Gargoyles ruled the island at the turn of the century, but in 1910 the new building at 35 Claremont Avenue had angels peering from its third story. They were archangels, not cherubs, with stern stone faces and sleek wings flared upward, bodies protected by stone shields—a biblical squadron rendered in medieval style, as if summoned from the pages of Milton to the building’s Italian Renaissance facade. They looked ready for battle.
In the spring of 1926, one floor above the angels, a man of science moved into apartment 4B.
Selig Hecht was 34, with a wife named Cecelia and a two-year-old daughter named Maressa. He was fresh from Cambridge University and was now Columbia University’s newest associate professor of biophysics. Selig’s academic and scientific bona fides were prodigious for his age, especially given his lower-class upbringing. He was born in the village of Głogów, in what was then Austria, and journeyed at age six with his family to the Lower East Side, a grimy warren of poor European expats. The oldest of five, Selig ran errands after Hebrew school to support the family, and during high school and college he kept the books at a wool business. His father fancied friendly arguments about history and philosophy. He raised Selig on a diet of Schopenhauer, who believed the world was godless and meaningless, and Spinoza, who believed the world was inherently divine and perfect, though man’s blundering prevented him from realizing it. Philosophy and ethics would later inform Selig’s work and writings, but first he pursued a formal education in the hardier fields of mathematics and zoology. He graduated with a biology degree from the City College of New York and got a job as a chemist in a fermentation research laboratory, where he studied the effect of light on beer. Selig then worked as a chemist at the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., to raise money for graduate school. The subject of his dissertation at Harvard University was the physiology of a marine invertebrate called a sea squirt, which he studied at the Bermuda Biological Station. His life’s work, though, would be the study of human vision and its adaptation to darkness.
It took him years to get an academic appointment worthy of his talents. “You yourself may safely ignore the stupidity and even brutality of our times,” the biologist Jacques Loeb wrote to Selig in 1922, in a note of encouragement. Loeb told him to “keep that serenity which is required of a man who wishes to do his best work. The future needs you and belongs to you.”
Now here he was in that future, on Claremont Avenue, back in his adoptive hometown of New York City, albeit far uptown from his youth in terms of geography and class. Riverside Drive was visible from the Hechts’ west-facing windows. To the east, following the gaze of the stone archangels, was Columbia’s campus, with its handsome new physics building three blocks away at West 120th Street and Broadway. A brick structure crowned with copper cornice, the Pupin Hall physics building was in some ways a monument to Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which had hurled physics into its modern era 21 years earlier by describing the relationship between energy and mass in the equation E = mc2. Energy (E) and mass (m) are essentially the same thing, because all mass is bound together by energy. Because the speed of light (c) is such a massive number whose value remains constant, a small amount of mass multiplied by c can transform into a disproportionately massive amount of energy. Pupin Hall would also be an investment in the application of Werner Heisenberg’s recently introduced “uncertainty principle,” which argues that both the position and velocity of an atomic particle cannot be precisely measured at the same time. The more an observer knows about the particle’s position, the less he knows about its velocity, and vice versa, and the observation itself affects the particle’s location or speed.
“We cannot know, as a matter of principle, the present in all its details,” Heisenberg wrote in 1927, packaging quantum mechanics into a neat maxim. Quantum mechanics is the study of the universe’s smallest parts: atoms, the basic component of an element, and the protons, electrons, and neutrons inside—the invisible whirling ingredients of all things.
By the time Selig became a full professor in 1928, he was the sovereign of the physics building’s 13th floor, with an expansive lab and views of the southern sweep of Manhattan and sunsets over the Hudson River. During the next decade, Pupin Hall welcomed younger academic stars whose expertise was the atom. These scientists, shaggy and eccentric, were known in academia as “longhairs.”
Selig Hecht wasn’t a longhair. His black hair was short, wiry, and wavy, and would later turn steel-colored. He kept his mustache trimmed to his upper lip. He wore woolen three-piece suits with a white handkerchief peeking from his jacket pocket. Tea was served every afternoon in his lab, which became a salon for lively discussions of art, music, literature, and politics. He was known for drawing diagrams at lightning speed on his blackboards while providing a running commentary that was as clear as it was fast. One evening a week Selig hosted students, faculty, and other peers at his apartment on Claremont Avenue. Near Selig’s own vibrant watercolor paintings, in a dining room of dark oak wainscoting, they would discuss books like The Logic of Modern Physics by P. W. Bridgman. In his first chapter Bridgman asked bracing questions that enlivened cocktail hours shared by men of science:
Why does time flow?
