Sleepwalking With the Bomb Read Online Free Page A

September 1933, only months after his Hitler-induced exile from Germany, Leo Szilard had the crucial eureka moment. The great Hungarian grasped before any of his fellow physicists that a nuclear chain reaction would release enormous energy, sufficient to destroy a city. The next step came just before Christmas 1938, when German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman stumbled upon an unexpected effect. The physicist member of their group, Lise Meitner, had just fled to Sweden. From there, she and her nephew, fellow refugee Otto Robert Frisch, interpreted what had happened—the central nucleus of a uranium atom was apparently unstable. The absorption of an extra neutron was enough to split it, resulting in two smaller atoms and an immense release of energy—a process Frisch dubbed “nuclear fission.”
    Tipped off by Meitner, Szilard saw that here could be the beginning of the chain reaction he had foreseen. He persuaded Albert Einstein to write his famous 1939 letter to President Franklin Roosevelt. “[T]he element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future,” Einstein wrote FDR, calling for “watchfulness, and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration.” He explained:
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.… 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.
     
    Szilard chose Einstein to deliver the message, to lend it the weight of his unmatched prestige. He had calculated well. On October 19 FDR convened an advisory panel to look into the matter, and by 1942 the Manhattan Project (so named to conceal its true purpose) was under way. Yet according to James B. Conant, a top FDR science adviser, FDR had “only fleeting interest in the atom,” and “the program never got very far past the threshold of his consciousness.”
    The discoveries made by Manhattan Project scientists first led to two types of atomic bombs (A-bombs), based upon uranium and plutonium, each a thousand times more powerful than bombs with conventional explosives. These atomic bombs, in turn, laid the foundation for the later development of the hydrogen bomb (H-bomb), a thousand times more powerful than the A-bombs dropped on Japan.
    Forty-two months after the founding of the Manhattan Project, the atom bomb was a reality. A flood of European scientists, refugees from Hitler, made this astonishing success possible. To Los Alamos flocked geniuses: two more Hungarians, the mathematics prodigy John von Neumann and the “father of the hydrogen bomb” Edward Teller; the great Danish founder of the atomic theory, Niels Bohr; the young Polish mathematician, Stanislaw Ulam; the brilliant German Hans Bethe, who explained how fusion energy powers the stars; and the Italian Enrico Fermi, considered by his peers the most deeply knowledgeable of them all. They joined Americans like J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose technical brilliance was complemented by his organizational ability and knack for picking the right people for each complex task; young physicist Glenn Seaborg, who created the devilish artificial element plutonium in 1941; and a contingent from Britain that included James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron particle essential for nuclear fission.
    Fear that Adolf Hitler would get the atom bomb first drove the Manhattan Project’s crash program. Szilard feared that by Christmas 1943 or New Year’s Day 1944, the Nazis would A-bomb Chicago. These scientists knew the truth of Winston Churchill’s description of Germany’s Napoleonic leader: “a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast.” The Allies were certain that Hitler would not hesitate to use the