THE SAME NIGHT that Szilard conducted his experiment at Columbia University proving a chain reaction, he phoned Edward Teller with the ominous news. Teller remembered the moment vividly many years later. “I was at the piano, attempting with the collaboration of a friend and his violin to make Mozart sound like Mozart, when the telephone rang. It was Szilard, calling from New York. He spoke to me in Hungarian, and he said only one thing: ‘I have found the neutrons,’” and hung up. 1 Teller understood just what Szilard’s laconic message meant. And he shared Szilard’s sense of dread. “All my worries about nuclear energy—the full realization that it was coming, and coming very soon, and that it would be very dangerous” was clear to Teller. “My sleep that night was uneasy,” he recalled. 2
Teller’s sense of foreboding had been building for years. When he arrived at the University of Göttingen in 1930, he saw the goose-stepping, the torchlight parades, the pagan rallies, and found them barbaric rituals unworthy of a cultured people. He saw the critical faculty of Germans being swept away in an emotional frenzy, and every hateful lie that Hitler shouted being accepted as Truth itself. How could this happen? A few Germans were troubled, they admitted to Teller—but what could they do? It was not a question that many Germans asked, or answered. The Nazis’ virulent anti-Semitism also bothered Teller. For most German Jews, it came as a terrible shock. They could not grasp how such a thing could happen in an advanced society in the heart of Europe in the twentieth century. Teller, a Hungarian Jew, knew better. What was happening in Germany was an uncomfortable reminder of what he had left behind in his native land.
Teller, like Szilard, had been born in turn-of-the-century Budapest. His father, Max, was a lawyer and associate editor of the major law journal of Hungary who worked from a spacious office apartment on the east embankment of the Danube near the Parliament Building. A quiet and reserved man, Max Teller did all the routine work on the law journal while the chief editor added the flair. His son’s own later style, avoiding routine work and constantly offering original ideas, may have been an unconscious reaction against the tedium of his father’s life. From his mother, Ilona, Teller inherited a moody temperament and a tendency to worry, though his worries were uniquely his own. As a young boy, he had such a terrible fear of the dark that, until he was seven, his parents always left a light on in his bedroom at night. When the light went out, he worked math problems to help cope with his fear of the dark. The consistency of numbers made him feel safe.
As a schoolboy, Teller annoyed his teachers and classmates with his self-concern and self-assurance even as he awed them with his brilliance. He was opinionated and always eager to show that he knew more than others. Classmates who resented this behavior bullied him as he walked to and from school. His governess later recalled that all he would say was, “I’m working on a plan.” 3 After getting a longer strap for his books, Teller, when approached by the gang, whirled his books around him and was never bothered again. It was an early example of defense through a cunning weapon. The bullying engendered in Teller a lifelong sense of being embattled, besieged, alone in a struggle against his enemies. Sensitive but deeply insecure, he took refuge at the family piano, losing himself for hours playing Mozart and Beethoven sonatas with great feeling. Teller also sought escape in the novels of Jules Verne, which carried him into the exciting and imaginative world of science fiction.
The revolutionary turmoil that swept post—World War I Europe hit Budapest when Teller was an impressionable adolescent. He witnessed political violence in the streets from the window of his bedroom. One day walking home from school, he saw a poster of a stern man with an outstretched arm whose large fingertip seemed pointed right at him, warning: “You, hiding in the shadows, you counterrevolutionary, TREMBLE.” He did.
When the communists briefly took over Hungary in 1919, Teller’s father was labeled a capitalist and the family became social outcasts. Communist soldiers requisitioned the Teller apartment as “bourgeois excess” and terrorized the family by urinating on houseplants and scrounging for money, which Max had hidden in the lining of his law books. This terrifying ordeal was the eleven-year-old Teller’s first taste of communism, and it fed into his preexisting fear of Russia, the great looming presence to the east. “When I misbehaved when I was a small boy,” he remembered, “my grandmother told me, ‘If you don’t behave, the Russians will get you.’” 4 Her threat, and the haunting image it evoked, resonated and would stay with Teller all his life.
