental missiles and the potential for unlimited destruction that they implied.

For Szilard, therefore, the experiences of World War II led to conclusions that were equally as pessimistic (in one sense) as those reached by Weiss; yet they thrust in a fundamentally different direction. If the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima conveyed any clear meaning to him, it was that the modern world must forever abandon the idea of securing political goals by military means. Along that path, he ardently believed, lay collective suicide - not this year, perhaps, nor the next, but someday, inescapably. This was the fundamental premise of Szilard's reasoning, and from this premise flowed a series of inferences that diverged sharply from those drawn by Weiss. The only rational goal of statesmanship, under these new circumstances, was not just to build up national strength or to avoid war but to pave the way for something truly unprece-

{p. 43} dented: a permanent peace. The task ahead - an arduous one, he admitted - was to construct a new system of international security in which all the world's peoples would voluntarily participate, because it was manifestly in their best interest to do so.

1898-1949: From Science Fiction to the Nuclear Arms Race

Szilard's life story falls unavoidably into two parts: on one side lie all the events leading up to his August 1939 letter to President Roosevelt about making an atomic bomb; on the other side lie all the events that sprang from his letter, as he struggled desperately to bring under control the immense forces he had helped unleash.

Born into a prosperous Budapest family of Jewish merchants in 1898, the eldest of three children, Szilard made an early impression on those around him as an exceptional child. His younger brother, Bela, later told an interviewer that in

{quote} all his youthful pictures - school pictures in high school, six years old, four years old even - [Leo was] dead serious. He wanted always to be different. How consciously I can't tell you. But he [even] dressed differently from his schoolmates. {endquote}

A frail and sickly child, Leo spent most of his time up to the age of ten at home; he received his early education from his mother and from governesses who taught him German and French. "Very often it is difficult to know where one's set of values comes from," Szilard later observed, "but I have no difficulty in tracing mine to the children's tales which my mother used to ten me. My addiction to the truth is traceable to these tales and so is my predilection for 'Saving the World.'"

One such tale was The Tragedy of Man, a dramatic poem written by the Hungarian writer Imre Madach. Four decades later, Szilard could still vividly remember the deep impression that this story had made on him - prodding him to think in broad, eschatological terms that were unusual in a ten-year-old:

{quote} In that book the devil shows Adam the history of mankind, with the sun dying down. Only Eskimos are left and they worry chiefly because there are too many Eskimos and too few seals. The thought is that there remains a rather narrow margin of hope after you have made your prophecy and it is pessimistic. {endquote}

As an adult, Szilard delighted to think of himself as a brilliant and prescient eccentric; he deliberately cultivated this self-image in his daily actions, and also (not surprisingly) projected it backward onto his own past. It is difficult, therefore, to know just how early in his life he really began thinking of "saving

{p. 44} the world." In any case, this picture of a precocious child thinking earnestly about the fate of the earth was the one that Szilard himself carried with him throughout his life.

When he was ten years old, Leo's health improved, and he began attending public school. He easily excelled, eventually winning the Eotvos mathematics prize in a nationwide competition; but his schoolmates apparently did not resent his brilliance.

{quote} For some reason, ... I was always a favorite of the class. ... Perhaps my popularity was ... due to my frankness, which was coupled with a lack of aggression. One of the favorite sports of the class at that time was playing soccer. I was not a good soccer player, but because I was liked there was always a rivalry between the two teams: On whose side would I be? I was sort of a mascot. ... So up to the age of fifteen, when I finally refused, I played every soccer game on one side or the other, very often on the losing side. {endquote}

Szilard was sixteen when the First World War broke out, and his reaction (as he later recalled it) was characteristically detached and impartial:

{quote} From reading the Hungarian newspapers, it would have appeared that whatever Austria and Germany did was right and whatever England, France, Russia, or America did was wrong. ... Somehow, it seemed to me unlikely that the two nations located in the center of Europe should be invariably right, and that an the other nations should be invariably wrong. {endquote}

Despite his skepticism, Szilard was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army in 1917. Before his regiment could reach the front, however, he fell ill with Spanish influenza and arranged to be sent home to Budapest for hospitalization. This illness probably saved his life, for he later received word that his regiment had been an but annihilated in battle.

As the war ended, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated, Hungary briefly became a Soviet-style republic under the leadership of the Communist Bela Kun; but in August 1919, the Kun regime was crushed in a violent coup d'etat and replaced by the Right-wing dictatorship of Admiral Nicholas Horthy. Szilard decided that Hungary's chaotic political situation did not bode wen for his future studies, and he applied tor admission to the Engineering School at the University of Berlin. In December 1919, he boarded a train and headed west, beginning the long series of international peregrinations that was to mark his restless career.

Berlin in 1919 was one of the world's foremost centers of theoretical physics; the faculty at the university included such Nobel laureates as Albert Ein-

{p. 45} stein. Max Planck, and Max Von Laue. Szilard could not resist the lure of this intellectual milieu, and within a few weeks he switched from engineering into physics. He learned quickly, moreover, and Soon impressed his professors as a student of exceptional talent. During the Christmas holidays of 1921, he spent three weeks taking long walks and feverishly jotting down notes on a particularly vexing problem in thermodynamics. When school began again. he approached Einstein after a seminar and told him that he had solved the problem: he had found a way to reconcile the two prevailing (and radically different) theories describing thermodynamic fluctuations. Einstein responded: "That's impossible. This is something that cannot be done." "Well, yes," Szilard replied, "but I did it."

Szilard showed his manuscript to his professors, and the following week Max Von Laue telephoned him at home: "Your manuscript has been accepted as your thesis for the Ph.D. degree." He was twenty-three years old.

During these Berlin years, Szilard also became acquainted with the science fiction writings of H. G. Wells, which made a profound impression upon him. In particular, Szilard was struck by a prediction that Wells had made in 1914 concerning the release of atomic energy, its revolutionary consequences for warfare, and the inevitable world government that "atomic survivors" would establish among the radioactive ashes of a devastated civilization. At first, Szilard did not regard Wells's books "as anything but fiction." However, after the Frenchman Frederic Joliot announced the release of artificial radioactivity in 1933 (the very year, by a strange coincidence, for which Wells had predicted it), Szilard began to think seriously about the possibility of atomic weapons.

It was also in April 1933, three months after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, that Szilard fled from Berlin to Vienna, catching one of the last unrestricted trains out of the country before Nazi controls were clamped down. He had been observing events in German politics with growing anxiety throughout the 1920s, and had first reached the conclusion "that something would go wrong in Germany" in February 1929, before the onset of the depression. Hjalmar Schacht, the president of the German Reichsbank, had made the startling announcement that Germany could not pay any more war reparations unless it got back its former colonies. ' I was so impressed by this," Szilard later recalled, "that I wrote a letter to my bank and transfered every single penny I had out of Germany into Switzerland." After this event, Szilard had prepared himself tor the worst: "I had two [packed] suitcases standing in my room ...; the key was in [them], and all I had to do was turn the key and leave when things got too bad."

From a hotel in Vienna he mobilized an international campaign to help find new academic posts for the hundreds of Jewish intellectuals who he knew would be fleeing Hitler's Germany as he had done himself. Later in 1933, this

{p. 46} project brought him to England; and it was here, as he was crossing a London street one autumn day, that he made the most momentous theoretical breakthrough of his career:

{quote} [Itl suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by neutrons, and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one neutron, ... [it might become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction, liberate energy on an industrial scale, and construct atomic bombs. The thought ... became a sort of obsession with me. {endquote}

Szilard's idea, as it turned out, was still too far ahead of its time. Lord Ernest Rutherford, who dominated British physics during the 1930s, had recently dismissed the notion of tapping the atom's power as "moonshine.' 15 Thus, because no one would provide financial backing for experiments based on so adventurous a conception, Szilard was forced to abandon his plans for research. Nevertheless, he took out a secret patent on his idea in 1934 and assigned it to the British admiralty for safekeeping.

Szilard was still living in London in March 1936 when Hitler's troops reoccupied the demilitarized Rhineland territories, unopposed by France or Britain. From that point on, Szilard later recalled, "I knew that there would be war in Europe." Although he had been offered a lectureship at Oxford University, it was time once again to prepare the suitcases. He had told his friend Michael Polanyi half-jokingly in 1935: "I would stay in England until one year before the war, at which time I would shift my residence to New York City. That was very funny, because how can anyone say what he will do one year before the war?" 17 In September 1938, Szilard was visiting a friend in Illinois when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned to London from the Munich Conference, trading the fate of Czechoslovakia for "peace in our time." Szilard brooded for three months, then wrote a most characteristic letter to the director of the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford:

{quote} It seems to me that the Munich agreement created, or at the very least demonstrated, a state of international relations which now threatens Europe and in the long run will threaten the whole civilized world.... I greatly envy those of my colleagues at Oxford who in these circumstances are able to give their fun attention to [scientific worksl ... without offending their sense of proportions. To my great sorrow I am apparently quite incapable of following their example.... I may therefore return to England if I can see my way of being of use, not only in science, but also in connection with the general situation....