Why does nature obey laws?
Are there parts of nature forever beyond our detection?
Was there ever a time when matter did not exist?
May time have a beginning or an end?
Selig’s salons were typical of bohemian Manhattan in the first decades of the 20th century. The Great Depression, its pall blanketing the city in the year after Selig became a full professor, transformed such academic discussions into social engagement and activism. By 1930 the Lower East Side, Selig’s childhood neighborhood, had devolved into a festering slum with 50 breadlines serving 50,000 meals a day. By 1932 half the city’s factories were closed, one-third of the population was unemployed, and the plight of the worker was a favorite cause of progressive New Yorkers. Selig and other professors signed a protest that year against the state of Kentucky’s mistreatment of industrial workers.
In January 1935 Selig published an essay in Harper’s Monthly Magazine titled “The Uncertainty Principle and Human Behavior,” in which he suggested that Heisenberg’s work had opened physics to philosophy. Heisenberg “apparently destroyed the pure and inevitable relations of cause and effect,” Selig wrote. The German physicist had discovered “a natural limit to knowledge” and that “there is a distinct limit to the total precision with which such an event may be described.” Uncertainty frees biological behavior from predetermination, allowing for the existence of free will, which in turn imbues mankind with godlike powers. Despite this feeling of freedom, Selig wrote, humans are still guided by an unseen hand.
To his own mind, the behavior of a man seems to be free and of his own choosing, and all the accumulated moralities of the world exhort him to choose the good and to act righteously on the assumption that he is capable of free choice and action. . . .
If free-will means that we can choose our good behavior and be rewarded for it, it means also that we can choose our evil behavior and be punished for it. . . .
[All behavior] is determined by the complicated series of conditions and circumstances which enter into the composition of an event.
Selig, by applying an atomic principle to the wider world, arrived at a social dictum: Man must act as if he were free to choose, while remembering that the origins of his behavior are complex and steered by forces long forgotten and not immediately understood.
The uncertainty of the present, in other words, is the product of a certain past.
The Harper’s essay drew excitement and blowback from readers who were tantalized by the notion of scientific and moral uncertainty. When a reader from West Point wrote to Harper’s to criticize Selig’s validation of both free will and determinism, Selig responded with a typewritten note. Free will and determinism are as mutually exclusive as reason and instinct, Selig wrote. That is to say: They are not.
“I think that we can have both,” he wrote to the West Point reader, “since they are each a partial view of the world.”
The essay burnished his reputation as a technician of nuance with a refined social conscience, which would soon be inflamed by the buildup to World War II.
The United States, as yet unprovoked by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was already engaged in World War II from an experimental standpoint. Thirteen floors below Hecht’s lab, in the basement, was a 30-ton, seven-feet-tall hunk of metal known as a cyclotron, which used a giant electromagnet to propel atomic particles at up to 25,000 miles per second. On January 25, 1939, a team at Columbia used the cyclotron to split an atom of the element uranium for the first time on American soil. This was fission, the process by which neutrons serve as projectiles that shatter atoms. Fission releases the energy that binds matter together, and is therefore the most efficient way to actualize Einstein’s famous equation involving E and m.
“Believe we have observed new phenomenon of far-reaching consequences,” the Columbia physicist John R. Dunning wrote in his diary that night.
In the minds of scientists, this discovery had two practical applications, both at odds with each other: as a peaceful source of energy and as a godlike force of destruction. “Complementarity” was the word that the physicist Niels Bohr used to describe the contradiction inherent in quantum physics—and, philosophically, in life itself.
A nuclear reaction could light a city.
A nuclear reaction could level a city.
It was all a matter of how the energy was used.
Over in Europe a madman was planning invasions of neighboring countries. His scientists were seemingly out in front with this new science.
—
WITH A URANIUM ATOM SPLIT in the basement, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi settled into his office on Pupin Hall’s seventh floor. His family had just arrived from Italy that month on the ocean liner Franconia. In early March, Columbia scientists discovered that fission ejected “secondary” neutrons that could split other nuclei, which would eject other neutrons, starting a chain reaction of splits that could grow instantaneously and exponentially. In Pupin Hall, physicists worked seven days a week researching gaseous diffusion, a process by which uranium could be enriched and concentrated to a point where a chain reaction was possible. With both the means and the ends quickly coming into focus, Fermi looked out over the island of stone and steel, cupped his hands, and said, “A little bomb like that, and it would all disappear.”
