To Trinity and Beyond (chapter two: Szilardeinstein's Monster)

(Continuing a tale begun here.)

Parts of Paris were still burning, and numbers of people were camped in the fields even at this distance watching over treasured heaps of salvaged loot. He speaks too of the distant rumbling of the explosion--'like trains going over iron bridges.'

Other descriptions agree with this; they all speak of the 'continuous reverberations,' or of the 'thudding and hammering,' or some such phrase; and they all testify to a huge pall of steam, from which rain would fall suddenly in torrents and amidst which lightning played. Drawing nearer to Paris an observer would have found the salvage camps increasing in number and blocking up the villages, and large numbers of people, often starving and ailing, camping under improvised tents because there was no place for them to go. The sky became more and more densely overcast until at last it blotted out the light of day and left nothing but a dull red glare 'extraordinarily depressing to the spirit.' In this dull glare, great numbers of people were still living, clinging to their houses and in many cases subsisting in a state of partial famine upon the produce in their gardens and the stores in the shops of the provision dealers.

Coming in still closer, the investigator would have reached the police cordon, which was trying to check the desperate enterprise of those who would return to their homes or rescue their more valuable possessions within the 'zone of imminent danger.'

That zone was rather arbitrarily defined. If our spectator could have got permission to enter it, he would have entered also a zone of uproar, a zone of perpetual thunderings, lit by a strange purplish-red light, and quivering and swaying with the incessant explosion of the radio-active substance. Whole blocks of buildings were alight and burning fiercely, the trembling, ragged flames looking pale and ghastly and attenuated in comparison with the full-bodied crimson glare beyond. The shells of other edifices already burnt rose, pierced by rows of window sockets against the red-lit mist.

- H.G. Wells, The World Set Free, written 1913

How much influence any mere writer has, and especially a 'popular' writer whose work takes effect quickly, is questionable, but I doubt whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English language, influenced the young so much. The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed.

- George Orwell, on H.G. Wells (Wells, Hitler and the World State), 1941

Szilard always took great pride in having quickly perceived the barbarism of Hitler's regime. After Hitler came to power in January, 1933, Szilard, teaching physics at the University of Berlin, feared the worst and kept two suitcases packed for flight...

Once in England... [Szilard] indicated that he was tempted to go into biology because physics seemed so boring.

But soon physics came to seem exciting again, full of rich intellectual prospects, when in September or October 1933 Szilard conceived of a nuclear chain reaction. This breakthrough was inspired partly by H.G. Wells's The World Set Free, a 1913 novel that forecast the discovery of artificial radioactivity and of the atomic bomb...

- Leo Szilard, Helen S. Hawkins, G. Allen Greb, Gertrud Weiss Szilard, Toward a livable world: Leo Szilard and the crusade for nuclear arms control (Vol 3 of the collected works of Leo Szilard) MIT, 1987

Every step farther would have been as dangerous as a descent within the crater of an active volcano. These spinning, boiling bomb centres would shift or break unexpectedly into new regions, great fragments of earth or drain or masonry suddenly caught by a jet of disruptive force might come flying by the explorer's head, or the ground yawn a fiery grave beneath his feet. Few who adventured into these areas of destruction and survived attempted any repetition of their experiences. There are stories of puffs of luminous, radio-active vapour drifting sometimes scores of miles from the bomb centre and killing and scorching all they overtook. And the first conflagrations from the Paris centre spread westward half-way to the sea.

Moreover, the air in this infernal inner circle of red-lit ruins had a peculiar dryness and a blistering quality, so that it set up a soreness of the skin and lungs that was very difficult to heal...

Such was the last state of Paris, and such on a larger scale was the condition of affairs in Chicago, and the same fate had overtaken Berlin, Moscow, Tokio, the eastern half of London, Toulon, Kiel, and two hundred and eighteen other centres of population or armament. Each was a flaming centre of radiant destruction that only time could quench, that indeed in many instances time has still to quench.... In the map of nearly every country of the world three or four or more red circles, a score of miles in diameter, mark the position of the dying atomic bombs and the death areas that men have been forced to abandon around them. Within these areas perished museums, cathedrals, palaces, libraries, galleries of masterpieces, and a vast accumulation of human achievement, whose charred remains lie buried, a legacy of curious material that only future generations may hope to examine....

As with all radio-active substances this Carolinum, though every seventeen days its power is halved, though constantly it diminishes towards the imperceptible, is never entirely exhausted, and to this day the battle-fields and bomb fields of that frantic time in human history are sprinkled with radiant matter, and so centres of inconvenient rays.

- Wells, The World Set Free

President Roosevelt,

...In the course of the last four months it has been made probable -- through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America -- that 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. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.

This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable -- though much less certain -- that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed...

I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over. That she should have taken such early action might perhaps be understood on the ground that the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, von Weizacker, is attached to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute in Berlin where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated...

- Einstein-Szilárd letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, August 2, 1939

My dear Professor,

I want to thank you for your recent letter and the most interesting and important enclosure.

I found this data of such import that I have convened a Board consisting of the head of the Bureau of Standards and a
chosen representative of the Army and Navy to thoroughly investigate the possibilities of your suggestion regarding the element of uranium.

I am glad to say that Dr. Sachs will cooperate and work with this Committee and I feel this is the most practical and effective method of dealing with the subject.

Please accept my sincere thanks.

  Very sincerely yours,
    (signed)
    Franklin D Roosevelt

It might lead one to think that John Campbell had a pipeline right into the nascent Los Alamos, New Mexico laboratory of the Manhattan Project... But in fact he'd simply been reading the technical journals, where all sorts of articles on nuclear fission and chain reactions had been published since 1940.
<...>
Cartmill replied a few days later, asking Campbell a few technical questions: "Wouldn't the consequent explosion set up other atomic imbalances, which in turn-and so on, until the whole damned planet went up in dust? . . . You see, I want to know how to make a U-235 bomb, so that I'll know how to destroy it, because I think that will be highly entertaining reading..."

So Campbell, in the next letter, told Cartmill how to construct an A-bomb, how it would be triggered, and what the probable consequences of an atomic explosion would be. Cartmill wrote the story, "Deadline," and Campbell used it in his March, 1944 issue, which went on sale in early February. It was not a particularly distinguished story. It was, in fact, a klutzy clunker. We have already seen that Campbell was desperate for material in the fall of 1943. (Cartmill had cleverly disguised the Allies and Axis of his imaginary world by calling them the "Seilla" and the "Sixa." The main contending countries were "Ynamre" and "Ytal" on the evil Sixa side and "Acireb" and "Aissu," though not, oddly, "Niatir," among the Seilla.) The readers rated it last, sixth out of six stories, in the monthly story-popularity poll that Campbell conducted.

- Robert Silverberg, Reflections: The Cleve Cartmill Affair: One, 2003

Soviet intelligence had thoroughly penetrated the Manhattan Project...

- Neil Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, 2009