Please excuse the three months' delay of this letter. Immediately after the Munich agreement it did not seem possible for me to have

{p. 47} a sufficiently balanced view. and I had to allow some time to elapse before I was able to write without bitterness of this event. {endquote}

Shortly after Szilard had written this letter, the eminent Danish theoretician Niels Bohr arrived in Europe with a piece of startling news: nuclear fission in uranium had just been discovered by two German scientists. Szilard immediately perceived the implications of the discovery and set up experiments (on borrowed equipment) to determine whether uranium, under appropriate conditions, would sustain a nuclear chain reaction. The experiments, conducted with Walter Zinn at Columbia University in March 1939, indicated that it would. "An we had to do:' Szilard later recalled,

{quote} was to tum a switch, lean back, and watch the screen of a television tube. If Hashes of light appeared on the screen, that would mean that neutrons were emitted in the fission process, ... and that the large-scale liberation of atomic energy was just around the corner. We turned the switch and we saw the flashes. We watched them for a little while and then we switched everything off and went home. That night there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief. {endquote}

Since it was clear to Szilard that war was approaching, he decided that Franklin Roosevelt himself must be apprised of these scientific developments and of their possible military consequences. To this end, he drafted a letter to the president, persuaded Einstein to sign it, and had it dispatched directly by a friend who had good connections in the White House. Out of these events the two-billion dollar Manhattan Project gradually developed. Szilard was assigned to the so-called Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, the branch of the Manhattan Project devoted to the production of plutonium in an atomic pile.

Albert Einstein later referred to his signing of Szilard's letter to Roosevelt as the one great mistake of his life. On the other hand, when they were faced at the beginning of World War II with the serious possibility of a Hitler wielding atomic weapons, most scientists did not hesitate to contribute their energy and ingenuity to the wartime cause. The Manhattan Project eventually became a top military priority for the United States, especially after the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941; and it steadily grew into a complex industrial effort with a plodding momentum of its own. For Szilard, the strict regimentation and requirements of secrecy represented the opposite of the scientific openness he considered essential to creative research. He soon grew restive, and complained repeatedly to his superiors that excessive restrictions on interdepartmental communications were slowing the project down. His initial fears were, on the one hand, that Germally would procure a bomb first and subjugate the entire planet: or, on the other hand, that if the United States could not quickly

{p. 48} develop its own bomb to use against Germany, the peoples of the world would never comprehend the weapon's revolutionary destructiveness, and would hence lose the incentive for a radical postwar arms-control agreement.

Then, as it became increasingly clear toward the end of 1944 that Germany could be vanquished by means of nonnuclear weapons, Szilard's fears turned toward Japan. By this point, the issues had an shifted, for there could be little doubt any longer of a U.S. victory. Was it still necessary to use the atomic bomb against Japan, and if so, in what manner" Szilard became deeply concerned about the total isolation of the scientists, who were making the bomb, from the relatively small group of policymakers who would decide how to use it. He worried not only about the moral issues involved in using the bomb but about the consequences that it would have for the balance of power in the postwar world. Specifically, Szilard later wrote, he "was concerned at this point that by demonstrating the bomb and using it in the war against Japan, we might start an atomic arms race between America and Russia which might end with the destruction of both countries."

Not being one to mince words, Szilard appealed vigorously to the project's administrators with various schemes to end the scientists' isolation, but he received only superficial reassurances. He then circulated petitions among the various Manhattan Project installations, requesting permission for the scientists to engage in open debate concerning the use of the bomb. The debate's proceedings, he suggested, should be sent to the president. This proposal was quickly blocked by the military security personnel, who had already grown suspicious of Szilard's independent temperament as early as 1940, and had ordered him shadowed by detectives for the duration of the war. (The agents duly recorded: "Subject is of Jewish extraction, ... usually eats his breakfast in drug stores and other meals in restaurants, ... occasionally speaks in a foreign tongue, and associates mostly with people of Jewish extraction. He is inclined to be rather absent-minded and eccentric, and will start out a door, turn around and come back, go out on the street without his coat or hat.... Subject's actions are very unpredictable and if there is more than one entrance or exit, he is just as apt to use the most inconvenient as not.")

Undaunted by the failure of his petitions, Szilard drafted a long letter to President Roosevelt and had it transmitted directly to the White House by a friend. "The strong position of the United States ... in the past thirty years;' he wrote,

{quote} was essentially due to the fact that the United States could out-produce every other country in heavy armaments. ... The existence of atomic bombs means the end of the strong position of the United States in this respect. From now on the destructive power which can be accumulated by other countries as well as the United

{p. 49} States can easily reach the level at which an the cities of the "enemy" can be destroyed in one single attack. ...

If there should be great progress in the development of rockets after this war it is conceivable that it will become possible to drop atomic bombs on the cities of the United States from very great distances by means of rockets. ...

... [Should] our "demonstration" of atomic bombs and their use against Japan be delayed ... so that the United States shall be in a more favorable position in negotiations aimed at setting up a system of [international] controls? {endquote}

A few days later, Szilard had just received word of being granted an appointment with Eleanor Roosevelt when the news broke that the president had died of a stroke. He then requested to see Harry Truman in person. Truman was not available, but he directed Szilard to discuss his concerns with James F. Byrnes, who (unbeknownst to Szilard) was slated to become Truman's new secretary of state. In May 1945, Szilard visited Byrnes at his home in Spartanburg, South Carolina, but the ensuing discussion left both men dissatisfied. Byrnes disapproved of Szilard's "general demeanor and his desire to participate in policymaking," while Szilard was "completely flabbergasted" by Byrnes's assumption that "rattling the bomb might make Russia more manageable." In particular, Szilard was appalled when Byrnes made a pointed reference to the destiny of Hungary, implying that Szilard should worry less about long-term relations between the United States and Soviet Union than about keeping his native country free from domination. "I certainly didn't want Russia to stay in Hungary indefinitely," Szilard later wrote, "but what Byrnes said offended my sense of proportion .

Troubled by this revealing encounter with one of the senior officials of the incoming administration, Szilard returned to Chicago During the next two months, he desperately sought to circulate another round of petitions, pushing the Manhattan Project scientists to demand greater control over the use of their creation - but to no avail. On August 6, Hiroshima was bombed and the new weapon's existence most starkly revealed to the rest of the world.

Szilard's fundamental ideas about politics as the art of conciliation and mediation were born long before the nuclear era, amid the decaying democracy of Weimar Germany. It was here, during the 1920s and early 1930s, that he first witnessed the blind force of ideological partisanship as it dragged a nation toward anarchy. His earnest and imaginative response to the internal polarities of Weimar Germany clearly prefigured the way he would later respond to the great polarity between Russia and America.

Szilard had come to Berlin in December 1919, just as the defeated German people were first making their rather sullen and half-hearted departure from

{p. 50} the authoritarian grandeur of Kaiser Wilhelm's Second Reich. The new republic, which had its birthplace at Goethe's native city of Weimar, was regarded by many Germans - both on the Left and the Right - as an alien political model imposed on a helpless nation by the victors of the First World War. One of the great paradoxes of Weimar democracy was that its principal supporters were the allegedly Marxist members of the Social Democratic party, whose leaders dominated German politics during the early postwar years. Flanked on the left by militant Communists and on the right by reactionary or proto-Fascist groups, the liberal center rested on an increasingly fragile coalition of Social Democrats, Catholics, and so-called Vernunftrepublikaner (republicans by rationalization), reluctant liberals like Thomas Mann who yearned for a uniquely German synthesis of traditional and modern political forms, and who supported the Weimar government only because an immediate alternatives seemed far worse.

Acutely sensitive to this volatile atmosphere of clashing political views, and alarmed by the economic turmoil and strident racism of the 1920s, the young physicist Szilard tried to sketch a solution of his own. He wrote in 1930,

{quote} If we possessed a magical spell with which to recognize the "best" individuals of the rising generation at an early age, ... then we would be able to train them to independent thinking, and through education in close association we could create a spiritual leadership class with inner cohesion which would renew itself on its own.... [Such a group could] exercise a potent influence on the shaping of public affairs even without any particular inner structure and without any constitutionally determined rights.... It would also be conceivable that such a leading group would take over a more direct influence on public affairs as part of the political system, next to government and parliament, or in the place of government and parliament. {endquote}

This organization, which Szilard called Der Bund (meaning "a closely bonded alliance"), may have been directly modeled after the contemporary proposals of H. G. Wells, whose science-fiction writings had already awakened in Szilard's imagination the fateful vision of an atomic bomb. Szilard greatly admired Wells, and even met briefly with him in 1929 - yet he never mentioned any explicit connection between his "Bund" and the book Wells published in the same year, Tile Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution. Whatever the actual relation between them, however, the "Bund" and the "Open Conspiracy" represented the same bold conception of political renewal - with the difference that Szilard focused upon the concrete circumstances of Germany in 1930, whereas the mind of Wells roamed more freely across the continents and decades.