On March 15, Adolf Hitler took Czechoslovakia.
Upstairs in his penthouse laboratory, Selig Hecht focused on the human eye, its adaptation to darkness, and its response to flickering light. He was not involved with atomic work but heard chatter about its progression. He hosted longhairs at his apartment and made those short walks home with them. He understood what the scientific community, and the United States, was working toward. He hoped they would never succeed.
On a Wednesday morning that July, Selig’s Columbia colleague Leo Szilard and theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner drove to Einstein’s cottage on Long Island. Over iced tea, Szilard and Wigner persuaded the famous 60-year-old physicist to sign a letter of warning that would be sent from his cottage to the White House. Einstein, in Szilard’s words, told President Roosevelt of “extremely powerful bombs of a new type” that were fueled by uranium, to which the United States had little domestic access.
“I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over,” Einstein wrote.
A month later Hitler took Poland.
The secrecy was on, Szilard thought. Over the next two years, a vast administrative effort kicked into gear to develop an atomic bomb before the Nazis did. Columbia physicists began assembling four tons of graphite bricks. The “pile,” as they called it, would be used to conduct and moderate a nuclear chain reaction on a small scale. After long, exhausting days they trudged home through the neighborhood of Morningside Heights smudged with graphite, looking like wayward coal miners. A month and a half before Pearl Harbor, 2,000 American scientists were engaged in “defense research” for the government at a cost of millions of dollars per month. Three out of four physicists in the United States were working on military projects. It was a “concentrated attack upon a problem,” said electrical engineer Vannevar Bush, the director of the government’s Office of Research and Scientific Development, at a joint luncheon of scientific societies at the Hotel Pennsylvania in Midtown Manhattan in October 1941. This was as much as Bush would say on the matter. He was already asking scientists involved in uranium research for a pledge of secrecy that prohibited them from even uttering the word “uranium.” Just several miles away, in warehouses on Staten Island, sat 1,100 metric tons of the stuff in 2,000 steel drums labeled URANIUM ORE. It had been shipped from the Congo the year before by a Belgian miner who worried that Hitler’s annexation of Belgium might extend to its African colonies. That night, at the same hotel, the Optical Society of America presented its highest honor to Selig Hecht for “distinguished work in the field of optics.”
By then Fermi and other Columbia professors were meeting at the Men’s Faculty Club on the first day of each month to forecast the future, just for kicks. As they lunched, this “Society of Prophets,” as they called themselves, would come up with ten yes-or-no questions concerning events that might occur that month.
Would German ships attack a neutral American convoy?
Would Hitler give the order to land in Britain?
Would the British hold the strategic Libyan port city of Tobruk?
The “prophets” would write down their answers, check them against current events at the end of the month, and keep score. When the informal society disbanded after Pearl Harbor, Fermi held the highest score: 97 percent of his predictions were accurate. His wife, Laura, attributed this success rate to his conservative belief that situations change more slowly than people expect them to.
After the United States entered the war in December 1941, Selig was tapped by the Army and Navy to devote his laboratory to military work. He and his assistants refined night-vision equipment for the Allies and visited military installations to troubleshoot equipment problems. In the fall of 1942 Selig taught a course at Columbia on night vision and camouflage. Aware of both the flight of Jewish academics from Europe and the breathless race to develop the bomb, he had a strong sense of urgency about the war. His plain speech and blunt wit endeared him to military officers. Selig didn’t speak about his wartime work at home and only vaguely alluded to his colleagues’ dance with the atom. Tight lips were the fashion.
“I learned to ask no questions,” Laura Fermi wrote in her memoir. “No more ‘What have you done today?’ nor ‘Are you pleased with your work?’ nor ‘Who is your collaborator?’” When her husband returned from mystery trips, she was left to speculate about the dust on his suit and the mud on his shoes. “Other women’s husbands also went on frequent travels,” she wrote. “It would have been bad taste indeed to ask where.”
Nuclear physicists from various countries, alarmed by the theoretical power of a chain reaction, attempted to cloak themselves in secrecy. This was unnatural, even antithetical, to the standards of modern science. State control of knowledge was a hallmark of autocracies like the Third Reich, and yet it was fear of the Nazis that compelled U.S. scientists into self-imposed censorship. “A conspiracy,” as Leo Szilard called it. History would call it the “Manhattan Project.”