Max Teller told his son that the Hungarian Soviet would eventually fail and that anti-Semitism would follow. “Too many of the communist leaders are Jews,” he explained, “and all the Jews will be blamed for their excesses.” 5 It was a sadly accurate prediction. In the fall of 1919 fascists swept to power in Budapest. Red Terror gave way to White Terror—an especially cruel trap for the Jewish middle class. They never had any use for the Commune, and yet now they became the scapegoats of the fascists. They were publicly vilified and denied access to certain professions, such as law, medicine, and education. For the first time, Teller tasted the bitterness of persecution.
Max Teller pressed two lessons on his son: he would have to leave Hungary, and as a Jew, he would always have to excel just to survive. Edward added two lessons of his own. One was his already deep and abiding anticommunism. The other was a practical view of what a science could do for him. “I loved science,” he later said, “but it also offered a possibility for escaping this doomed society.” 6 In this, he meant more than just Hungary. Science was a way for Teller to hold his own in a hostile world.
He took these experiences and emotions with him when he left to study in Germany, just weeks before his eighteenth birthday. Teller did work at Karlsruhe, Munich, and Leipzig, where his mentor was Werner Heisenberg. From Leipzig, Teller went to Göttingen, where for the first time he suffered taunts from Nazi students. A Göttingen administrator made plain the danger that he faced. “I would like to help you,” the administrator told him, “but you have no future in Germany.” 7 The comment shocked Teller, but he took the hint. He emigrated to Britain and took up a temporary lectureship at the University of London, then won a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to study with Bohr in Copenhagen. The terms of the award prohibited marriage during the fellowship, but Teller decided to wed his childhood sweetheart, Mici Harkanyi, anyway. (What Edward Teller wanted, he pursued—whatever the rules.) After a year in Copenhagen, he was offered a tenured position at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Quantum mechanics was still a new discipline, and Teller was one of perhaps a hundred theoretical physicists in the world well educated in the subject.
Teller left for the United States at the beginning of 1935. He traveled aboard a ship from Southampton to New York. The gentle rocking of the ship induced Teller to meditation. He felt suspended between two worlds, not yet in a country where his future was uncertain, yet forced to leave a continent that was no longer home. Never before had Teller so powerfully felt a sense of exile.
Also aboard the ship was Hans Bethe, another refugee physicist forced to leave Germany, headed to Cornell University. Teller and Bethe shared much in common: Jewish roots, the impact on their lives of rising political extremism, the unsuccessful attempt to keep physics above politics, the maelstrom of Nazism. They were unsure what awaited them in America. Anxious about the fate of their families and friends back in Europe, they were in acute need of emotional, professional, and financial support. They found all these things in their adopted country. Like Szilard, both quickly came to love the United States for its embrace of immigrants. “I am speaking English with an accent, but in no other country have I been told that my accent is charming!” Teller reported to longtime friends back in Europe. “I am praised for mispronouncing the language!” 8
The state of American physics was also quite advantageous for newcomers. Experimental nuclear physics was developing rapidly, with experimental results outrunning theory. For a theoretician like Teller, such a situation was made to order. In Europe, Teller—for all his ability—had worked in the shadow of older, more established physicists. In America he was his own man with his own graduate students. These advantages, combined with his awareness of his own intellectual gifts, rapidly gave Teller a brash self-assurance that made him a commanding teacher at George Washington University. His physical presence helped: intense, sad gray eyes stared out from under thick black eyebrows. And he was an impressive speaker, his pauses powerful, his words great blocks of stone laid down one by one. If he sensed he was losing his students’ attention, his stentorian voice would go down—not up.
Dramatic and passionate, forceful and egotistical, gregarious and clever, Teller could be irresistibly charming—when it suited his purposes. On such occasions he was a brilliant raconteur with a perfect sense of timing who told good stories and listened attentively to others. Yet coexisting with this warm, charming, vulnerable, and idealistic Teller, there was an alternative Teller, who was melancholy and whose gusto for life was offset by bouts of dark brooding during which he could be bullying, aggressive, devious, intolerant, resentful, vengeful, and self-absorbed. This Teller, when tense, was liable to take a route of no-holds-barred aggression that could include a full-blooded tirade against his opponents, real and imagined. And even when in a good mood, he would always exaggerate the gap between himself and his critics. There was always something angry about the energy and intensity with which he pursued an argument, an unremitting fierce tight focus, like a flame, that put observers in mind of a blowtorch.
