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hangman’s noose, or whether the rope had just temporarily loosened.
    Leo Szilard lived on the edge of the maelstrom as a researcher in nuclear physics at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the Berlin
     suburb of Dahlem. A brilliant, sensitive, and intuitive genius who imagined things no one else had imagined before—and could
     peer into the future as few others could—Szilard was in Dahlem when Hitler took power as chancellor of Germany on January
     30, 1933. With the coming to power of the Nazis, Szilard sensed a new chill more potent than Germany’s damp and biting winter
     air. As the situation for Jews in Europe grew darker, the streets of Dahlem seemed to him more and more like a maze, a trap.
    Szilard’s ideas often appeared bizarre and remote from reality because his thinking was so far ahead of others’. Such foresight
     was not restricted to physics. His colleagues at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute thought civilized Germans would not tolerate
     anything really rough happening under Hitler, but Szilard was not so sure. One night he saw a Nazi torchlight parade end in
     a square near the institute. A huge pile of books gathered there was put to the torch, and as the flames engulfed them, more
     books were thrown on the pyre. Among the books tossed into the flames were works of “Jewish physics” by Einstein. As Szilard
     watched the barbaric spectacle, he remembered that a century earlier the great German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine had written,
     “Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.”
    Szilard possessed a rare combination of concentrated thinking—often about the future—and readiness for immediate action. He
     reacted to the rise of Nazism by packing his suitcases and keeping them close at hand. He was used to picking up and leaving
     when things fell apart: he had grown up a Jew in early-twentieth-century Hungary.
    Szilard was born in 1898 in the Garden District of Budapest, a neighborhood of wealthy Jewish merchant families who stood
     just one step below the Magyar nobility in the hierarchy of Austro-Hungarian society. Budapest was one of Europe’s most cosmopolitan
     cities; it had the second-largest Jewish population, after Warsaw. Horse-drawn droshkies carried silk-gowned women and their
     counts in red uniforms and furred hats to the grand palace of Emperor Franz Josef while coffeehouses teemed with intellectuals
     espousing socialist revolution. The Hapsburg Empire’s official tolerance and rich mixture of nationalities had allowed Jews
     such as the Szilards to find a home, but beneath the cosmopolitanism lurked a powder keg waiting to explode.
    Szilard’s mother, Tekla, was a frank and honest woman who taught her son to be candid. “I made up my mind” at an early age,
     he later wrote, “that if I had to choose between being tactless and being untruthful, I would prefer to be tactless.” 6 As an adult, his outstanding characteristic was not to be deterred by conventions of the time. Although Szilard’s mother
     was Jewish, she practiced what she called her “natural religion,” which was loosely based on the teachings of Jesus and which
     she conveyed through vivid parables. As a result, her son developed a strong moral and ethical sensibility, and a deep aversion
     to violence. He later said that his “predilection for saving the world” was traceable to the stories his mother told him. 7
    Tekla and her husband, Louis, argued often in front of their son, who increasingly exhibited a trait quite likely fostered
     by their chronic disagreement: a tendency to worry. Playmates kidded Szilard for worrying too much, but he seemed unable to
     stop thinking about dangers. Intensely inquisitive, and perhaps a bit terrified about endings and abandonment, he was always
     jumping ahead to the next assignment in school. Most boys his age strove to fit in, but Szilard was—and would forever be—independent
     and irreverent. His sense of humor also helped him