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I never saw a man in such an extremely nervous state as Oppenheimer. He seemed to feel that the destruction of the entire human race was imminent.
—Henry A. Wallace
“Now, this is a dinner party!” declared Leo Szilard. Oppie, overhearing him, looked at the short Hungarian, not sure if he meant the great spread of food that had been laid out before them here in Washington or the stellar guest list. Besides Szilard and Oppie, also present were Nobel laureates Enrico Fermi and Harold Urey as well as Ed Condon, a half-dozen United States senators, and former vice president Henry A. Wallace. Hosting was Watson Davis of the Science Service news agency.
The purpose of the dinner was to educate the senators, and although Charles Tobey, a Republican from New Hampshire, opened by saying, “It looks as if we have a nonpartisan issue,” heated debate soon erupted—but among the scientists rather than the politicians. Fermi had joined Oppie in supporting the May-Johnson Bill while Urey, Condon, and, most vociferously, Szilard were against it.
The dinner—Waldorf salad, Maine lobster, and porterhouse steak—was consumed with much gusto amid spluttering, and it soon became clear to Oppie that Leo’s side was winning. It didn’t help that the two of them hadn’t really spoken since their angry meeting in Virginia back in May. The aftertaste of that, plus Szilard’s certain knowledge that Oppie had vetoed the circulation of his petition calling for a demonstration of the bomb, seemed to be giving even more force than usual to Leo’s flamboyant protestations. Oppie tried his standard suave maneuvering, but the senators, perhaps sick of that from their own daily lives, were clearly warming to the excitable Hungarian.
When dinner was over Oppie sidled over to Szilard, who was standing by a window, looking at the nighttime lights of the nation’s capital. “We should talk.”
“We have talked, Robert.”
“There’s ... more. Which hotel are you in?”
“I always stay at the Wardman Park.”
“I’ll walk you back there.”
“Shall we bring Urey as referee?” snapped Szilard.
Although Urey was a chemist, it was Szilard who served as a catalyst, his massive creativity sparking similarly profound insights in others. “Just you and me, Leo.”
Szilard considered for a long moment then nodded. “I’ll get my coat.”
#
Oppenheimer had felt comfortable talking in low tones as he and Leo walked along Woodley Road, confident that no one would hear enough of their conversation, in German, to make sense of it. But once they reached the hotel they found the bar crowded, and so they decided to head up to Szilard’s suite. Oppie noted that it was nicer than his own at the Statler; the Hungarian was known for his decadent tastes. The bathtub, he saw through the open bathroom door, was filled with steaming water; Leo must have had a standing evening order with the chambermaid.
There was a hugely padded chair by the window and an elegantly carved wooden one by the writing desk. Leo took the former leaving Oppie the latter. The curtains were drawn back and the window was open, letting in a cool October breeze.
“I’ve washed my hands of it myself,” said Oppie, “but there’s a matter you should know about.”
“Oh?” said Szilard.
“Yes, it’s ...” Oppie trailed off. “Funny,” he said, at last. “It’s an odd thing to put into words. So stark. But here it is: the world is coming to an end.”
“Almost certainly,” agreed Szilard, “if we let the military control atomic matters.”
“No, no. It has nothing to do with the military or the bomb. It has to do with the sun. We discovered it at Los Alamos: there’s an explosion working its way outward from the sun’s core, which had contained a degenerate neutron mass. It will erupt through the surface in eighty-odd years, pushing the photosphere and corona outward. The total loss of solar mass will be minor, but superheated plasma will wash over the inner solar system, destroying everything out to earth’s orbit.”
“There must be an error.”
“I wish there was. But let me go over the evidence.”
Szilard sat perfectly still as Oppie recounted what was known. The Hungarian’s eyes were rolled slightly up and his pupils were tracking left and right as if he were visualizing equations as Robert described them. “Are you sure?” he said at last.
“Bethe has confirmed it; so has Fermi. And Teller, too.”
“My God,” Leo said. “It’s—my God.” His normally florid cheeks had lost their color. “Have you read my friend H.G. Wells?”
“Of course.”
“In the last pages of The Time Machine, the time traveler leaves the year 802,701 A.D. and goes many millions of years further into the future, to witness the end of our world. And that’s where it’s supposed to be—far, far down the road! Not something that, were I to eat right and exercise, I myself might almost live long enough to see!”
“I know,” said Oppie. “I wish it wasn’t true.”
“Over! The whole she-bang!” Leo snapped his fingers. “Like that!”
“Like that,” said Oppie softly. “But Teller thinks physicists should work together to try to find a solution.”