People were amazed by Teller’s stamina in dispute. Marvelously argumentative, never tired, he possessed a singularity of purpose that brooked no diversion. Given this propensity, it might come as a surprise that Teller kept any friends—but he did. Yet the role of former friends was, in comparison, endless, all of them guilty of making an objection to some aspect of Teller’s work, no matter how mild or constructive in spirit. The general rule was: once exiled, exiled forever. Even détente was unthinkable. Onlookers were left openmouthed at the ferocity of the rows and the intensity of the rejections.
Uncomplicated and genuine at one moment, an aggressive salesman driven to impress at the next, slyly political and naive, he was a complex and moody man who remained scarred by political upheaval. Such experience had made Teller an insecure pessimist. Like Szilard or Fermi or Bethe, he loved America, but he was never a happy exile, never able to live from day to day, and the fate of his family—whom he did not know how to protect—in Europe caused him much anxiety and suffering. Conflicts born of such frustrations would embitter Teller for the rest of his life.
The morning after Szilard phoned Teller with the news about neutrons, he took the train from New York to Washington. Teller picked him up at Union Station in the shadow of the Capitol, and they drove to Teller’s home on Garfield Street in leafy Northwest Washington. There they talked in Hungarian, long into the night, about fission and a chain reaction. Szilard told Teller it was crucial for fission research to remain secret in order to keep it out of the hands of the Nazis. He understood that science was advanced through the free exchange of ideas and that many refugees like himself had left Germany precisely because the Nazis had censored intellectual inquiry, but Szilard saw war coming and feared that atomic bombs would decide the outcome. Teller agreed.
Szilard felt so strongly about this issue that he decided to lobby Niels Bohr as well. If he could convince Bohr to swing his prestige behind secrecy, then the campaign to hinder German atomic research might succeed. On March 16, 1939, Szilard and Teller went to see Bohr at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. That same evening the radio broadcast ominous news that Hitler had sent German troops into Prague, violating the promise to respect Czech independence he had made to the leaders of Britain and France at the Munich Conference just six months earlier. Awakened at last to Hitler’s duplicity, Britain and France now issued guarantees to Poland, next on Hitler’s list, and began to rearm furiously. And there was this: Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia had some of the world’s richest uranium deposits.
The news only confirmed the two Hungarians in their advocacy of secrecy, but Bohr disagreed vehemently. “Openness is the basic condition necessary for science,” he scolded them. “It should not be tampered with.” 9 Physics was an international discipline. The good physicist reported his results so that other physicists could scrutinize them and correct errors. Secrecy would subvert openness and subordinate physics to national competition, substituting petty rivalry for progress.
Bohr also thought Szilard and Teller were being unduly alarmist. Bohr continued to believe that separating U-235 from U-238 and accumulating enough of the U-235 isotope to make a bomb would require a staggering—well-nigh impossible—engineering effort. “You would have to turn the entire country into a factory,” Bohr told them. 10 He estimated that an isotope separation factory would have to operate twenty-four hours a day for ten days to produce only a billionth of a gram of U-235. At that rate, it would take 26, 445 years to produce one gram. To Bohr, the conclusion was simple and inescapable: U-235 was, thankfully, not a practical source for atomic bombs.
As Bohr’s time in Princeton came to an end, colleagues urged him to send for his family and remain in the States—any university position in the country was his for the asking. Bohr certainly saw the handwriting on the wall—that war was imminent—but turned down all invitations to stay because of his loyalty to Denmark. He had to return home, Bohr felt, in order to protect his institute and keep its doors open as a haven for scientists fleeing Nazi persecution. “We are aware that a catastrophe might come any day,” he wrote a friend in America after his arrival back in Copenhagen. 11 But still he refused to leave home.