This aura of secrecy pervaded the Columbia campus and drifted out into neighborhood gossip in Morningside Heights, a village unto itself, where many professors and their families lived above tearooms, Chinese laundries, and small grocery stores that were just beginning to stock pudding powders and frozen foods for the first time. Secrecy found its way down the gentle slope of Claremont Avenue from West 119th to 116th, up the marble steps of the stately apartment buildings, to wives commiserating in steamy galley kitchens, to eavesdropping children.
Across the tiled hallway from the Hechts, apartment 4A belonged to Frederick W. Rice, an obstetrician at Bellevue Hospital, and his wife, Madeleine Newman Hooke Rice, a graduate student at Columbia. The Rices were progressive Catholics. They had three daughters, one of whom was the same age as the Hechts’ daughter, Maressa. The children played together on the fourth floor, often shouting through the apartments’ shared wall, and sneaking through a door off the Rices’ kitchen that connected the homes. The adults visited regularly at night to socialize with guests, who included longhairs, “prophets,” and academic refugees from Nazi Germany.
Megan, the Rices’ youngest daughter, would overhear the adults alluding to the secret work of the men of Morningside Heights. She asked why Dr. Hecht’s work was hidden, even from his own wife, especially when it was conducted only blocks away from their homes.
“Well, Dr. Hecht understands the Einstein theory,” Megan’s mother said, implying that scientific knowledge was the key to the mystery in their midst.
—
THEN ALL OF A SUDDEN the newspapers, in hulking black headlines, announced the atomic bombing of Japan on August 6, 1945. Secret sites, spread out across the United States, had collaborated at breakneck speed to theorize, assemble, and test bomb components. The physics building at Columbia University was one such site. The buzz around campus and out in Morningside Heights was hypothetical and experimental in nature, while the sweaty industrial work was done in those secret cities farther west. The effort was called the Manhattan Project, and it was credited with ending the war by devastating two major cities.
The men of science whose intellect had underpinned the project recoiled at the devastating military use of atomic power over Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki. They viewed this as a kind of original sin, a Rubicon crossed, Pandora’s box now opened.
Selig Hecht tried to wrangle the unthinkable into words by writing an essay titled “Science and Moral Values,” which was in the spirit of Niels Bohr’s concept of complementarity. Selig typed some of the essay, revising by hand in blue ink, and wrote some of it in elegant cursive on unlined paper. While editing, he grafted typewritten passages onto handwritten ones. It was not a polished academic editorial. It was an emotional treatise of philosophy—less Schopenhauer, more Spinoza. On a handwritten page headlined with the Roman numeral “I,” he wrote:
Everything that happens, from the composition of a symphony to the eruption of a volcano, involves an intricate and interlocking pattern of sequences in the movement of matter and the transformation of energy. When wheels rotate and water flows, when muscles contract and nerves conduct, when bells ring and pianos play, when grass grows and wheat is mown, there is an incessant and vast interplay between energy and matter.
He wrote that “every advance in civilization seems to bring its quota of disturbance” and that the intersection of science and morality often leaves us with a paradox. Human intellect had progressed far enough to leverage science for ultimate power.
But of what avail is this knowledge if we use it to destroy cities and people, to devastate the countryside, and to shatter the very structures and men that made possible this knowledge and civilization?
The contrast is humiliating: on the one hand, clear knowledge and precise control of natural forces; on the other, spiritual anarchy and devastating ruin. Why is this? Why has man learned to understand and to dominate the forces of nature, and why has he failed to understand himself so that his control of nature serves to destroy himself? This is the modern paradox: the more we know of nature, the more easily we wreck our lives with the knowledge; order in natural knowledge and chaos in social behavior. Why?
Natural law is fixed and describes what will happen, he thought, while moral law is voluntary and prescribes what should happen. Morality “can be brought into concrete form by social mechanism,” wrote Selig, who had demonstrated this theorem in his own life. The essay was at once hopeful and frightened. “In a few years this war has ruined much of what we have built in centuries of patient history,” he said. “The next war may be of an entirely different order of magnitude and destroy us completely.” To drive his point home, he wondered if every supernova explosion in deep space was actually evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization that was not a careful steward of its atomic power.
Perhaps we can still achieve a happy moral order before it is too late. In order to do so let us not rely only on social mechanisms, or only on personal virtue and responsibility.
