Leo Szilard Biography
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Leó Szilárd (February 11, 1898 – May 30,
1964) was a Jewish Hungarian-American physicist who worked on the
Manhattan Project. He was born in Budapest and died in La Jolla,
California.
****
Personality
Szilard was well known to his colleagues as
an eccentric, lightning-quick thinker who "seemed fond of startling
people" with strange, seemingly incongruous, yet extremely perceptive
statements and questions. He was also extremely good at predicting
political events. He is said to have predicted World War I as a boy, and
when the Nazi party first appeared, he predicted that it would one day
control Europe. In 1934, he foresaw the details of World War II. He then
made a habit of residing only in hotel rooms, with a packed suitcase
always on hand.
Developing the idea of the nuclear chain
reaction
In 1933 Szilard fled to London to escape
Nazi persecution, where he read an article written by Ernest Rutherford
in The Times which rejected the concept of atomic energy. Although
nuclear fission had not yet been discovered, Szilard was reportedly so
annoyed at this dismissal that he conceived of the idea of the nuclear
chain reaction while waiting for traffic lights to change on Southampton
Row in Bloomsbury. The following year he filed for a patent on the
concept.
Szilard first attempted to create a chain
reaction using beryllium and indium, but these elements did not produce
a chain reaction. In 1936, he assigned the chain-reaction patent to the
British Admiralty to ensure its secrecy (UK Patent 630726 ). Szilárd
also was the co-holder, with Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi, of the patent
on the nuclear reactor (U.S. Patent 2708656).
In 1938 Szilard accepted an offer to
conduct research at Columbia University in Manhattan, and moved to New
York, and was soon joined by Fermi. After learning about nuclear fission
in 1939, they concluded that uranium would be the element capable of
sustaining a chain reaction.
The Manhattan Project
Szilárd was instrumental in the development
of the Manhattan Project. It was his idea to send a confidential letter
to Franklin D. Roosevelt explaining the possibility of nuclear weapons,
and to encourage the development of a program which could lead to their
creation. In August 1939 he obtained Albert Einstein's endorsement of
this proposal, and the Einstein-Szilárd letter eventually led to the
establishment of research into nuclear fission by the U.S. government.
Later, he moved to the University of Chicago to continue work on the
project. There, along with Fermi, he helped to construct the first "neutronic
reactor", a uranium and graphite "pile" in which the first
self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was achieved, in 1942.
As the war continued, Szilárd became
increasingly dismayed that he was losing control over his scientific
developments to the military, and clashed many times with General Leslie
Groves, military head of the project. His resentment towards the U.S.
government was exacerbated by his failed attempt to avoid the use of the
atomic bomb in war.
Szilárd became a naturalized citizen of the
United States in 1943.
Views on the use of nuclear weapons
Szilard was probably the first scientist to
seriously examine the science behind the creation of nuclear weapons, as
he knew about the fictional "atomic bombs" described in H. G. Wells's
science fiction novel The World Set Free. The basic idea of creating an
explosive device by harnessing the release of energy from a nuclear
chain reaction came to him in a flash of intuition in London on
September 12, 1933. He reportedly developed the idea in response to
Ernest Rutherford's dismissal of the possibility of obtaining energy
from atoms as "moonshine". As a survivor of a devastated Hungary after
World War I, and having witnessed the subsequent terror of the Reds and
the Whites, Szilárd developed an enduring passion for the preservation
of human life and freedom, especially freedom to communicate ideas.
He hoped that the U.S. government, which
prior to World War II was staunchly opposed to the bombing of civilians,
would not use nuclear weapons, because of their potential for use
against civilian populations. Szilárd hoped that the mere threat of such
weapons would force Germany and/or Japan to surrender. He drafted the
Szilárd petition advocating demonstration of the atomic bomb. However,
rather than threatening the Axis Powers, President Harry Truman sided
with advisors who thought use of the weapons was the best solution, and
chose to deploy the weapons over the protestations of Szilárd and many
of the other top scientists in the project. (See also: Atomic bombings
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki)
The first atomic bomb blasts resulted in
the deaths of as many as 300,000 Japanese civilians, the total
destruction of Hiroshima, the partial destruction of Nagasaki, and led
within days to the unconditional surrender of Imperial Japan. This was
consistent with America's intentional mass bombing of civilian targets
in Europe, most notably the firebombing of Dresden and various other
German cities, causing more deaths than even Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Before the war, Szilárd had considered the
U.S. the one truly humane government in the world; that is why he chose
to assist them, over everyone else, with the atomic bomb. He resigned
from this view after the U.S. used the weapons at the conclusion of the
war.
After the war
In 1947, Szilard changed fields from
physics to molecular biology, working extensively with Aaron Novick. He
proposed, in February of 1950, a new kind of nuclear weapon using cobalt
as a tamper, a cobalt bomb, which he said might wipe out all life on the
planet. U.S. News & World Report featured an interview with Szilard in
its August 15, 1960 issue, "President Truman Didn't Understand." His
penchant to use language provocatively and say things which most readers
would dismiss as absurd is well evidenced in this quote from that
interview, "But again, I don't believe this staging a demonstration was
the real issue, and in a sense it is just as immoral to force a sudden
ending of a war by threatening violence as by using violence. My point
is that violence would not have been necessary if we had been willing to
negotiate." He spent his last years as a fellow at the Salk Institute in
San Diego. The impact crater Szilárd on the lunar farside is named for
him.
****
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