Pandora's Keepers (24 page)

Bohr finally won an appointment at 10 Downing Street on May 16, 1944. The meeting misfired from the start. Churchill was preoccupied,
with D day only three weeks away. Bohr began by mumbling in his typically discursive way. Churchill grew impatient. Here was
a scientist presuming to advise
him
about international affairs and naive enough to urge informing the Russians about the most secret Anglo-American project
of the war. The prime minister curtly told him: “I cannot see what you are talking about. After all, this new bomb is just
going to be bigger than our present bombs. It involves no difference in the principles of war. And as for any postwar problems,
there are none that cannot be amicably settled between me and my friend, President Roosevelt.” Churchill preferred an Anglo-American
monopoly of the bomb to postwar international control as a way to check Soviet adventurism and to preserve Britain’s influence
in the world. Before he would tell Stalin anything about the bomb, he wanted some assurance of cooperation. To Bohr, that
was putting the cart before the horse. As the meeting ended, Bohr, sensing failure, asked if he could send the prime minister
a letter developing the points he wanted to make. “It will be an honor for me to receive a letter from you,” answered Churchill,
but then added tartly, “But not about politics.”
⁷¹
“We did not speak the same language,” Bohr said ruefully afterward.
⁷²

Churchill’s assumptions about the bomb and his expectations about the future were, of course, governed by his understanding
of the past. He did not anticipate that the bomb would revolutionize international relations and he did not believe anything
could be gained by surrendering the atomic monopoly he thought America and Britain would enjoy after the war.
⁷³

Bohr returned to the United States less than a week after D day, buoyed by the thought that the war was entering its final
phase but discouraged by his failure to persuade Churchill. He reported to Frankfurter on his dismal meeting with the prime
minister and Frankfurter carried the news to Roosevelt, who expressed a willingness to see the Danish physicist again. The
meeting was arranged for August twenty-sixth. FDR received Bohr in the Oval Office late that afternoon for an hour and a half
of private talk. He welcomed Bohr with a big smile. Bohr sat down beside the president’s desk. In front of him windows framed
a view of the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial. Roosevelt was warm, cordial, and amiably sympathetic, as usual.

The two men spoke in a frank and encouraging manner. Bohr told his son, Aage, after the meeting that Roosevelt agreed an approach
to the Soviet Union had to be tried along the lines that Bohr suggested. The president said he was optimistic that such an
approach would yield a “good result.” In his opinion, Stalin was enough of a realist to understand the bomb’s revolutionary
importance and consequences. FDR also expressed confidence to Bohr that Churchill would come around to his view of things.
The two leaders had disagreed before, he said, but they always resolved their differences in the end. Roosevelt told Bohr
another meeting might be useful after he had talked with Churchill at the second Quebec Conference to be held the following
month.
⁷⁴

Bohr was hopeful as Roosevelt met Churchill in Quebec on September eleventh and the two leaders then traveled to the president’s
estate along the Hudson River in upstate New York a week later to continue their talks more privately. High on their agenda
was the Manhattan Project. Seated amid the brilliant foliage of a Hyde Park autumn, FDR and Churchill signed a secret agreement
that codified their position on the bomb. The heart of their joint agreement said this:

The suggestion that the world should be informed regarding [the Manhattan Project] with a view to an international agreement
regarding its control and use, is not accepted. The matter should continue to be regarded as of the utmost secrecy… Enquiries
should be made regarding the activities of Professor Bohr and steps taken to ensure that he is responsible for no leakage
of information, particularly to the Russians.
⁷⁵

Roosevelt and Churchill had resolved to maintain the Anglo-American atomic monopoly—despite Bohr’s warning that it was a chimera—as
a counter against Stalin’s postwar ambitions. The two leaders, unable to grasp the technical fact that fission was common
knowledge among scientists throughout the world and that Japan, Germany, and Russia—like Britain—had not pursued a bomb because
they lacked the resources in the middle of a war, could not conceive of forgoing an advantage they thought would assure the
peace on terms they felt deep in their hearts were best for mankind. Their agreement may also have reflected their fear that
Stalin’s mistrust would only be aroused if he were informed of the project’s existence and then did not receive detailed information
about it. Whatever the reasons, Bohr was never invited to meet with either leader again. There would be no attempt at international
control
before
the bomb became a reality. And at the very moment FDR and Churchill signed their secret agreement, a member of the British
team at Los Alamos, Klaus Fuchs, was busy betraying many of the details of the bomb to Soviet agents. The hoped-for monopoly
would not last long.

B
ETWEEN HIS MEETING
with Churchill in September 1944 and his death in April 1945, Roosevelt underwent no change in his attitude toward the bomb.
But in the laboratories of the Manhattan Project, particularly the Met Lab, scientists became increasingly concerned during
late 1944 and early 1945 about the implications of their work. To their earlier anxiety about military control was now added
the dawning fear that they might succeed in making a weapon of mass destruction. This was especially true of Leo Szilard.
The big question in his mind shifted from “Can an atomic bomb be made?” to “What will happen once it is?”

This question increasingly consumed Szilard’s thinking as his workload decreased. With a chain-reacting pile achieved and
plutonium production underway at Hanford, the Met Lab had essentially completed its task. The focus of effort had shifted
to Los Alamos. This gave Szilard more time to reflect, and the more he reflected the less enamored he became of the bomb.
Sitting in his room—the space practically bare except for an old traveling bag which served as a closet—at the Quadrangle
Club of the University of Chicago or strolling the green expanse of the Midway south of the university on evenings and weekends,
he turned his far-reaching mind to a host of questions: Should Russia be told about the bomb? If Germany was defeated before
the bomb was ready—as seemed increasingly likely—should it be used against Japan? Could international control be achieved,
and if so, what form should it take?