Each is necessary, but neither is sufficient. With the two actively combined we may yet emerge from our moral barbarism and achieve that spiritual integrity which our great teachers and prophets had the genius to recognize ages ago.
Selig, because of this reputation for extolling the social obligations of science, was named the honorary vice president of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, created in 1946 by Szilard and Einstein to educate the public about the dangers of atomic energy, to encourage its use for peaceful matters, and to curb military control over it. In its first letter asking for public donations, the committee wrote that a “new type of thinking” is “essential if mankind is to survive.” The committee thought that atomic power necessitated a world government, that building bombs meant forever postponing peace.
“I do not believe that we can prepare for war and at the same time prepare for a world community,” Einstein wrote in the New York Times. “When humanity holds in its hand the weapon with which it can commit suicide, I believe that to put more power into the gun is to increase the probability of disaster.”
Even Leslie Groves, the towering gung-ho Army general who was in charge of the Manhattan Project, admitted the dangers in stark tones. “Modern civilization might be completely destroyed” if other countries produced their own atomic weapons, he and Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote to President Harry S. Truman a couple of months before they were used on Japan. The following year, during a closed Senate hearing, the head physicist of the Manhattan Project was asked whether a nuclear bomb could be smuggled into Manhattan and detonated by enemies of the United States.
“Of course it could be done,” replied J. Robert Oppenheimer, “and people could destroy New York.”
Selig was the only member of the committee who wasn’t a nuclear physicist, but he proved his expertise the following year by publishing Explaining the Atom, a layman’s guide to quantum physics. The book’s epigraph invokes the British physicist Lord Rayleigh: “There is no possibility of telling whether the issue of scientists’ work will prove them to be fiends, or dreamers, or angels.”
In the prologue to Explaining the Atom, Selig wrote about “public men”—congressmen, presidents, appointees—who have no understanding of the basic principles of atomic energy and yet make decisions about this ultimate weapon. His book was essentially dedicated to these elected officials, and to citizens of the world who’d been shielded from knowledge by the secrecy of the Manhattan Project. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946, passed by “public men” in Congress that summer, reassigned the stewardship of nuclear energy from the military to civilians. The act also prescribed the death penalty or life imprisonment for anyone guilty of stealing or sharing atomic secrets. The language of this law, Selig thought, implied that the release of atomic energy was a sudden development triggered by isolated data—something that could be stolen and used as easily as a loaded handgun resting beside a cash register.
Really, though, the atomic bombing of Japan was a culmination of a half century’s work between thousands of people whose “intellectual drama” (as Selig put it) eventually yielded both the understanding and the technology to unlock the energy of matter. The bomb was “merely the latest impact of the wave of physical science that began about fifty years ago on the ocean of knowledge,” Selig wrote at the end of his prologue. Ernest Rutherford had imagined the existence of neutrons 25 years before Hiroshima, Einstein had published his special theory of relativity 15 years before that, and “radioactivity” entered the lexicon nine years prior. In his 1914 novel The World Set Free, the science-fiction writer H. G. Wells envisioned how any “scrap of solid matter in the world would become an available reservoir of concentrated force.”
A chain reaction of thinking over many years at a macro level, in other words, led to a chain reaction at the nuclear level.
Explaining the Atom was Selig’s way of rendering the complexities of nuclear physics in clear terms. Energy and mass are “different aspects of the same basic cosmic stuff,” he wrote, and a small change in mass releases a comparatively large amount of energy. Uranium is a heavy, radioactive and unstable element, and thus breaking down an atom of uranium releases enough energy to pulverize other uranium atoms. The first fissioned nucleus frees 170 million electron volts and two neutrons, which are absorbed by two other atoms, which each release two more neutrons. Thus, the 30th generation of fission causes the splitting of more than a billion atoms. The energy release grows instantly into a self-sustaining torrent, into an explosion, into a fireball that can flatten and ignite a metropolitan area. By destroying the smallest parts of matter, mankind could destroy the largest parts.
And it was all accomplished by “a staggering project,” as Selig called it, that was now public knowledge. Manhattan dreamed up the atomic bomb. Secret industrial cities around the country helped to make it. Selig Hecht wanted to teach it. He stated his goal—almost a plea—in the preface to Explaining the Atom, which he prepared in the late summer of 1946 at his summer home in Bridgewater, Connecticut:
My purpose is to supply a background against which people can think and act intelligently on the problems of atomic energy. So long as one supposes that this business is mysterious and secret, one cannot have a just evaluation of our possession and security. Only by understanding the basis and development of atomic energy can one judge the legislation and foreign policy that concern it. I hope that this book will help make intelligent voters.