Szilard had concluded that fission was deadly serious business and that physicists could no longer handle it alone. They had to share their knowledge and concerns with the U.S. government—the stakes were simply too big and too grave. In Szilard’s mind, the question now was not whether to notify Washington, but how. He approached the chairman of Columbia’s physics department, George Pegram, with his concerns. Pegram had followed Szilard’s and Fermi’s experiments and agreed that the time had come to notify the government. He mentioned a contact he had in the Navy Department in Washington. Pegram and Szilard asked Fermi to see this contact during an upcoming trip he had planned to Washington.
Fermi had spent his first months in America adjusting to his adopted country. He strove to master the plainsong of American speech and the nuances of American culture—all with a sunny disposition and modest manner. He made a deal with his students: if they corrected his English and taught him Americanisms, he would teach them physics. He and his wife, Laura, bought a house in Leonia, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Columbia University. Working at night, they dug a hole in the basement, where they buried his remaining Nobel Prize money as a precaution against the chance that it might be taken away from them as enemy aliens in the event of a war.
On March seventeenth Fermi took the train to Washington and called on Admiral Stanford Hooper, technical assistant to the chief of naval operations, at the Navy Department building on the Mall near the White House. “There’s a WOP outside,” said a lieutenant loud enough for Fermi to hear, rudely foreshadowing the puzzled indifference of the admiral he was about to see. Fermi affected nonchalance, but inside he was fuming. When Fermi was let in to see Hooper, he handed the admiral a letter of introduction from Pegram that described the physicists’ discoveries and their implications:
Experiments in the physics laboratories at Columbia University reveal that conditions may be found under which the chemical element uranium may be able to liberate its large excess of atomic energy, and that this might mean the possibility that uranium might be used as an explosive that would liberate a million times as much energy per pound as any known explosive. My own feeling is that the probabilities are against this, but my colleagues and I think that the bare possibility should not be disregarded. 12
Hooper gathered a group of officers and navy civilian scientists. For the next hour Fermi outlined the military potential of fission in his halting English with a thick Italian accent. His audience listened politely as they tried to follow along. Few if any knew what a neutron was, and little came of the meeting. When it was over, Admiral Hooper merely asked to be kept informed. No sooner had Fermi left than a navy scientist who had attended the briefing called another and asked him, “Who is this Fermi? Is he a Fascist or what?” 13 Such was the outcome of the first contact between physicists and the government on the possibility of an atomic bomb.
Fermi rendezvoused with Szilard and Teller in Washington that weekend. The navy’s indifference to the dangers and opportunities of fission frustrated and infuriated them. “If we brought a bomb to them all ready made on a silver platter,” said Fermi bitterly, “there would still be a 50/50 chance that they would mess it up.” 14 They were apprehensive. They had inside knowledge of German science, and much respect for it, even though many of Germany’s best physicists had been driven away. There was still enough scientific talent in Germany, they felt, to solve the problem of a fission bomb. German physicists had read the scientific literature about fission and a chain reaction, as they had. Heisenberg had mentioned his interest in uranium on a recent tour of American universities. While some, like Bohr, found the idea of an atomic bomb scarcely credible because of the isotope-separation problem, Szilard, Teller, and Fermi had little doubt that such a bomb could be made. And if such a bomb could be made, they reasoned, then one would be made. The prospect of such a weapon in Hitler’s hands meant nothing short of doom.
Their experience with the Navy Department led them to conclude that ideas presented at a low level of the governmental bureaucracy were likely to go nowhere, but those inserted at the top stood a much better chance of producing results. The White House was more likely to be open to new ideas than would unimaginative bureaucrats. 15 Roosevelt had to be warned, but how? What could they do? They were well known in physics circles, but nothing more than registered aliens in American society at large. As newcomers to the United States, they lacked the political connections necessary to press their claims effectively in the corridors of power.