For both Szilard and Wells, the growing political and economic disarray

{p. 51} of the 1920s and '30s suggested that twentieth-century society was no longer governable by traditional forms of leadership. They proposed that the citizens of the Western democracies gradually transfer the reins of governance to a new elite, made up of the "best minds" from all fields and trained to act with decisiveness amid the incipient chaos of the era. Szilard's plan was more detailed than that of Wells, for it specified the methods of selection, training, and education for his ideal elite, whereas Wells preferred to leave such details up to the initiative of the participants. For both of them, however, the key element was the inner cohesion of this new group of leaders. Although its members would be drawn from diverse backgrounds and encouraged to hold contrasting views, the new elite must be united by a spiritual esprit de corps which transcended an the ideological, national, and class distinctions that were threatening to tear modern society apart. Both the Hungarian scientist and the English novelist were rather vague about details, but they explicitly pointed to an underlying "religious spirit" as the foundation for their proposals. Like the Guardians in Plato's Republic, these new leaders must represent exactly the opposite of the rapacious trafficking that had been associated with the word "politics" since ancient times. In Szilard's "Bund," they were to

{quote} demonstrate their devotion through particular burdens which they take upon themselves and through a life of service.... They must hand over to the Order an monies they earn above the base minimum necessary for their existence.... For a part (about a third?) of the members of the Order, celibacy may perhaps be prescribed. {endquote}

The "Bund" and the "Open Conspiracy" were frankly elitist conceptions, but neither of them was intended as a blueprint for a modern form of oligarchical government. What Szilard and Wells had in mind, rather, was to inject a strong dose of meritocracy into the processes of contemporary mass democracy. They envisioned a group of enlightened leaders with sufficient moral authority to persuade large numbers of citizens, but they refused to accept any Leninist notions of a vanguard party that could force the masses to follow their "objective" interests. "Care must be taken," Szilard wrote,

{quote} that the prevailing opinion of the leading group be safely and freely communicated to a wide public so that the two may never diverge to a significant degree.... Whether one should ever give the Order an opportunity to exercise a more direct influence on public affairs is a question that can be postponed until experience has shown ... to what degree it has succeeded in remaining closely bound to the general public. {endquote}

In proposing such a new form of governance, Szilard and Wells were drawing directly or indirectly from an three of the major ideologies that competed

{p. 52} for dominance during the interwar years. From classical liberalism - which remained central to their proposals - they adopted the principle of the free exchange of goods and ideas as a basic tenet. They mitigated this liberal principle, however, with an emphasis on centralized planning for public welfare, as espoused by contemporary communists and socialists. Wells referred to himself as a nonmarxian socialist, while Szilard (who abhorred an such labels) was attracted to the idea of social planning less from any ideological conviction than from his ingrained penchant for rational and well-ordered solutions. Finally, their proposals also reflected a critique of parliamentary democracy somewhat similar to that which was emerging among the ideologues of Fascism; for both Szilard and Wells saw little hope in the polarized and ineffectual parliaments of England, France, and Weimar Germany. Like the Fascists, they urgently sought new sources of resolute leadership outside the traditional organs of national public life; but they were drastically different from the Fascists in everything else, for they based their solutions on reason, tolerance, and a deep respect for the virtues of diversity. Indeed, the "Bund" and the "Open Conspiracy" were deliberately designed to forestall a decline into Fascism by addressing and remedying precisely those weaknesses in parliamentary government that the Fascists tended to exploit.

Szilard's proposed "Bund" also bore many similarities to Louise Weiss's Ecole de la Paix, which was meeting during these same years in Paris. Both these institutions were designed o provide a neutral platform, from which enlightened individuals might gain insight into each other's contrasting positions, thereby moving closer to mutual understanding and to producing a common plan of action for the future. "In today's bureaucracy," Szilard wrote in 1930, "there is no structure whatsoever that would offer a guarantee of a well-thought-out, large-scale definition of aims." This had been precisely one of Weiss's main reasons for founding her Ecole: the idea that an elite group of individuals, endowed with the respect of the broader population, might step forward to offer a democratic society the sense of direction that it so badly needed to survive. Szilard's "Bund," however, never went beyond the initial planning stages; for in the growing polarization of Weimar Germany, he was unable to find enough persons willing to participate in his unorthodox experiment. Still, he did not grow disillusioned by the harsh setbacks of the 1930s (as Weiss did), and later revived his elitist proposals for consensus building and mediation in the new context of the postwar era.

"If you are a scientist," Robert Oppenheimer told a gathering at Los Alamos, New Mexico in November 1945,

{quote} you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn

{p. 53} over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world.... It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity. {endquote}

Oppenheimer's audience. which consisted largely of Manhattan Project scientists and technicians, did not include Leo Szilard. Had he been present, though, Szilard would doubtless have found it troubling to hear such a straightforward assertion about the value of knowledge in dominating the environment. Szilard expressed his more ambiguous assessment of the relation between knowledge and power in a 1946 contribution to the pamphlet One World or None. "Atomic bombs," he wrote, "are the product of human imagination applied to the behavior of inanimate matter; [wel cannot cope with the problems that their existence has created unless we are willing to apply our imagination to the problems of human behavior."

Here was a scientist who clearly understood that Oppenheimer's phrase, "power to control the world," actually concealed an unbridgeable qualitative difference between controlling things and controlling people. Implicit in Szilard's statement was a paradox lying at the heart of industrial civilization: while human mastery over nature steadily increases, humanity's control over its own destiny becomes more and more problematic. This twentieth-century paradox of growing power and diminishing control is an too familiar to the postwar generations, who have learned how to conduct their everyday lives in a strangely insecure atmosphere of global ecological crises and economic disequilibrium, political turmoil, and fearsome armaments. For Szilard, Hiroshima and Auschwitz could only be followed by humility. "I am not particularly qualified to speak about the problem of peace," he wrote in 1947 for the newly created Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists;

{quote} I am a scientist and science, which has created the bomb and confronted the world with a problem, has no solution to offer to this problem. Yet a scientist may perhaps be permitted to speak on the problem of peace, not because he knows more about it than other people do, but rather because no one seems to know very much about it. {endquote}

Szilard was too sophisticated to think that the inductive logic of natural science could be transferred to the infinitely more obtuse and intractable questions of politics, and he readily acknowledged the rift between physical problems and social problems. Nevertheless. it is impossible to understand Szilard's vision of peace without understanding his vision of science. for both were derived from the same reservoir of fundamental values. Like his great masters, Einstein and Bohr, Szilard did not find any rigid cleavage between "scientific" and "humanistic" categories of thought. He approached basic scientific prob-

{p. 54} lems with an undisguised reverence that bordered on rationalistic mysticism; and, conversely, he tried to keep his personal life and political ideas as clear and unfettered as he kept his scientific creativity. In 1940, when the A-bomb project was still a small and tentative undertaking, he wrote down for himself a list of the personal ideals that moved him. He was evidently embarrassed enough by their openly emotional tone to feel the need to entitle them - with typical wry self-mockery - "Ten Commandments." On science, Szilard wrote:

{quote} Do not destroy what you cannot create.

Speak to an men as you do to yourself, with no concern for the effect that you make, so that you do not shut them out from your world; lest in isolation the meaning of life slips out of sight and you lose the belief in the perfection of the creation. {endquote}

On the conduct of his personal life, he wrote:

{quote} Do your work for six years; but in the seventh, go into solitude or among strangers, so that the recollection of your friends does not hinder you from being what you have become.

Let your acts be directed towards a worthy goal, but do not ask if they will reach it; they are to be models and examples, not means to an end.

Honor children. Listen reverently to their words and speak to them with infinite love. {endquote}

Szilard did not need to "obey" these commandments, for (in the words of his widow) they already reflected his spirit "like a portrait." Scientific inquiry, personal life, and social action were inseparable for him; he brought the same intellectual habits and moral values to an three.

On the other hand, although he took his work very seriously, Szilard's style of thought continually revealed a certain playful lightness. His friends remarked that he could labor night and day for several months on a scientific experiment, than abandon it suddenly with complete serenity, saying, "Oh, it was not a good idea." He preferred to act as a catalyst and innovator, concentrating an his effort on a problem in its early stages when the frames of reference were not yet clear-cut; and then, once the general outlines had emerged, his attention would wander and he would move on to something else. The drudgery of finishing a project, as wen as the subsequent recognition for it, he cheerfully left to others. "Had he pushed through to success an his new inventions," observed the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dennis Gabor in 1973, "we would now talk of him as the Edison of the twentieth century."

With gentle irony, Szilard relentlessly criticized the statesmen and political trends of the Cold War period, yet he did not hesitate to turn the same dry bemusement upon himself: "I must confess," says the main character in one of

{p. 55} his stories, "that with Szilard I never know when he is serious and when he is joking, and I suspect that often he does not know himself." He could be brusque and impulsive at times, or extraordinarily patient and cautious; he was as understated about his own achievements as he was unintimidated by the achievements of others; he plunged vigorously into scientific and political arguments, yet his friends and colleagues marveled at his apparent incapacity for acrimony or in will.

Szilard was not exactly a humble man, but it would be misleading to say that he had a "big ego." He was egocentric, in the sense that he appears to have felt personally responsible since his childhood for affecting the fate of humankind in some decisive way; and he would let nothing come between him and this responsibility. His vision of his own stature was neatly captured when he looked back with irony on his unsuccessful 1945 meeting with Truman's secretary of state, James Byrnes:

{quote} I was rarely as depressed as when we left Byrnes' house and walked toward the station. I thought to myself how much better off the world might be had I been born in America and become influential in American politics, and had Byrnes been born in Hungary and studied physics. In an probability there would have been no atomic bomb, and no danger of an arms race between America and Russia. {endquote}

Having lived in Hungary, Germany, and England before settling in the United States, Szilard was perhaps less a Hungarian emigre than a rootless citoyen du monde: "Leo's home," according to a friend, was "wherever his intellectual interests [happened] to be at the moment." During the postwar years, he lived mainly in hotels and faculty clubs, ate his meals in "horrible restaurants frequented by students," and "owned no. property, very few books." In 1951 he married "an old friend of Berlin days," Gertrud Weiss; but his wife was knowingly taking on a relationship with a man who could never be tied down. Whenever possible, he affiliated himself with academic institutions only on the most tenuous and temporary basis. Although he was officially a professor at the University of Chicago through most of his postwar career, he regularly sought (and received) research grants which permitted him to rove continuously among major American universities, staying in each location for a few months or years at a time. Among scientists, something of a "Szilard legend" eventually developed, and he was noted not only for his "uncanny ability to conceive ideas before their time," but also as "an intellectual adventurer, likely to embark at any moment on some excursion far beyond the boundaries of science ... unpredictable just because his behavior [was] so devastatingly rational ."