Leo’s tone calmed a bit. “It is, as you’d say, a sweet problem.”
“It’s not sweet,” Oppie said. “It’s bitter. The ashes of futility.”
“Well,” said Leo. “We probably won’t survive that long, anyway, as I said, if we let the military control atomic matters.”
“I know the May-Johnson Bill is shit—”
“That’s what you said about the atomic bomb.”
“— and I’ll be happy if they come up with something better, but I still say politics is a matter for politicians.”
“We shall never agree on that,” said Leo. “But this—saving the world!—is a matter for intellectuals, for scientists. Not brutes, not soldiers. Everyone knew our Manhattan Project would last at most a few years. Either we would succeed or Hitler and Heisenberg would, but it was a race that was bound to be completed by 1944 or 1945. No one expects us to be working together in 1946, let alone the 1950s.”
Oppie sucked on his pipe, which, out of deference to Leo, he’d let go out before they’d gotten up to his room. “We aren’t going to be working together. I’ve resigned.”
“Surely that was theater; your skills are needed. Humanity will—”
“— will receive its collective fate: paralyzed souls, one and all. I don’t care.”
“You must care some,” said Szilard, “or you wouldn’t be bothering to tell me all this.”
Oppie frowned, thinking those same words again: Now I am become Death. In the Bhagavad Gita, Vishnu, part of the Hindu trinity along with Brahma and Shiva, tries to persuade Prince Arjuna to do his duty. To impress the Prince, Vishnu takes on his multi-armed form and declares Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Vishnu succeeds, and Arjuna does what, as a warrior, he had been born to do.
Robert’s stomach churned. He, scion of the Ethical Culture School, had not been born a warrior, and this was not his fight.
“I’m telling you, Leo, because of your ... your passion. I’ve done my bit for King and Country. Oh, I’ll still work on atomic policy—Prometheus has an obligation to play fire marshal—but that’s it. As for the solar photospheric ejection? Teller thinks something can be done; maybe he’s right, but it’s not my department.”
Leo looked out at the city, countless thousands asleep. “Teller, yes. My old friend and fellow Martian. I can work with him. But ...”
“Yes?” prodded Oppie.
“The world was at war when the Manhattan Project began. We had no choice then but to crawl into bed with the army, the government. Hell, Robert, I was the one who got Einstein to write to Roosevelt. But we’re not at war anymore; we don’t need the military.”
“If you take this on, you will need resources,” replied Oppie. “Money, manpower. Washington can be your ally.”
“Metonymy, is it? Yes, perhaps we will need friends in high places but we don’t need the Pentagon, and we certainly don’t need the man who built it.”
“General Groves is—”
“An ignoramus. You know that, Robert.”
“He thinks highly of you.”
“As he should. I am—ah, you swap metonymy for sarcasm. Ask yourself, then: which of us is the indispensable man as we move forward, him or me?”
“The hawk or the dove, is that it?”
Szilard folded his arms in front of his sloping chest. “Answer my question.”
Oppie shook his head. “I simply say there are things that the military is good at. But you’ve been thinking up plans to save the world for years; this is your field, not mine.”
Leo had been born in 1898, and had spent much of the late 1920s and early 1930s promoting his notion of “the Bund,” a society of intellectuals who would shape future civilization. He had indeed befriended H.G. Wells, a fellow utopian dreamer who had proposed a similar notion in one of his novels, and even for a time had served as Wells’s agent for translated editions.
Szilard shrugged his rounded shoulders. “Did you know I’d been contemplating a switch into molecular biology? Life rather than death, you see. But now ...” He paused. “Who else knows?”
“Several at Los Alamos; I’ll write up a list for you.”
“But not Groves?”
“No.”
“Good, good. Anyone outside of your New Mexico group?”
“Not yet.” And then, offering an olive branch: “You were the only person I thought to approach.”
Leo considered this then tipped his head. “I’m honored.” He turned fully toward Oppie. “But there are others who must be informed at once.”
“Who are you thinking of?”
“Number one has to be Einstein, of course.”
“He was denied clearance to work on the atomic-bomb project,” said Oppie. “His left-leaning ways.”
Leo raised eyebrows at the irony. “Denying Einstein but approving you. In any event, I know Albert well; I shall head to Princeton from here—it’s not far—and brief him myself.” He shook his head sadly. “A better man there isn’t; the government should be ashamed for having kept him in the dark during the war.”
“I know,” said Oppie turning toward the black night. “I swear, sometimes this country goes out of its way to vilify its most loyal servants.”