Trinity
On July 16th, 1945, a plutonium bomb nicknamed ‘The Gadget’ was detonated atop a 100-foot tower at Trinity Site. The New Mexico sky burned with the ‘‘brilliance of a thousand suns,’’ and the desert sand turned into green radioactive glass.
Leo Szilard
Leo Szilard knew how to start a chain reaction, both with atomic nuclei and with American presidents.
In 1933, Szilard was the first to realize that a self-perpetuating nuclear chain-reaction could be induced within a critical mass of neutron-emitting fissile material. With this idea, Szilard laid out a crucial part of the theoretical framework that made it possible to build nuclear power plants and bombs.
His friend and colleague Eugene Wigner, who would go on to win the Nobel prize in physics and lead the design of nuclear reactors to convert uranium into weapons-grade plutonium for the Manhattan Project, said that “If the uranium project could have been run on ideas alone, no one but Leo Szilard would have been needed.”
Szilard had been living in the U.S. since 1938 and was eager to get federal support to speed up the experimental nuclear work he was involved with. Ultimately, the best way to prevent the Nazis from becoming nuclear was to make sure the U.S. got the bomb first.
A mutual friend introduced Szilard to American banker Alexander Sachs, who was a trusted advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and had a strong interest in physics. Szilard explained to Sachs the importance of warning the president about uranium and the prospect of the bomb, and Sachs replied that fellow physicist Enrico Fermi had already spoken to the president and had informed him that the prospects of actually building an atomic bomb were remote.
Sachs said that he would deliver a letter to Roosevelt, and suggested that a more prestigious signature would lend the letter more weight with the President.
The letter explained that recent work by Szilard and Fermi made it almost certain that in the immediate future it would be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium by which vast amounts of power would be generated. That this new phenomenon would lead to the construction of extremely powerful bombs of a new type which could destroy a whole port, and warned that German scientists were making progress in their nuclear experiments.
Szilard made the case that it would be desirable for the American Administration to be in close contact with the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America, to look into securing a supply of uranium ore, and to help speed up the experimental work by upgrading its budget from a university to a federal level.
The letter’s last 5 words added a lot of weight to the other 500:
‘‘Yours very truly,
Albert Einstein.’’
Szilard gave the letter to Sachs on August 15, 1939, and Sachs asked the White House for an appointment with the president. Then, just 2 weeks later, Germany invaded Poland, and World War II began. Sachs decided to postpone the meeting so that the president would give the letter his full attention. Which he did on October 11th.
As a result of Szilard’s forward-thinking initiative, Einstein’s signature, and Sach’s good sense, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was moved into creating the Advisory Committee on Uranium, which convened for the first time on October 21, 1939. The meeting was attended by members of the National Bureau of Standards, representatives from the Army and Navy, as well as 3 Jewish Hungarian Physicists that had been invited at Sachs’ initiative: Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, and Leo Szilard.
At some point during the meeting, the conversation turned into a discussion of government financing. The project needed a lot of money, but the administrators wanted to keep costs at a minimum. Colonel Adamson saw the moment fit to educate the physicists on the nature of war, and explained that it was morale, not new arms, that brought victory in the battlefield. To which Wigner responded that if weapons were so comparatively unimportant, then perhaps the Army’s budget should be cut by 30 percent. Right then and there, the Jewish Hungarian trio secured the project’s initial funding for the purchase of uranium and graphite, which would go on to power the world’s first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, which was the first major technical breakthrough in the race to build the bomb. A reactor that was jointly designed by 2 geniuses who could never seem to agree on the big questions but who always brought out the best in each other, Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi.
The Advisory Committee on Uranium later became the Manhattan Project. With over 130,000 personnel, a budget of over $20 billion in Today’s money, some of the most brilliant minds in history, and the full support of the president, the project achieved one of the most impressive feats of scientific and technical mastery on that fateful morning of Trinity, on July 16, 1945. A day that President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not live to see.
President Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, and was succeeded by Harry S. Truman. In May 1945, President Truman approved the creation of the Interim Committee to advise on matters of nuclear energy and the use of nuclear weapons. On June 1st, the Committee concluded that the bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible and that it be used without prior warning.
On June 16, the scientific panel advising the Committee, which was made up of 4 physicists who would go on to win 3 Nobel Prizes: Enrico Fermi, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Arthur Compton, and Ernest Lawrence, wrote a formal report supporting the committee’s decision. They explained that although the opinions of their scientific colleagues on the initial use of atomic weapons was not unanimous, the panel sided more with the view that a technical demonstration would likely not bring an end to the war, and that direct military use without prior warning would be the only sure way to bring an immediate end to the eastern front of the deadliest conflict in human history.
The scientific panel’s official recommendation went against the opinion of the majority of the scientists working on the bomb. A July 18th poll asked 150 scientists working at the Manhattan Project’s Metallurgic Laboratory in Chicago, where Szilard was Chief Physicist, what they thought was the best way to use the atomic bomb to bring an end to the war, and the results were as follows:
- 46% support for giving a demonstration of the bomb in Japan, followed by an opportunity to surrender before the weapon was used militarily.
- 26% support for a demonstration in the US with a Japanese delegation present, followed by an opportunity to surrender before the weapon was used militarily.
- 15% support for using the bomb militarily without warning.
- 11% support for not using the bomb militarily, and only in a public demonstration.
- 2% support for keeping the bomb a secret.
News of the committee’s decision reached Leo Szilard, who believed that with great power comes great responsibility and that the United States had the moral responsibility to offer Japan the opportunity to surrender after having made public the intention to use nuclear weapons against them unless they surrendered.
To convince the president, Szilard would once again have to outweigh Enrico Fermi’s influence, but this time he would also have to overcome the full leverage of the Interim Committee and its all-star scientific panel.
To counter with sufficient force, Szilard had his moral petition signed by 70 of the top scientists working at the Metallurgic Laboratory. In case that was not enough, Szilard came up with an idea that would allow him to add a very special 71st signature. By dating the letter July 17, 1945, Szilard was able to add to his petition the most powerful signature the world had ever seen.
Signed, Trinity.
Szilard met with James F. Byrnes, who was about to become the Secretary of State and entrusted him to deliver his letter to the president.
The course of modern history was greatly influenced by two letters written by Leo Szilard. One was signed by Einstein and the other by the bomb. One changed the world because it was delivered, and the other changed the world because it was not. James F. Byrnes never gave the letter to Truman.
On the 6th of August, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb codenamed ‘Little Boy’ on the city of Hiroshima without any warning and thus awakened ‘‘Death, the destroyer of worlds.’’ It was followed by the dropping of a second bomb codenamed ‘Fat Man’ on the city of Nagasaki on the 9th of August, and the surrender of The Empire of Japan on the 15th.
We will never know whether the Szilard Petition would have made any difference had it been delivered to President Truman, but that decision should have been made by Truman and not by Byrnes. Had Truman acted on Szilard’s advice, 200,000 Japanese lives might have been spared, but the war might have been prolonged, causing many more deaths.
President Truman’s difficult decision on how to end the war was not influenced by Szilard’s moral arguments because his petition wasn’t delivered, but the fact that President Truman had the choice to end the war right then and there was made possible 6 years earlier, when a ghostwritten letter signed by Albert Einstein was delivered, and the president of the United States read the words of a physicist who knew how to start a chain reaction.
Destiny
After he met with Byrnes, Leo Szilard was heard to have said, “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.”