Even in physical appearance, Szilard seemed a striking and unusual figure.

{p. 56} The sociologist Edward Shils, a close friend of his, was left with the following impression after they first met in 1945:

{quote} From my window, I could see him approaching, roly-poly; he walked smoothly and rapidly, the swift and regular agitation of his legs contrasting with the serenity of his bearing.... Very shortly thereafter, he came to my room. He was short and plump; he had a large head, a high, broad, somewhat sloping brow, and small, fine, neatly curving features. His hair, dark and combed back, had a broad grey streak running almost from the center of his forehead, and surmounted a ruddy face. It was the face of a benign, sad gentle, mischievous cherub. The whole formed a picture of unresting sensitivity and intelligence, immensely energetic and controlled, and yet with great ease and gentleness of manner. {endquote}

In 1946, Szilard astonished his colleagues by abandoning physics altogether and starting over anew in the fledgling field of molecular biology. This radical break, according to one of his friends, signified "a turning from death to life that seemed to reflect his deep revulsion after Hiroshima." Szilard himself, however, attributed the switch more simply to an intuition that physics had been intellectually exhausted by mid-century and that it was time to move on to something truly new. He was especially disgusted by what he perceived as the co-optation of theoretical physics by the demands of large-scale technology. "Nowadays," he wrote,

{quote} a physicist has to go to the army or navy and get himself a million dollars or if necessary ten million, and build a cyclotron for a few hundred million volts at least, but preferably for a billion volts or even ten billion volts, and after he has gone through the trouble of spending a few million dollars, which usually takes a few years, he can then sit down and observe phenomena which no one could predict and about which he can then be astonished. {endquote}

On the other hand, Szilard believed that "while physics appears to be on the way out, biology does not seem to exist yet." He suspected that "there must exist universal biological laws just as [there] exist, for instance, physical laws [like] the conservation of energy or the second law of thermodynamics." Like Einstein and Bohr, Szilard tended to approach scientific questions with an eye to their bearing on the fundamental mysteries of nature; he was actually more at ease with those answers that bordered on mathematical or metaphysical paradox than with straightforward, one-dimensional models projecting mere mechanical laws. Not surprisingly, his early biological research, which focused on the phenomenon of aging, was guided by questions about the subtle reciprocal interaction of the whole and part within a living organism:

{p. 57} [Does] aging occur in a cell of the animal body because it is not placed in a constant environment, but in an environment determined by an the cells of the body, and because that environment changes as the result of the interaction of the cells of the body with each other? ... Even if we understood an the phenomena that a muscle or nerve fiber may exhibit in terms of the underlying physical and chemical analysis, we will not have made an appreciable step towards the understanding of what life is.

The fact that Szilard should have been thinking in such speculative and anti-reductionistic terms in his postwar scientific work is not without significance for his political activities. He repudiated physics because he believed that it had succumbed to the lure of technology and was, therefore, enduring a slow death of massive institutionalization. He embraced biology, on the other hand, precisely because it did "not seem to exist yet" - because it was an uncharted territory that still offered opportunities for small-scale, flexible research into areas that one chose because they were intrinsically interesting, not just potentially lucrative or useful. What motivated Szilard's choice was probably not so much an explicit value judgment that physics, in Robert Oppenheimer's words, had "known sin," whereas biology was untainted because it focused on life. Such a comparison, given the historical circumstances of the Manhattan Project, apparently did not strike Szilard as entirely fair; for few could know better than he what it had been like to make the agonizing decisions of 1939. Rather, the essential problem for Szilard appears to have been much simpler: postwar physics was being harnessed like a workhorse for the utilitarian ends of industrial society, whereas biology still seemed relatively free to roam wherever the human imagination beckoned. Both in his aversion for what he perceived as the physicist's submission to the ends of power and in his attraction to the biologist's independence, Szilard the scientist was no different from Szilard the humanist.

Thus, if there was a common thread running through Szilard's personal life and scientific ideals, it was the peculiar movement he always made between passionate involvement in some problem or endeavor, and abrupt disengagement so that he could move on to something new. "[A] man's clarity of judgment," he told an interviewer in 1960,

{quote} is never very good when he is involved, and as you grow older, and as you grow more involved, your clarity of judgment suffers. This is not a matter of intelligence; this is a matter of ability to keep free from emotional involvement. {endquote}

This vigilant and continuous effort of emotional disengagement was also central to Szilard's conception of peace; for war, as he saw it, flowed essentially

{p. 58} from strong emotional attachments to particular national or ideological positions. Human beings, he believed, would not engage in the insane destructiveness of modern war unless they had been blinded by irrational impulses and narrow affective allegiances. There is no sign that Szilard read or was directly influenced by the writings of another Hungarian, Karl Mannheim, whose Ideology and Utopia was first published in Bonn in 1929. Yet Szilard would almost certainly have shared that work's urgent preoccupation with "the prospects of rationality and understanding" in an era of violently clashing nationalisms, racisms, and hardened ideologies. Like Mannheim, Szilard believed that the intellectual's role in the twentieth century was to help other groups of people get along with each other - to stand apart from an limited or parochial interests, providing a neutral ground from which those conflicting positions might be harmonized, or at least allowed to coexist.

Szilard apparently never doubted that such a neutral ground could be created. He believed that lasting peace was a remote but real possibility, and he based this belief on the deeper faith that clear and open-minded communication could lead to successful compromises on an the major conflicts that divided human beings from each other. The nature of the conflicts, per se, did not trouble Szilard, for he believed that no social problem would prove so intractable as to resist indefinitely the efforts of intelligent and rational negoti-

1945-1964: The Urgent Utopia

On September 23, 1949, the U.S.-Soviet arms race which Szilard had long foreseen became a public fact, as President Truman made the dramatic announcement that the Soviet Union had just exploded its first nuclear device. The news defied an those confident forecasts of a fifteen-year U.S. nuclear monopoly - forecasts that had impelled James Byrnes, four years earlier, to brush off Szilard's pleas for U.S.-Soviet cooperation. Szilard himself, three days before Truman's announcement, had been reading ancient Greek history. His notes recorded that he was "considerably frightened" by what he read, for he saw a clear historical parallel between the U.S.-Soviet rivalry and the deadly conflict that had brought Athens and Sparta to ruin. The logic of arms races, it seemed to him, had not changed substantially in 2,500 years.

{quote} Sparta and Athens did not want to go to war, but both looked upon war between themselves as a possibility which could not be disregarded. Therefore each one felt impelled to take steps which would make it more likely that it should win the war if war came. Each such step which Sparta took to improve her chances in case of war, and every such step which Athens took to improve her

{p. 59} chances in case of war, was of necessity a step which made war more likely to occur. {endquote}

Szilard had remained unconvinced by the stark picture of the Soviet Union that gained currency during the early postwar years. For many Westerners, he knew, the Soviets were similar to the Nazis in their ideological fanaticism and single-minded pursuit of world domination: they only understood the logic of superior force, and could not be kept at bay by means of reasonable compromises, but solely by fear. For Szilard, however, this conflation of two peoples like the Germans and the Russians, each of which possessed its own unique heritage and culture, could only result from a hopelessly muddled and superficial understanding of European history. In his view, it was far more accurate to interpret Soviet actions as stemming quite simply from the logic of self-interest. "Soviet Russia," he wrote in 1949,

{quote} is a dictatorship no less ruthless perhaps than was Hitler's dictatorship in Germany. Does it follow that Russia will act as Hitler's Germany acted? I do not believe so.... To my mind anything that Russia has done in the past four years can be fully understood as the action of a nation pursuing her national interests, guided largely, though not solely, by strategic considerations. {endquote}

Szilard met regularly with Soviet scientists and officials during trips to Europe and at international scientific conferences, and he once chided his friend Edward Teller, the father of the American hydrogen bomb, for his rigidly anti-Soviet position:

{quote} I doubt that Teller would find it easy to hold on to the premises of his political thinking if he had had adequate personal contact with our Russian colleagues and had made an extended visit to Russia.... The set of values of our Russian colleagues is not exactly the same as the set of values of the man in the street in Moscow or Leningrad, and of course the Soviet Government is no more a human being than the Government of any other great power. Still, the Soviet Government does not operate in a vacuum and the members of the Soviet Government who are, after all, human beings are not likely to remain unaffected by the set of values which pervades most of Russia. {endquote}

Unswayed by the dehumanizing rhetoric of the Cold War, Szilard insisted on assuming that the majority of Russians were not beastly aggressors but normal human beings like the citizens of other nations. The Soviet government, he believed, was a ruthless dictatorship; but it was amenable to reason, and it was certainly not interested in committing national suicide. On this basis, he felt, there was room for fruitful bargaining and long-term accommodation.

