Word: szilard
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...small theater where the seats are carpeted rises. Hiroshima is never mentioned in this film, which for some reason begins with voices in prayer in church and the figure of Jesus covered with blood. Then the film proceeds to show the Chicago squash court and herky-jerky conversations among Szilard, Wigner, Edward Teller and the rest. A jalopy convertible winds up a mountain road in a scene that might have come from a Gene Autry western of the 1930s. There are sudden shots of the Statue of Liberty; sheep and golden flowers by a roadside; the Los Alamos Ranch School...
Alerted by the emigre Hungarian scientist Leo Szilard to the possibility that the Germans might build an atom bomb, he wrote F.D.R. of the danger, even though he knew little about recent developments in nuclear physics. When Szilard told Einstein about chain reactions, he was astonished: "I never thought about that at all," he said. Later, when he learned of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he uttered a pained sigh...
...Europe, the Anglo-American atom bomb program sparked by the discovery of fission late in 1938 would have found itself shorthanded. Most Allied physicists had already been put to work developing radar and the proximity fuse, inventions of more immediate value. Fermi and his fellow emigres--Hungarians Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Edward Teller, German Hans Bethe--formed the heart of the bomb squad. In 1939, still officially enemy aliens, Fermi and Szilard co-invented the nuclear reactor at Columbia University, sketching out a three-dimensional lattice of uranium slugs dropped into holes in black, greasy blocks...
...taped interview, Sudoplatov asserts (more flatly than in the book) that "in 1944 we received from Szilard material about his work at Los Alamos. This was very important." But Szilard did not work at Los Alamos in 1944 -- or ever...
Four weeks ago, we printed an excerpt from Special Tasks, the memoir of a Soviet spymaster published by Little, Brown. In it the principal author, Pavel Sudoplatov, charged that prominent scientists, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, had knowingly made atomic secrets available to Soviet agents. Since publication of the book, many nuclear physicists and historians have raised serious questions about Sudoplatov's account. Our story on the controversy begins on page...