Then Szilard thought of his teacher and friend Albert Einstein. A letter from a scientist of Einstein’s stature might make the president sit up and take notice. Szilard contacted Einstein and explained the situation. An avowed pacifist, Einstein agonized at the thought of setting in motion a program to build an atomic bomb, so antithetical to his instincts. Einstein struggled with his conscience for some time before finally concluding that bitter necessity required the United States to pursue a bomb—the Nazis must not get it first. Finally, in late July Einstein agreed to sound the alarm on Szilard’s behalf. It was unusual for a scientist of Einstein’s stature to take such a step. “The one thing most scientists are really afraid of is to make a fool of themselves,” Szilard said later, reflecting on Einstein’s decision. “Einstein was free from such a fear and this above all is what made his position unique on this occasion.” 16
On August second Szilard set out for Einstein’s summer retreat on Long Island with a letter he had drafted for Einstein’s signature. Szilard had never learned to drive, so he enlisted Teller, who was teaching physics at Columbia that summer, to take him out there. It was already hot and humid when Teller picked up Szilard outside the King’s Crown Hotel early in the morning and drove out to Long Island. “I entered history as Szilard’s chauffeur,” Teller later said. 17
Szilard and Teller knew Einstein’s general whereabouts, but not his specific address. Once they reached the north shore of Long Island, they began asking directions to the home of the famous Professor Einstein, but no one could help. Finally they asked a little girl with long braids who said she had never heard of Professor Einstein, but she knew where a nice old man with long white hair lived.
Szilard and Teller reached Einstein’s cottage on Peconic Bay in the late afternoon. They found the great man with a massive forehead and an aureole of white hair dressed in an old robe and slippers sitting in the living room, empty except for a few garden chairs and a small table, pondering physics. A picture window looked out on to Long Island Sound, but the shutters were half closed to keep out the heat. Looking like an old-fashioned Swiss watchmaker in a small town who collected butterflies on Sundays, Einstein served his guests iced tea with heavily muscled arms and drank some himself while he reviewed the letter Szilard had drafted for him. His large bulging chocolate eyes followed the text carefully. In it, the physicist who had risked his life during World War I for his outspoken pacifist beliefs said that an atomic bomb might be possible and that the United States should speed up experiments regarding a uranium chain reaction. Szilard and Teller watched silently as Einstein hunched over the dining-room table and signed the letter:
Old Grove Road
Nassau Point
Peconic, Long Island
August 2, 1939
F. D. Roosevelt
President of the United States
White House
Washington, D.C.
Sir:
Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration. I believe, therefore, that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations:
In the course of the last four months it has been made probable—through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America—that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.
This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.
The United States has only very poor ores of uranium in moderate quantities. There is some good ore in Canada and the former Czechoslovakia, while the most important source of uranium is the Belgian Congo.
In view of this situation you may think it desirable to have some permanent contact maintained between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reaction in America. One possible way of achieving this might be for you to entrust with this task a person who has your confidence and who could perhaps serve in an unofficial capacity. His task might comprise the following:
I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over. That she should have taken such early action might perhaps be understood on the ground that the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, von Weizsäcker, is attached to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute in Berlin where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated.
Yours very truly,
Albert Einstein
18
After Szilard returned to New York, he began to think about how to get Einstein’s letter to the president. Through a friend, Gustav Stolper, an economist and former member of the German Reichstag who was now a refugee living in New York, Szilard made contact with Alexander Sachs—a Russian émigré, science buff, financier, and well-connected New Dealer with access to the White House. Sachs was an ideal go-between. He understood the concept of fission and the seriousness of what Szilard told him. Sachs agreed to get the letter to Roosevelt.