{p. 60} Unfortunately, however, the international atmosphere during the first five years after World War II could hardly have been less propitious for advancing ideas like Szilard's. The mentality of James Byrnes, which had so dismayed Szilard in 1945, also characterized most of the powerful individuals who helped shape the postwar world - from Truman to Acheson and Dulles, from Stalin to Zhdanov and Molotov. Even before Roosevelt's death, Western suspicions had been fueled by the Soviet betrayal of the Polish wartime leadership in Warsaw, just as Russian suspicions were fueled by the Anglo-American delay in establishing a second front in Europe. After 1945, the two erstwhile allies - each unfurling the banner of a rival ideology - scrambled to gain control over the postwar world before control was preempted by the other. Soviet and American actions followed upon each other in rapid succession: on the Soviet side, the vain attempts in 1946 to control Iran and Turkey; Communist takeovers and purges in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia; and the sudden blockade of Berlin. On the American side: Truman's abrupt cancellation of Lend-Lease in 1945; U.S. manipulation of the United Nations as an instrument for opposing Soviet policies; the Truman Doctrine and anti-Communist intervention in Greece; U.S. moves to establish pro-Western governments (and military bases) around the vast perimeter of the Soviet land mass, in Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe; and the formation of NATO in 1949. Within the Soviet Union, these international events went hand in hand with a further hardening of the already paranoid and brutal excesses of Stalinism; while in the United States, Truman's government loyalty investigations (inaugurated in March 1947) paved the way for the collective hysteria of McCarthyism.

Which side was to blame for this self-aggravating cycle of fear and provocations? Who started it? Szilard regarded such questions as naive and misleading, because they implied that one side had been the exclusive aggressor while the actions of the other had been uniformly defensive. He did not see the Cold War this way. For him, rather, the Cold War was like a lethal game that could either be observed from the outside or "played" from the inside. From the perspective of the inside, one heard people in one bloc passionately describing those in the other bloc as "evil" or "primarily at fault." From the outside perspective, however, one saw a polarized configuration of international politics that could be logically expected to express itself in precisely this kind of hostile repartee between two self-righteous camps. Szilard easily admitted that one side or the other could be primarily responsible for any given international incident, but he refused to accept the idea that the Cold War as a whole was triggered by unilateral action. The Cold War, in his view, was an interactive relationship based on a dynamism of fundamental symmetry: the reciprocal logic of the arms race, and the reciprocal distrust of two alien peoples.

Szilard truly considered nuclear war a day-to-day possibility, and he occasionally urged his friends "to leave the United States, and go to live in Australia

{p. 61} or New Zealand or perhaps a small island in the Pacific, in order to be away from the danger." Although he himself continued to bustle about such prime nuclear targets as New York and Washington, D.C., Szilard took precautions in the same way as he had done during the crisis years between 1929 and 1933: he carried with him his essential patents and documents in two bags known as "BBS" and "SBS" (Big Bomb Suitcase and Small Bomb Suitcase). In 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, Szilard fled by plane to Geneva until the duel between Kennedy and Khrushchev had clearly been resolved. "I have been getting more and more convinced that the country will come to grief," he later explained to a friend. "If I were to stay in Washington until the bombs begin to fan and were to perish ... I would consider myself on my deathbed, not a hero but a fool."

It was this grim appraisal of humankind's prospects that set the tone for Szilard's radical solutions to the Cold War. Szilard's vision of peace - like everything else about him - evolved continuously as new ideas and new events stimulated his imagination. Nevertheless, he forced himself twice during the postwar period (in 1955 and 1961) to sit down and bring together his far-ranging thoughts into a fairly comprehensive "blueprint" for a pathway out of the Cold War. The first effort was a long article for the Bmlelin of the Alomic Scientists, entitled "Disarmament and the Problem of Peace." The second eventually took shape as a humorous fictional essay, "The Voice of the Dolphins," designed to convey the complex ideas of his 1955 article to a much broader audience. The narrator of this essay, a historian of the 1990s, describes the steps through which a demilitarized world federation has emerged out of the international anarchy of the 1950s. Crucial to the transformation was the "Vienna Institute," where Soviet and American scientists (working together as a team) had learned to communicate with superintelligent dolphins. Acting as arbiters between the global power blocs, the dolphins devised ingenious disarmament plans which preserved national sovereignty and identity while leading gradually toward global disarmament. The story ends with the narrator's well-founded suspicion that the dolphins never really existed, but that they were a convenient fiction used by the scientists to enhance their credibility as neutrals promoting peace.

Szilard started from the assumption that two major incentives might push the superpowers toward a political settlement: the danger of nuclear annihilation, and the tremendous economic benefits of reducing military expenditures. Pragmatically anticipating the lobbying of arms-manufacturing corporations and military groups, he suggested that the U.S. and Soviet governments each set up a special fund to compensate those who possessed vested economic interests in the military establishment. These funds, he thought, could be financed from current defense budgets and could subsidize the conversion of all industries to peacefuI purposes. Military personnel would be given ex-

{p. 62} tremely generous allowances, over a period of years, to train for a new career; but they would not be the only ones to reap the benefits of disarmament. Szilard calculated that the billions of dollars in annual savings would enable the superpowers (depending on their priorities) to abolish hunger in the Third World, or to double their own domestic standards of living. "Leisure," he wrote, "could take the form of ... two months' additional paid vacation for everybody.

With incentives like these, it was hard to consider disarmament uninteresting: But what about national security? In Szilard's view, disarmament was meaningless - even dangerous - unless it was preceded by a fundamental political agreement that both superpowers strongly supported. In "The Voice of the Dolphins" (1961), he asked his readers to imagine a world patrolled by "multinational police forces" created with the blessing of the United States and the Soviet Union. These regional military forces would operate under the aegis of the United Nations; their assignment would be to deter aggression in their designated areas of the globe and to punish any nation that disturbed the status quo by violent means. The actions of these U.N. police forces would be governed by regional committees of nations endorsed in advance by the superpowers. "America," Szilard thought, "might agree not to veto a slate favored by Russia for a certain region if Russia would agree not to veto a slate favored by America for a certain other region."

Szilard's reasoning here was straightforward. He believed that the superpowers would continue for the foreseeable future to project their influence to the far corners of the globe, as their national interest and ideology ordained; and it seemed far safer to have this influence regulated by the interposed institutional structures of the United Nations. For the sake of international stability, he argued, it was better to cushion the rivalry of the superpowers through a tacit division of the planet into regional spheres of influence, rather than to have Russia and America intervening unilaterally and erratically in the affairs of lesser nations, as dictated by the flux of international crises and fickle public opinion.

Szilard's vision, therefore, was not based on some vague and pious conception of world government that simply cancelled out national sovereignty. Instead, he proposed a flexible and decentralized structure in which international bodies could modulate the preponderant influence of major nations, while smaller nations could acquire a limited but nonetheless real capability to govern their own local regions. In "The Voice of the Dolphins," Szilard wrote:

{quote} When the possibility of setting up regional police forces under the control of various "groups" of nations was first discussed, many people opposed it on the ground that each such region would be likely to become the sphere of influence of one or the other of the

{p. 63} great powers.... It turned out, however, that the regions under the control of the various groups of nations were spheres of noninfluence, rather than spheres of influence. For instance, Central America was under the control of Uruguay, Canada, Austria, and Australia, and this did not place Central America in the sphere of influence of the United States, but it did exclude Central America from the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. Similarly, the Middle East was excluded from the sphere of influence of the United States without falling into the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. {endquote}

Why should the superpowers allow these lesser nations to take over their own roles as international constables? Why, for instance, should the United States cede its traditional dominance over the political fortunes of Central America to "Uruguay, Canada, Austria, and Australia?" The answer lay in the broader advantages of the global settlement with Russia - of which the Central American and Middle Eastern "regional police forces" were an integral part. For the sake of defusing the nuclear powderkeg and greatly increasing their own economic prosperity, the superpowers might be willing to barter some of the direct influence that they currently exercised over various regions of the planet. The tact that such an agreement would require both the superpowers and the world's smaller countries to surrender some of their sovereignty to the United Nations did not deter Szilard, for to him it offered the only path toward a safer, more stable world.

A crucial flaw in this vision, of course, lay in Szilard's rather sketchy depiction of the regional police forces themselves. What if Uruguay and Austria, for instance, could not agree on how to respond to a crisis within their sphere? What if the regional police force in the Middle East began implementing a policy that one (or both) of the superpowers strenuously opposed? Szilard did not directly address these kinds of thorny questions, and his articles accordingly tailed to attract much attention.

In another sense, however, these questions are somewhat unfair; for Szilard never hoped to provide an infallible blueprint for peaceful international relations. His aim, rather, was to depict a global political system governed by an entirely different set of assumptions and ground rules. It was obvious that such a picture would seem highly unrealistic if judged by contemporary standards; but Szilard's goal was to imagine what such a world might look like and to specify the changes that would have to occur in order to get "from here to there."

Szilard could see plainly that the vast majority of human beings was still hemmed in by the divisive allegiances of nation, class, religion, race, and local community. All these divisions constituted the substance of human culture, he believed, and could not be simply overruled or ignored. The trick to steering

{p. 64} this imperfect world toward sanity, as he saw it, lay in a concept that he called "predetermined gradualism." The idea underlying this cumbersome term was fairly ingenious, for it simultaneously addressed two profoundly conservative tendencies in human society. On the one hand, Szilard observed, most people were inherently slow to change, and stubbornly resisted drastic alterations in their established patterns of life and thought. On the other hand, the political, economic, and military problems of the postwar world were so complex and interconnected that every attempt at piecemeal change in one of these domains invariably ran afoul of major obstacles in the other domains. The solution, in Szilard's view, was to bring together a wide range of problems and disagreements and resolve them as part of a single package of long-term compromises and trade-offs. Rather than immediately implementing the whole set of deals, however, the negotiating teams would lay out a steady progression through prearranged stages, which each step coming a little closer to the desired final goal. In this way, he reasoned, the outcome would be predetermined, but the steps along the way would be gradual enough to ease the shock of transition.