Szilard first addressed these questions in January 1944, when he sent Vannevar Bush a memorandum emphasizing for the first
time not the urgency of beating Nazi Germany to the bomb but what it would mean to the world once the bomb was made. “If peace
is organized before it has penetrated the public’s mind that the potentialities of atomic bombs are a reality,” he wrote,
“it will be impossible to have a peace that is based on reality.” And yet he acknowledged a stark dilemma: “It will hardly
be possible to get political action along that line unless high efficiency atomic bombs have actually been used in this war
and the fact of their destructive power has deeply penetrated the mind of the public.”
¹

Other Met Lab scientists also began contemplating the bomb’s implications. The most sophisticated and far-reaching study was
conducted by a group that included Fermi. The report, formally titled “Prospectus on Nucleonics,” and known as the Jeffries
Report after its chairman, physicist Zay Jeffries, called for a general statement to the American public revealing the existence
of the Manhattan Project, the destructive potential of the bomb, and the fact that it would inevitably affect relations between
nations in the future. The report owed its inspiration to Compton, who had asked Met Lab scientists for their ideas the year
before. From then on, with Compton’s encouragement, the group devoted serious thought to postwar problems.
²

The Jeffries Report, submitted to Compton in November 1944, reflected a broad spectrum of scientific opinion. The quality
and quantity of viewpoints—the report was sixty-five typewritten pages in length—showed that the implications of the new weapon
had been discussed in considerable detail. Its assessment was presented in the form of a warning, coupled with a set of recommendations.
A world armed with atomic bombs was analogous to two people armed with machine guns locked in a room, the report said. Since
the person who shoots first kills his rival, it is likely that one of them will do so to remove the fear of being attacked.
The prospect of this kind of preventive warfare would become a grim reality—as America’s war against the specter of a nuclear-armed
Iraq under Saddam Hussein half a century later attested—unless mutual understanding were achieved and the production of atomic
bombs were either prevented entirely or limited to a carefully controlled pool for checking any potential disturbance of the
peace. The report also noted that “it would be surprising if the Russians are not also diligently engaged in such work.” A
peace based on uncontrolled and perhaps clandestine development of nuclear weapons was little more than an armistice and was
bound to end, sooner or later, in catastrophe. A central authority for the control of atomic energy was necessary if the world
was to avoid disaster. Compton submitted the Jeffries Report to Groves, who chose not to pass it along to policy makers.
³

Bohr decided to make one last approach to policy makers himself. In early April 1945, he prepared a detailed memorandum on
the bomb’s postwar implications for Roosevelt. The memo included many farsighted proposals later adopted by the U.S. government
for the international control of atomic energy: technical inspection, an international inspection agency, and a distinction
between “safe” and “dangerous” activities in the realm of nuclear research. Bohr believed humanity’s survival in the long
run required far-sighted statesmanship in the short run.
⁴
Bohr asked British Ambassador Lord Halifax and Felix Frankfurter to get it to the president. Halifax and Frankfurter discussed
Bohr’s request on a stroll through Rock Creek Park on the afternoon of April twelfth. It was a beautiful spring day in Washington,
the sun bright and warm and the leaves and grass emerald green. Suddenly church bells began to toll until the air filled with
their sound. Halifax and Frankfurter saw people hurrying to speak to others. Roosevelt had died of a cerebral hemorrhage in
Warm Springs, Georgia. With that, Szilard’s initiative was halted.

Several weeks before, Szilard had also prepared a memorandum for FDR. Remarkably perceptive, the memo addressed a number of
central problems: the escalation of nuclear weapons technology from atomic to thermonuclear bombs, the vulnerability of an
urbanized nation like the United States to nuclear attack, and challenges involving control of raw materials and on-site inspections.
Szilard predicted that America faced a fundamental choice: negotiate an accord with the Soviets or compete with them in an
atomic arms race after the war.
⁵
The great danger of such a race was “the possibility of the outbreak of
a preventive war
. Such a war might be the outcome of the fear that the other country might strike first, and no amount of good will on the
part of both nations might be sufficient to prevent the outbreak of a war if such an explosive situation were allowed to develop.”
Only international control could avert this danger. The U.S. government was about to arrive at decisions, he warned, that
would control the course of events after the war. Those decisions ought to be based on careful estimates of future possibilities,
not simply “on the present evidence relating to atomic bombs.”
⁶

Szilard had discussed his memo with Lawrence. They met at the Chicago rail station, Lawrence reading and commenting on the
memo as he waited to change trains.
⁷
Lawrence encouraged Szilard to forward the memo to the president through First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who agreed to see
him. With a White House appointment thus set, Szilard went to Compton’s office armed with his memorandum. He was nervous as
Compton slowly read the memo, expecting to be scolded for again going outside official channels. To Szilard’s astonishment,
Compton cheered him on, saying, “I hope that you will get the President to read this.” “Elated by finding no resistance where
I expected resistance,” Szilard recalled, “I went back to my office. I hadn’t been in my office for five minutes when there
was a knock on the door and Compton’s assistant came in, telling me that he had just: heard over the radio that President
Roosevelt had died.”
⁸