Events delayed Sachs’s meeting with the president. On August twenty-third Hitler and Stalin, ideological enemies but totalitarian twins, signed a cynical “nonaggression” pact that stunned the world and prepared to carve up Poland between them. On September first German tanks crashed into Poland, facing little more than horse cavalry as opposition. The years of threat and bluster and tension were over. World War II had begun. A Polish refugee in America who heard the news on the radio captured the feelings of a whole generation when he said, “I suddenly felt as if a curtain had fallen on my past life, cutting it off from my future. There has been a different color and meaning to everything ever since.” 19
By early October, Szilard had almost given up on Sachs. To Einstein he wrote: “There is a distinct possibility that Sachs will be of no use to us. If this is the case, we must put the matter in someone else’s hands. I have decided to accord Sachs ten days’ grace.” 20 On October eleventh Sachs finally got his appointment with the president, more than two months after Einstein had signed Szilard’s letter and six weeks after the war had begun. Reminding FDR that Napoleon had missed the greatest technological marvel of his day when he rejected Robert Fulton’s offer to build a fleet of steamships, Sachs tendered Einstein’s letter and proceeded to explain the military potential of fission. Einstein had, of course, closed his appeal to the president with a warning that Germany had stopped the sale of uranium from mines in Nazi-controlled Czechoslovakia, one of the world’s few sources of the metal, a sure tip-off that Hitler was already at work on an atomic bomb. FDR quickly grasped the point. “Alex,” he said, “what you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.” The president called in General Edwin “Pa” Watson, his personal aide, and told him, “This requires action.” 21
At Roosevelt’s request, Watson directed the creation of an Advisory Committee on Uranium to explore the feasibility of an American atomic bomb program and report its findings to the president. Lyman Briggs, the director of the National Bureau of Standards, was appointed the committee’s chairman. Although Briggs was a physicist, his interests and experience were not in nuclear physics. Moreover, he was conservative by nature, accustomed to operating—as most bureaucrats do—in a slow, cautious, and methodical manner. For Briggs, fission’s possibilities had to be soberly measured against opportunities in other fields. 22
The Uranium Committee met for the first time on October 21, 1939—ten long months after the discovery of fission in Germany. Sachs saw to it that Szilard and Teller were invited to the meeting. Fermi was also invited, but he refused to attend; his experience with Admiral Hooper and the navy made him unenthusiastic about another meeting with government bureaucrats. Fermi did, however, authorize Teller to speak on his behalf.
Szilard opened the meeting by emphasizing the possibility of creating a chain reaction in a uranium-graphite “pile” (or nuclear reactor). He explained to the committee that each time a uranium nucleus split apart, it released tremendous energy. But fission would not occur if one had to keep firing neutrons from an external source at the uranium atoms to break them up. If, on the other hand, the uranium atom released neutrons as it split, then these neutrons could go on and break up other nuclei. The neutrons from these disintegrations would trigger more, producing a chain of fissions. But neutrons had a less than 1 percent chance of fissioning a nucleus of natural uranium—thus no chance for a chain reaction. Neutrons needed to be slowed down. Slow neutrons had a more than 50 percent chance of fissioning a uranium nucleus—thus producing a chain reaction. The best way to slow neutrons was to use a “moderator,” which absorbed neutrons. The best moderator was graphite, whose carbon molecules absorbed about 10 percent of neutrons.
All of this sounded terribly exotic to the bureaucrats gathered around the table. The ordnance expert at the meeting, Lieutenant Colonel Keith Adamson, an officer at the army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in northern Maryland, sneered at the idea of an atomic bomb—it was sheer fantasy. The colonel told Szilard and Teller in no uncertain terms that he did not believe “all this junk about complicated inventions.” “At Aberdeen,” he went on, ridiculing the physicists, “we have a goat tethered to a stick with a ten-foot rope, and we have promised a big prize to anyone who can kill the goat with a death ray. Nobody has claimed the prize yet.” 23 Adamson then proceeded to lecture Szilard and Teller about scientific boondoggles in wartime. “He told us that it was naive to believe that we could make a significant contribution to defense by creating a new weapon,” recalled Szilard. “He said that if a new weapon is created, it usually takes two wars before one can know whether the weapon is any good or not. Then he explained rather laboriously that in the end it is not weapons which win the wars, but the morale of the troops.” 24
Teller listened to Adamson with mounting frustration and anger. He had studied in Germany for many years and understood their military technology better than most—certainly better than the colonel. Finally he exploded. “If it is morale and not weapons that wins wars,” Teller said, his voice rising as his accent thickened, “then why does the Army need such a large arms budget? Perhaps its funding can be cut.” “All right, all right,” Adamson replied, “you’ll get your money.” 25 The Uranium Committee authorized all of $6,000 to purchase graphite, though Szilard and Fermi would not actually receive the money for several months. Briggs sent a report of the meeting to President Roosevelt on November first. He heard from the White House on November seventeenth. The president had read the report and wanted to keep it on file. “On file” is where it languished well into 1940.