Moreover, foreseeing the reluctance of political leaders to embark on sweeping negotiations over the shape of the distant future, he added another interesting twist: either side should be able to withdraw from the agreement at any time with complete impunity. If the agreement was truly sound, he argued, it would be strongly in the interest of both sides to keep it in force. Rather than seeing the whole settlement abrogated, they might, therefore, be willing to make partial concessions when particular (and unforeseeable) conflicts arose. Naturally, such a comprehensive political settlement would have to rest upon a "gentleman's understanding" not to engage in political subversion outside one's own indirect spheres of influence; and once again, the primary enforcer of this "understanding" was nothing more than the self-interest of the superpowers in keeping the overall agreement in force.

What Szilard envisioned, therefore, was a world where the positive incentives of cooperation had replaced the negative sanctions of fear and punishment in keeping the peace. It was at this point, and only at this point, that he began to discuss disarmament. Szilard thought that the superpowers would have to accept three basic principles if they sincerely wanted disarmament. First, they would have to agree to maintain their weaponry at levels of rough parity or equilibrium. Second, they would keep a portion of their strategic nuclear forces as "insurance" against being double-crossed, an "insurance" that would presumably be required for a long time. Finally, with each diminution in levels of armament, they would have to agree to concomitant reductions in the secrecy that cloaked their military establishments; for secrecy implied the possibility of betrayal, and fear of betrayal would block an progress.

The key to the entire procedure, of course, lay in the gradual transfer of peacekeeping functions to the regional police forces established under a

{p. 65} spheres-of-influence agreement. It was essential to avoid creating a power vacuum at any point in the disarmament process; for in the absence of an effective arrangement for settling conflicts and enforcing the peace, the disarmament of the superpowers would become a dangerous descent into vulnerability and possible chaos.

Szilard envisioned three broad phases of disarmament. During the first stage the superpowers would destroy three-quarters of their conventional military forces, while retaining their fun arsenal of nuclear weapons. At this point, the regional police forces would begin to operate as enforcers of the peace, and other great powers like France, China, and Great Britain would also reduce their conventional forces. If the first stage proved workable over a period of years (Szilard did not specify how many), then the more drastic reductions of the second phase would begin. Here, an conventional arsenals would be gradually eliminated, including those of the lesser nations, and only the multinational peacekeeping forces would remain. Then, in the third stage, the last stockpiles of nuclear weapons would be destroyed. At the heart of this final step was the establishment of a foolproof method of inspection, so that no nation could secretly accumulate a nuclear arsenal and blackmail the rest of the world.

Szilard's solution to this difficulty was directly connected to the broader political settlement between the superpowers. If the world's nations truly desired to keep the global settlement in force, he wrote, then they "might have to adopt a fresh attitude toward the problem of inspection, and decided to legalize the position of the informer." Each nation, in other words, would adopt an official policy of actively encouraging its own citizens, government employees, and scientific researchers to report any violation of the overall disarmament plan. Indeed, he argued, each nation would allow an the other countries to employ local citizens as secret informers, providing large cash rewards and immunity from prosecution to anyone who discovered a violation. Why? Because, if it was true that the participating states had a strong interest in keeping the international settlement in force, then it would also be in their interest to convince other states that they were not cheating. Accordingly, they would do everything in their power to establish a credible system for reassuring their neighbors that any major violation would be reliably discovered and reported.

This picture represented a perfect reversal of the reasoning that characterized traditional international politics. Szilard had taken the logic of competitive self-interest and gradually subverted it, in steady increments, until he had pushed through to an entirely different logic of cooperative self-interest. He was fully aware of the utopian tension between his final vision and the harsh world of the Cold War; but he believed that the articulation of such a long-range vision was an essential first step - even for much more modest programs of change.

{p. 66} Thinking about the distant future, however, did not make much sense to Szilard unless it was coupled with prompt action to create a "breathing space" within the all-too-real Cold War of the present. Disregarding the fact that a scientist, in the 1940s, was expected to stick to laboratory experiments and graduate students, he began stepping with increasing confidence into the limelight of politics and the mass media.

Already during the fall of 1945, while the nation was still in disarray from the war, Szilard received his first lesson about maneuvering for success in American politics. The occasion was a bill being rushed through congress to form a new, military-controlled U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Alarmed by the prospect of military officers obtaining preponderant authority over peacetime nuclear-policy decisions, Szilard immediately established a lobbying headquarters in a Washington hotel. He enlisted the support of fellow scientists, congressmen, and members of the press, and was thus able to persuade the House Military Affairs Committee to reopen its hearings on the bill. After being the first to present testimony, he began to contact everyone he knew to mobilize a solid opposition. Edward Shils, Szilard's friend from the University of Chicago, later wrote:

{quote} I remember going to his suite in the building where we were staying. He was simultaneously on two separate long-distance calls on telephones in two rooms, going back and forth, putting down the receiver in one room while he went to take up the conversation in the other. {endquote}

Szilard was particularly effective in this early phase of the struggle, when prodigious outbursts of energy were required to build up a momentum of dissent. Gradually, however, as more and more atomic scientists pledged their support, founding a national federation in Washington to represent their new movement, Szilard began to withdraw toward the sidelines. Although he continued to work for the scientists' cause, he clearly preferred the role of catalyst to that of administrator and left the orchestration of the final lobbying drive to others. Eventually, the scientists won a major victory, and the AEC began functioning in 1947 under strictly civilian control.

At the same time, Szilard was becoming increasingly alarmed by the anti-Communist hysteria that he saw reflected in the press and in the rhetoric of politicians. The only way out, in his view, was to embark on a campaign of education among the American public, breaking the psychological patterns of blind mistrust and setting new terms for the debate on foreign policy. In a letter to Einstein in March 1950, as Senator Joseph McCarthy was loudly accusing the U.S. State Department of being riddled with Communists, Szilard described in detail a proposed Citizens' Committee which would serve to clarify U.S. diplomatic aims by holding mock American-Russian debates. According

{p. 67} to the plan, a group of well-educated U.S. citizens would study carefully a specific topic of international concern and then divide into two groups. One side would argue as if they were Russians, while the others would defend the "American" position. A transcript of the debate would then be made public. In this way, Szilard believed,

{quote} if we could at least achieve that the public discussion of the Russian-American conflict will be henceforth carried on more in terms of the real conflicting interests which are involved and less in the irrational terms in which it has largely been conducted in these last four years, then we would already have achieved something of importance. {endquote}

Szilard proposed the Citizens' Committee for sponsorship by the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, of which both he and Einstein were members; but the outbreak of the Korean War two months later forced him to postpone his project indefinitely.

Judging from the much lower profile that he kept during the remainder of the 1950s, it appears that Szilard reluctantly came to grips with McCarthyism, acknowledging the strength of this pervasive and irrational phenomenon, and recognizing that an immigrant like himself was in no position to launch an effective opposition. As a result, he focused more on his biological research and confined his political ideas to the relatively safe platform of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He continuously readapted his thinking, moreover, as the Cold War waxed and waned. The Korean War, between 1950 and 1953, had spurred the United States to a new level of involvement in the affairs of distant nations - a level unprecedented in the nation's history. From Iran to French Indochina, from Formosa to Guatemala, the U.S. government intervened to block what it perceived as a rising tide of global communism. It signed security treaties with Australia and New Zealand in 1951, with Francisco Franco's Spain in 1953, and with the Southeast Asian nations in 1954. The U.S. defense budget grew dramatically during the 1950s (independently of the specific costs incurred by the Korean War), and the first U.S. hydrogen bomb cast its glaring light over the Pacific atoll of Eniwetok in 1951. Over half of the U.S. citizens in a 1954 nationwide poll declared that they "regarded favorably" the efforts of the senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy.

The Soviets, too, were thinking in global terms, but their means of projecting influence were not yet comparable with those of their rivals. In March 1953, four months before the Korean armistice, the death of Stalin abruptly shook the power hierarchy in the Eastern bloc. As the reins of governance passed into the hands of an uneasy oligarchy, some of the tighter controls of Stalinism were relaxed; but only two months after Stalin's death, the new rulers unflinchingly used tanks in great force to crush an anti-Soviet insurrection in

{p. 68} East Germany. By 1955, Nikita Khrushchev had emerged as the new Soviet leader, and it was he who presided over the formation of the Warsaw Pact, a mirror image to NATO in the Eastern bloc. Under Khrushchev's strong leadership, the Soviet Union began to acquire a new reputation as a modern superpower fully capable of challenging the leading role of the United States. By the end of the following year, the Soviet Union had concluded fourteen economic and military pacts with Third World countries.

A meeting between Eisenhower and Khrushchev in 1955 brought few substantial agreements but contributed to perceptions of a "thaw" in the Cold War; this perception was reinforced early in 1956, when Khrushchev astounded the world at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist party by denouncing Stalin's criminal excesses. The "thaw" abruptly ended, however, in November 1956 - a month in which the overwhelming predominance of both superpowers became plain for an to see. On the Western side, a rash military action by France, Britain, and Israel to wrest the Suez Canal from Egypt's control turned into a humiliating fiasco after Washington issued peremptory instructions to place the matter before U.N. arbitration. On the Eastern side, a successful reform movement in Poland had led to growing hopes for independence and self-rule in Szilard's native Hungary; yet when the Hungarian reformers moved into outright revolution, troops from the Warsaw Pact poured in from an sides under Soviet orders. Although more than three thousand of his countrymen perished during the Soviet-sponsored invasion, Szilard maintained a strict silence on the subject. He may have feared that any public protest on his part would destroy his carefully cultivated position as an intermediary between East and West.