The man of science who lived in a building of angels, who believed not in God but in humanity’s potential for grace and goodness, was concerned about the future. He foresaw the abuse of atomic power and worried about society’s ignorance of what it possessed. Selig felt that good citizenship required a good understanding of science. Knowledge was important, but so was the application of knowledge for the betterment of the world. Science was nothing without synthesis. “There is no end to the cataloguing of interesting phenomena,” he once told a Columbia colleague. “The problem of putting the interesting phenomena into a meaningful context is a much more difficult story, and the success which attends the effort is the mark of a true scientist.”
—
NOW THAT THE SECRET was out, the United States needed a bureaucracy to formally and publicly handle it. Through the National Security Act of 1947, Congress created a thicket of management to shield and shepherd the atom-powered defense of the United States in the postwar world: the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Military Establishment, which would later become the Department of Defense. Congress had already established the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, with nine members each from the House of Representatives and the Senate, to deal with nuclear matters. Unlike all other congressional committees, the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy had the power to both “authorize” and “appropriate,” meaning it approved policy and funneled the money to carry it out, giving a group of 18 lawmakers unprecedented control over the evolution of the country’s nuclear-weapons complex. Eventually the complex would grow into a series of laboratories and plants, run chiefly by private contractors, all over the United States.
Because this “new source of energy must remain under state control,” it increased “enormously the power of the state over the citizen,” wrote E. L. Woodward, an Oxford professor of international relations, in the New York Times. The ultimate power would belong to a powerful few.
The bureaucracy that was supposed to run the nuclear-weapons complex, coupled with the Manhattan Project’s vanguard classification system, would make meaningful context hard to come by in this cascade of dollars and secrets. Public men had classified information from the public, and would continue to do so for generations. President Harry S. Truman was fully aware that atomic bombs went beyond war games and organizational charts.
“You have got to understand that this isn’t a military weapon,” Truman said in a meeting with officials from the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense. “It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses. So we have got to treat this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that.”
By the new millennium, the United States would spend ten trillion dollars on nuclear-weapons programs—more than any other government expense except Social Security and non-nuclear defense—and begin spending a trillion more on modernizing the arsenal for the 21st century. Nukes, in other words, would be America’s third-highest national priority, ever. Along the way, the weapons would evolve from a strategy into a policy into a faith. They would hasten doomsday, and also be credited with delaying it. They would be detonated in experiments all around the planet, in desolate expanses out West and on remote islands in the Pacific. They would be attached to missiles on high alert that were buried in the ground or loaded into submarines that roamed the oceans. They would create economies, inspire movements, and destroy lives. They would survive accidents and budget cuts, and outlast presidents and wars. They would number in the tens of thousands, spread to other countries, and then recede from view, but they would remain the pinnacle of human ingenuity and insecurity, a force that binds American power and threatens to blow it apart, a paradox to be pondered and maybe, one day, resolved.
All the while, a counterforce pushed back. Men and women of science, and of faith, believed that humanity was too frail to tangle with the almighty. The mere possession of nuclear weapons, to them, was a wish for death. Before a nuclear weapon was even detonated, movements to abolish them were underway. The anti-nuclear campaign would draw energy from every corner of the Earth, and it would grow and shrink, triumph at times and fail at others. It would propel people into noble lunacy—to lay down in front of trains and trucks, to scale fences and climb onto submarines, to march in the streets and through the desert, to plunge into the technicalities of warhead design and congressional budgeting, to spend years in court and prison with no hint of reward or promise of victory.
They would seek nothing less than the transformation of the American identity.
It would seem impossible. But every now and then, the impossible would occur.
—
ALMOST EXACTLY one year after he finished the final chapter of Explaining the Atom, in September 1947, Selig Hecht died of a heart attack in apartment 4B at 35 Claremont Avenue. He was 55. A fellow professor had noted that Selig seemed unwell during a visit to Cambridge University earlier that summer. The hustle and strain of the war years had left a mark, not only on him but also on the army of scientists who had aided the war effort.
Selig’s body was cremated and his ashes were scattered around Columbia’s physics building, just a short walk from his home.
By this time, Megan, the youngest Rice daughter who used to live across the fourth-floor hall—the girl so captivated and unnerved by those secretive conversations about the atom—was 17 years old and had decided to become a Roman Catholic sister.