Szilard and Teller left their meeting with the Uranium Committee frustrated and dejected. They felt trapped in a dilemma: to determine whether a nuclear chain reaction could be the basis for the development of an atomic bomb required a thorough scientific investigation; such an investigation required significant financial support, but the Uranium Committee would not give such support without compelling evidence suggesting probable success. Since they could not guarantee that a bomb would be available for wartime use, they could not attract the money for vital chain-reaction experiments. They felt as if they were “swimming in syrup.” 26
Months passed and nothing happened. Szilard’s frustration turned to anger. He decided to write a scientific paper about a chain-reacting uranium-graphite pile and threaten to publish it unless the government promised to move on fission research. The ploy worked. Within weeks of making his threat known, Columbia University received a grant of $6,000 for the purchase of graphite. 27 This allowed Szilard and Fermi to begin their experiments. They started by addressing two problems: the absorption rate of graphite and its effectiveness in slowing down neutrons. They set up the graphite in a square column several feet thick. Then they arranged lumps of uranium in a lattice configuration throughout the column, placed a neutron source inside the column, and measured the neutron activity with Geiger counters. The results led Szilard and Fermi to conclude that a very large pile would be needed to create and sustain a chain reaction. What is more, impurities commonly found in uranium and graphite would have to be eliminated because these impurities hungrily absorbed neutrons. All of this meant that a chain-reacting uranium-graphite pile would be very expensive in both materials and labor.
Meanwhile, Szilard traveled again to Princeton to see Einstein. They prepared a second letter for President Roosevelt that emphasized the secret German uranium research underway at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which they had learned about from a Jewish chemist, Peter Debye, who had recently been expelled from the institute. This second Einstein letter also stressed that Berlin had assumed direct responsibility for fission research and was stepping up its efforts to achieve a breakthrough. 28 In March 1940 Sachs sent the letter to FDR, who ordered the White House to consult the Uranium Committee. Briggs and Adamson cautiously said that nothing more should be done, pending the outcome of Fermi’s and Szilard’s work on neutron absorption in graphite. Bureaucratic caution prevailed once again.
Meanwhile, security officials busily developed a mind-set of distrust toward Szilard, Teller, Fermi, and other refugee physicists “of queer types and backgrounds.” 29 Agents categorized them as “aliens,” or in the case of Fermi, who came from Italy—an Axis country—as an “enemy alien.” A confidential report prepared by Army Intelligence in the summer of 1940 offered the following assessment of Fermi and Szilard:
(1) ENRICO FERMI. Department of Physics, Columbia University, New York City, is one of the most prominent scientists in the
world in the field of physics. He is especially noted for breaking down the atom. He has been in the United States for about
eighteen months. He is an Italian by birth and came here from Rome. He is supposed to have left Italy because of the fact
that his wife is Jewish. He has been a Nobel Prize winner. His associates like him personally and greatly admire his intellectual
ability. He is undoubtedly a Fascist. It is suggested that, before employing him on matters of a secret nature, a much more
careful investigation be made. Employment of this person on secret work is not recommended.
(2) MR. SZELARD. It is believed that this man’s name is SZILLARD. He is not on the staff of Columbia University, nor is he connected with the Department of Physics in any official capacity. He is a Jewish refugee from Hungary. It is understood that his family were wealthy merchants in Hungary and were able to come to the United States with most of their money. He is an inventor, and is stated to be very pro-German, and to have remarked on many occasions that he thinks the Germans will win the war. It is suggested that, before employing him on matters of a secret nature, a much more careful investigation be made. Employment of this person on secret work is not recommended. 30
Allegedly derived from “highly reliable” sources, the report was riddled with errors. To security investigators, Szilard and Fermi were simply foreigners with strong accents, suspicious backgrounds, and a string of fanciful ideas. Briggs informed Szilard and Fermi that the Uranium Committee had decided to limit further financial support of their research. The committee was afraid that if it funded an expensive research endeavor that flopped, Szilard’s and Fermi’s foreign backgrounds would prove a liability in case of a congressional inquiry. 31 The explanation Briggs gave them was that the possibility of a costly failure loomed too large. It seemed the American government would never seriously embrace the possibility of building an atomic bomb.