The period of the mid-fifties "thaw," however, had provided an important opportunity for Szilard to emerge from his relative isolation. In 1955, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein had issued a joint "manifesto" on the nature of future wars, calling for a meeting of scientists from around the world to discuss the problems of atomic energy and international cooperation. The meeting, which became the first in an ongoing series, was held in 1957 in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, and started what gradually became known as the Pugwash Movement. Szilard participated with guarded enthusiasm. Although he attended eight of the eleven conferences held during the following seven years, and often presented long papers specifically written for each occasion, he remained skeptical that any conference held on so large a scale could really promote a "meeting of the minds" (as he called it). He realized that it would be unlikely for Soviet scientists to speak freely in so widely publicized and formal a context, and he disapproved of the vague and noncommittal proposals which were an that such a huge congregation could agree upon as its common platform. Accordingly, when the seventy participants of the third conference issued in 1958 a fundamental declaration that was to be "considered the tenet of the

{p. 69} Pugwash Movement," it was ratified unanimously - "with only Szilard abstaining."

By the late 1950s, the United States and the Soviets had reached a tense modus vivendi. Although it would take another decade before Western military experts would begin talking of "parity" or "equivalence" in the military capabilities of the superpowers, the Soviets had made a huge impression in 1957 with the launching of Sputnik (the first man-made satellite) aboard a powerful rocket. Suddenly the fearful prediction that Szilard had made to President Roosevelt in 1945 was coming true: nuclear technology had been coupled with aeronautics and ballistics, threatening entire nations with a rain of destruction from one moment to the next. The mainland of the United States, long protected by vast oceans, was no longer a sanctuary but a naked and vulnerable target. Although initial U.S. fears of a "missile gap" later turned out to be exaggerated, the Soviets had succeeded in establishing what one American strategic expert described as a "balance of terror."

Szilard's periodic articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists during the late fifties and early sixties clearly reflected these new strategic realities. Although he still clung to his long-term hopes for a comprehensive settlement between the superpowers, he devoted several extended essays to the more pressing problem of stabilizing the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, so as to mitigate the inherent dangers of the arms race. In one article, entitled "How to Live with the Bomb and Survive" (1960), he pragmatically accepted the rationale of nuclear deterrence, or mutually assured destruction, that was gradually becoming the cornerstone of the superpowers' strategic policies. Nevertheless, he characteristically pushed this rationale much farther than most "defense intellectuals" of the period. If the superpowers' statesmen truly believed in nuclear deterrence, Szilard argued, then their primary goal should be to reach an explicit understanding about how to handle conflicts and crisis situations without triggering a disastrous escalation that neither side wanted. They should establish formal procedures for handling such crises well in advance, so that neither side would be likely to misread the other's actions; and they should promptly scale back their nuclear forces to low and equal levels, since it was far easier to monitor a small and stable number of weapons than a constantly changing and proliferating arsenal.

At the heart of Szilard's thinking, in these short-term proposals for stabilizing the arms race, just as in his long-range hopes for disarmament, lay the goal of enhancing communication between the two enemies. Without effective communication, even the most modest attempts at cooperation were bound to fail; yet the existing points of contact between the superpowers in the late 1950s struck him as hopelessly inadequate. Official diplomacy consisted mainly of mutual accusations and posturing; such informal channels as the

{p. 70} Pugwash conferences seemed too far removed from the realities of power to accomplish much. It was here, therefore, that Szilard decided to embark on a bold attempt at conducting diplomacy on his own. Starting early in 1959, he began to write a series of letters directly to Nikita Khrushchev, describing his plan for orchestrating a more far-reaching "meeting of the minds" between the Americans and Russians. To his astonishment, the Soviet leader wrote back, and for the next four years, Szilard and Khrushchev traded proposals back and forth. These contacts with the Soviet leader represented the culmination of ideas that Szilard had developed for his "Bund" in the early 1930s, and they ultimately came to constitute one of the more important episodes in his career.

What Szilard envisioned was a small, unofficial forum for Russian-American discussions on arms control; the novelty in his idea was to seek official approval for the informal talks and to have off-duty government experts as wen as scientists participating. A delicate balance had to be struck, Szilard thought, between the rigidity of official negotiations among the powerful, and the relative flexibility (but proportionate impotence) of discussions among mere outsiders. Since the participating Russian and American experts would not speak as representatives of their governments, they would be freed from the need to use bargaining tactics and could thus communicate more clearly. At the same time, since these persons would have close informal connections with decision makers who were actually in power, the discussions' impact on official policy might still prove considerable.

Szilard knew that the Soviet government in recent years had issued several resounding proclamations calling for "General and Complete Disarmament." Western defense experts had routinely dismissed these Soviet proposals as mere propaganda, pointing to the fact that the Soviet government refused to allow on-site inspection of its weapons facilities as proof that it made its offers in bad faith. Szilard, however, decided to take the Soviet offers more seriously. Although he doubted that "General and Complete Disarmament" could ever take place, except as the final development in a much broader process of political accommodation, he nonetheless believed that a propitious moment had arrived for taking the first step.

Szilard's major opportunity arose in October 1960, when Khrushchev traveled to New York, flanked by representatives of an the Eastern-bloc countries, to attend the Fifteenth General Assembly of the United Nations. In addition to frequent diplomatic receptions and vigorously combative press conferences, Khrushchev met the Cuban leader Fidel Castro for the first time, mended fences with Yugoslavia's Tito (with whom relations had been severely strained), and conferred privately with world statesmen from Ghana's President Kwame Nkrumah to Britain's Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Amid the hectic schedule of engagements, the Soviet leader set aside

{p. 71} fifteen minutes for an interview with Szilard. Their talk, once it had begun, actually lasted two hours.

Szilard and Khrushchev met under awkward circumstances, for the international atmosphere in the fall of 1960 was not a propitious one for conducting diplomacy - whether openly or behind the scenes. An American presidential campaign was reaching its climax, as candidates Richard Nixon and John Kennedy fiercely vied with each other in presenting images of patriotism and anti-Communist toughness. Only five months earlier, the Soviet leader and President Eisenhower had abruptly scuttled a scheduled summit meeting after Soviet antiaircraft rockets shot down an American U-2 spy plane near the Russian city of Sverdlovsk. "We came to New York," Khrushchev later wrote, "determined to show that American imperialism isn't all-powerful and that we knew our rights, despite the anti-Soviet howling and growling that was stirred up against us." At one point during the U.N. sessions, the Soviet leader even took off his shoe and angrily banged the podium in front of him to interrupt a speech by a Western diplomat. Large motorcades escorted Khrushchev to and from the U.N. skyscraper, for Manhattan's streets bristled with demonstrators waving placards and shouting slogans to denounce the Communist system and its representatives. When Szilard arrived at the Soviet U.N. mission headquarters at 11 A.M. on October 5, he had to pass through a barricade of two hundred New York policemen who had formed a protective cordon sanitaire around the entire block.

Szilard brought to the interview a seven-page letter in Russian, summarising his views on the burning issues of contemporary international politics. Through an interpreter, he told Khrushchev that although time was short, he wanted first to "take a minute and talk in a somewhat lighter vein."

{quote} I said that I had brought him a sample of the Schick Injecto razor, which is not an expensive razor but is very good. The blade must be changed after one or two weeks and the blades I brought with me should last for about six months. Thereafter, if he would let me know that he likes the razor, I would send him from time to time fresh blades, but this I can do, of course, only as long as there is no war.

K. said that if there is a war he will stop shaving, and he thinks that most other people will stop shaving also. I said that I was somewhat distressed to see that, during his stay in New York, he stressed only the points where he was in disagreement with American statesmen and that I thought he might have found a few points on which he was in agreement.... K. asked what points I had in mind and I told him that he might have said, for instance, that he was in agreement with Senator Kennedy on everything that Kennedy was saying about Ninon, and he could have added that he was

{p. 72} in agreement with everything that Ninon was saying - about Kennedy. {endquote}

Szilard's record of the interview does not say whether Khrushchev was amused, but the length of the ensuing conversation suggests that the Soviet premier had seen through the devices of the razor and the political wisecrack and understood that Szilard was more interested in peace than in political partisanship .

Three main themes dominated the conversation. First and foremost in Szilard's mind, of course, was the subject of rational communication between the superpowers. He reiterated the proposal he had made in his letters for creating an informal forum of discussion among superpower "insiders." Khrushchev had no objection to this idea, adding "that Topchiev, the General Secretary of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, will be able to arrange an the contacts that we might want."

Encouraged by Khrushchev's response, Szilard next proposed that a direct phone link be set up between the White House and the Kremlin. Apart from its potential usefulness in times of international emergency, Szilard told Khrushchev that "the installation of such a telephone connection would dramatize the continued presence of a danger which will stay with us as long as the long-range rockets and bombs are retained." The Soviet leader then alarmed Szilard by revealing that, just before leaving the Soviet Union, "an American manoeuvre was reported to him, about which there was some doubt, which forced him to order 'rocket readiness,' and he added that, incidentally, this readiness [had] still not been rescinded." Khrushchev told Szilard that if the U.S. president approved of the idea, then he, too, would be willing to have the special phone line installed.

