This year marks the 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the culmination of the secret Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bombs. As one of the preeminent scientists to suggest the extreme danger posed by these weapons, Leo Szilard founded the Council for a Livable World in 1962. His legacy lives on through the Council’s committed efforts to decrease the threat of nuclear weapons.
Leo Szilard was a celebrated physicist and one of the pioneers who envisioned utilizing nuclear chain reactions to harness nuclear energy. He endorsed Albert Einstein’s 1939 letter to President Franklin Roosevelt explaining how it was possible to harness a nuclear chain reaction in order to release “vast amounts of power” with the potential for military use. In a memorandum attached to Einstein’s letter, Szilard wrote:
There is reason to believe that, if fast neutrons could be used, it would be easy to construct extremely dangerous bombs. The destructive power of these bombs can only be roughly estimated, but there is no doubt that it would go far beyond all military conceptions.[1]
Six thousand dollars were allotted for initial research into atomic power in 1940, efforts which were spurred on by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The following year, U.S. Army General Leslie Groves was put in charge of what was then called the “Manhattan Project.” If the project succeeded, the implications could truly be earth shattering. Then Secretary of War Henry Stimson shared that the Manhattan Project should be considered “a new relationship of man to the universe”.
In March 1945 Albert Einstein wrote the following letter to President Roosevelt:
I am writing you to introduce Dr. L. Szilard who proposes to submit to you certain considerations and recommendations…In the summer of 1939 Dr. Szilard put before me his views concerning the potential importance of uranium for national defense. He was greatly disturbed by the potentialities involved and anxious that the United States Government be advised of them as soon as possible… [2]
Szilard’s misgivings went largely unheeded. US News & World Report interviewed Szilard in 1960, 15 years after the end of World War II. When asked about how he felt after learning that the new bomb would be dropped on Japan, he said that he had “opposed it with all his power.” He went on to say that unfortunately, there was no concerted opposition on the part of the scientists against using the bomb.
He again attempted to convey his misgivings about the consequences of using nuclear weapons to the president, and wrote a memo explaining his opinion that the possible short-term victory gained over Japan could be overshadowed by a nuclear arms race with Russia. Szilard asked First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to deliver the message to her husband, but President Roosevelt died on April 2, 1945. There is no evidence that he read Szilard’s memo.
Szilard also endeavored to alert President Truman of his concerns, but he was unable to navigate the official channels necessary to reach the president. He learned that there was no government plan in place to deal with the potentially negative geopolitical effects that the atomic bomb could induce. General Groves, in fact, believed that the Soviets did not have sufficient uranium to allow them to enter into an atomic weapons arms race.
In July 1945 Szilard sent a petition to President Truman, which was signed by 60 members of the Manhattan Project. During his US News & World Report interview, he said that the memo “did not go into any considerations of expediency but opposed, on purely moral grounds, the use of atomic bombs against the cities of Japan.” By using atomic weapons against civilians in Japan, “We lost the moral argument,” he said, “With which, right after the war, we might have perhaps gotten rid of the bomb.”
Perhaps the problem was a disconnect between the scientists and politicians. The scientists recognized the awful destructive power an atomic bomb could inflict, but the politicians clearly were not as concerned. Instead, they were focused on how an atomic bomb could be the agent of an expedient end to a costly war. In his book, The Voice of the Dolphins which was first published in 1961, Szilard wrote:
That the bomb would pose a novel problem to the world was clear in 1946. It was not clearly recognized, however, that the solution to this problem would involve political and technical considerations in an inseparable fashion. In America, few statesmen were aware of the technical considerations, and, prior to Sputnik, only few scientists were aware of the political considerations.[3]
Szilard realized that the solution must be for the scientists to educate and influence the politicians to the best of their ability. One author writes that, for Szilard, “Electoral politics was not a substitute but a supplement and aid to his conception of changing policy through gaining the ear of politicians.”[4] In 1962 he founded the Council for a Livable World with precisely that aim in mind. The Council was one of the first political action organizations to focus on arms control, and it has for decades remained dedicated to “delivering ‘the sweet voice of reason’ about nuclear weapons to Congress, the White House, and the American public.”
Szilard once conceded that it was far better that America developed an atomic bomb before Germany or Russia did so, but he also recognized early on the potential for devastating conflict in the years to follow. In a memorandum dated September 19, 1942, he wrote:
What the existence of these bombs will mean we all know. It will bring disaster on the world if the Germans will be ready before we are. It may bring disaster on the world even if we anticipate them and win the war, but lose the peace that will follow. [It is] impossible to help gradually prepare the country for the role which it will have to assume immediately after the war is over. How can we have peace in a world where a lone airplane can drop an atomic bomb over a big city like Chicago? [5]
Leo Szilard was one of the creative geniuses who helped produce the most powerful weapons the world had ever known, and he founded the Council for a Livable World in order to help spread the message to American politicians that nuclear weapons must never again be used. Seventy years after the Manhattan Project yielded its deadly creation, the Council continues to proclaim that message today, and it will continue to do so until nuclear weapons are eliminated from the face of the earth.
Sources:
[1] Szilard, L. (1972). The Collected Works of Leo Szilard: Scientific Papers (B. T. Feld & G. W. Szilard, Eds.). MIT.
[2] Weart, S. R., & Szilard, G. W. (Eds.). (1978). Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts. MIT.
[3] Szilard, L. (1961). The Voice of Dolphins. Simon and Schuster.
[4] Szilard, L., Hawkins, H. S., Greb, G. A., & Szilard, G. W. (1987). Toward a Livable World: Leo Szilard and the Crusade for Nuclear Arms Control. Retrieved from https://books.google.com
[5] Weart, S. R., & Szilard, G. W. (Eds.). (1978). Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts. MIT.