The remainder of the conversation dealt with the two interlinked themes of picturing how a disarmed world might work, and figuring out how to get "from here to there." Szilard chose to confront Khrushchev first with one of the more pressing short-term issues. During the preceding two years, relations between the superpowers had been dangerously strained by disagreements over the fate of Berlin. Khrushchev had issued an ultimatum in 1958, threatening to turn the divided city over to East German control if diplomacy failed to produce a final agreement on the city's future status. John Foster Dulles, U.S. secretary of state, had responded that NATO would meet such a move "if need be with military force." Tensions were still high in the fan of 1960, and Szilard had come up with a solution that must have raised Khrushchev's eyebrows:

{quote} East Germany might offer to shift its capital from East Berlin to Dresden on condition that West Germany shifts its capital from Bonn to Munich. If that is done. then it would be possible to create two free cities: East Berlin and West Berlin with a view of perhaps

{p. 73} forming, at some later time, a similar confederation between East Germany and West Germany. {endquote}

The proposal typified the more utopian and fanciful side of Szilard, for it was highly reasonable in an abstract way, and yet seemed deliberately to ignore the immense political obstacles that would rapidly block any such act of international sleight of hand. Khrushchev immediately rebuffed the idea, saying "that he could not very wen ask [the East German Premier] to shift the capital of East Germany away from East Berlin." Here, Szilard had clearly underestimated the political pressures impinging on both Soviet and American statesmen, blocking them from any moves that could remotely appear as "backing down."

Just as they did not see eye-to-eye on the Berlin question, Szilard and Khrushchev also failed to reach substantial agreement on a long-range vision of a disarmed world. Reading through the detailed letter in which Szilard explained his views, Khrushchev agreed that the power balance in the U.N. General Assembly would gradually shift away from its predominantly pro-U.S. stance. He praised Szilard's perceptiveness for predicting that "a world police force, under the central command of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, would not be acceptable to the Soviet Union in the present circumstances, and it might not be acceptable to the U.S. in circumstances that might prevail a few years hence." Khrushchev disagreed, however, with Szilard's proposal to get around this obstacle by creating regional U.N. police forces whose actics would be governed by committees of nations specially selected by the superpowers. To Khrushchev, this proposal appeared (correctly) as a return to the traditional conception of dividing the world into spheres of influence belonging to the various Great Powers. He told Szilard "that the nations in the region where such a regional force operates would come under the control of the nations who controlled the police force."

Szilard explained to Khrushchev that "while the Great Powers might be able to exert a certain amount of influence in such regions, at least their control would not be direct but rather indirect." The Soviet leader, however, whose nation was just beginning to come into its own as a real superpower, apparently did not find this voluntary shackling of the Great Powers attractive. He brought the conversation to an end, asking Szilard how he would feel if he were to send him a case of vodka. Szilard answered "that I wondered if I couldn't have something better than vodka."

{quote} "What do you have in mind," said Khrushchev, and I said, "Borjum." A few days earlier when Khrushchev delivered one of his long speeches before the United Nations, he had a glass of mineral water in front of him from which he drank from time to time and several times he pointed to it and said, "Borjum, excellent Russian

{p. 74} mineral water." When I said, "Borjum," Khrushchev beamed. "We have two kinds of mineral water in Russia," he said, "they are both excellent and we shall send you samples of both." {endquote}

After their meeting, Szilard and Khrushchev continued to correspond with growing frequency. Having received a formal go-ahead from the Soviet leader, Szilard began contacting prominent Americans to enlist their support for a series of high-level but informal discussions. He called his undertaking the "Angels Project," and explained his choice of this name in a letter to Khrushchev:

{quote} Contrary to what one might think, most people closely connected with the [Kennedy] Administration are keenly aware of the need of avoiding an all-out arms race. Moreover, there are a number of men among them who are "on the side of the angels" and who have consistently taken the position that the United States should be prepared to give up certain temporary advantages it holds, for the sake of attaining an agreement with the Soviet Union that would stop the arms race. {endquote}

Between October 1960 and October 1962, Szilard worked tirelessly to bring his project together. He obtained the sponsorship of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, sought (and received) substantial pledges of funding from major foundations, and vigorously promoted his idea with high officials in the Kennedy administration. Among the "Angels" who tentatively agreed to participate were Henry Kissinger (then a professor at Harvard), Marvin Goldberger (Princeton), Roger Fisher (Harvard), George Rathjens (a former advisor to President Eisenhower), and Herbert York (later to be chief U.S. negotiator in the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban talks). These figures were typical of Szilard's chosen "constituency": scientists with good connections in government, ex-diplomats, liberal or "centrist" academics, an of whom shared Szilard's faith in the intrinsic value of international communication and compromise. It was to this relatively small but influential elite that Szilard regularly turned when he needed support for his projects.

Not an those whom Szilard approached responded favorably. "Your letter," wrote back one indignant professor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator, "identifies the individuals whom you are asking to join you in these discussions in effect as a minority of men of good intent working in an otherwise hostile environment of the U.S. Government. This I feel is grossly unfair." 107 Szilard responded (by return mail) that even though everyone in the government might indeed want to stop the arms race, there was still a valid distinction to be made between those who were willing to make compromises (the Angels) and those who were bent on negotiating from a position of superiority. "It is the very essence of the proposed project," he went on to explain,

{p. 75} {quote} that the American and Russian participants would not be representative samples, composed of both angels and non-angels. [If they were,] they would not be likely to reach a consensus that would be far-reaching enough to be interesting. But if they are samples biased in favor of the angels, the group might come up with the image of a disarmament agreement that America and Russia might conceivably be prepared to accept at some future date. Such an agreement would presumably not be currently acceptable to either of the two governments; nevertheless, the image could be very useful because it could focus attention on the goal towards which we might want to move. {endquote}

And he could not resist further ruffling his critic, as he closed his letter, with a typical volley of playful mischief:

{quote} Of all those with whom I have consulted, you were the only one so far who objected to the basic concept of the project. This does not necessarily mean, of course, that the others are right and that you are wrong; you might wen be very much brighter than some of those others with whom I have consulted, but I am certain that you would not expect me to concede that you are brighter than I am. {endquote}

During the months before the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Szilard sent Khrushchev regular reports on the progress of the Angels project. In mid October, as terse ultimatums went back and forth between the superpowers and the U.S. navy prepared to intercept several Soviet ships carrying nuclear missiles to Cuba, Szilard suddenly flew to Switzerland (presumably taking "Big Bomb Suitcase" and "Small Bomb Suitcase" with him on the plane). He was still there in early November, waiting for the tense international atmosphere to calm down, when he received a letter through the Soviet legation in Geneva. It was from Khrushchev, who began his letter by speaking in a strange tone of awe about "the international crisis that we have just survived." Without giving any details, the Soviet leader admitted to Szilard just how close to a "devastating thermonuclear war" Russia and America had come: "during those days the world was practically on the brink of such a war." Khrushchev then went on to speak with surprising fervor about the Angels project:

{quote} I like this proposal.... My understanding is that the participants of the meeting ... are to hold their discussions without ... [outsiders], without representatives of television or radio corporations. And the conclusions to which they come are to be considered as their personal views. But at the same time they are to be people enjoying the respect and confidence of public opinion in their countries.... Their conclusions could greatly influence public

{p. 76} opinion, and even officials and governments would have to listen to them. {endquote}

Unfortunately, the Angels project - and especially its creator - had not been faring so wen in the eyes of the Kennedy administration. A year before, during the early months of Kennedy's presidency, Szilard had moved to Washington to get acquainted with the new wielders of power and sound out their receptiveness to his own way of thinking. "I was stopped in my tracks," he wrote, "by the invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles" in April 1961. The U.S.-sponsored invasion at the Bay of Pigs so outraged Szilard that he drafted a petition to President Kennedy and secured signatures from "about one in six" members of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. "In deciding whether to use force," the petition read,

{quote} our Government must give due regard to the [United Nations] Charter and it must not adopt a double standard of morality; it must not apply one yardstick to the actions of the Soviet Union, England, or France and another one to the actions of the United States. {endquote}

This kind of stinging rebuke, duly delivered to the White House with a cover letter from Szilard, was not likely to win friends in high places - particularly with a president unusually sensitive to the judgment of America's intellectual elite. In December 1962, Szilard showed his recent letter from Khrushchev about the Angels project to McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's special assistant for National Security Affairs; but Bundy remained unimpressed and made it clear that he was not in favor of the scheme. "Szilard," Bundy later wrote, "was not the kind of man for this truly unofficial but well-connected process." During the spring of 1963, Szilard continued to correspond with Bundy's assistant at the White House, Carl Kaysen, but he made little progress. Although President Kennedy himself "wished the project success" in a note to the prospective Angels in June 1963, a disheartening blow came shortly afterward, on July 1. William Foster, head of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, ruled that none of the agency's consultants would be permitted to participate in "Angels" discussions at any time. This not only excluded one of the more influential "Angels," Herbert York, from participating, but also created a significant imbalance in the American and Russian teams. "I am uncertain in my own mind," Szilard admitted to Khrushchev two weeks later,

{quote} just how useful the proposed conference would be in the present circumstances.... No official of the American Government would directly participate, yet it would be necessary for some of the junior officials of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Relations or the Ministry of Defense to participate in the conference, and the con-

{p. 77} ference could hardly be useful if Soviet participation were limited to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. {endquote}

Confronted with this clear reluctance on the part of the U.S. government to provide the project with serious support, the Russians too drew back. Through a Kremlin spokesperson, Khrushchev told Szilard that the Russians henceforth would rely on the informal channels of communication already established among scientists at the Pugwash conferences. The Angels project had failed, and Szilard admitted as much in a letter to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in February 1964: "I myself shall make no further attempts to engage the Russians in 'private discussions' on the subject of arms control."

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