Word: szilard
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Hawk, Wells foretold the modern air armada in The Shape of Things to Come. On the eve of World War I, after reading a book about radium, he wrote The World Set Free, a novel that predicted the atomic bomb with such imaginative precision that the late physicist Leo Szilard acknowledged that the book had inspired the building of his own apparatus for starting chain reactions...
...during his ten-hour performance at the A.A.A.S., he departed from this posture many times. He was gentle, even humorous with his challengers. To an astonished group of scientists and press, he announced that during the war, Leo Szilard had urged him to circulate a petition against the bomb they were developing and that he, Teller, agreed with it. But Oppenheimer, director of the laboratory at Los Alamos, talked him out of it. So! Even the great weapons-champion had had doubts about the Bomb. Dr. Teller agreed to take with a small group of radicals late into the night...
THEN CAME his revelation. Leo Szilard, he said, wrote him while he was working on the bomb at Los Alamos, asking his help to "prevent killing by the atomic bomb." Szilard asked Teller to sign and circulate a petition for a demonstration-only use of the bomb. "I fully and heartily agreed," Dr. Teller said. "Unfortunately, I did what I thought was supposed to do. I took the piece of document to the director of the laboratory (the late Dr. Oppenheimer), who told me, 'Szilard is using his influence as a scientist to influence political decisions. This is wrong...
...asked its scientific panel to consider other alternatives. The panel ultimately endorsed the committee's decision, but others did not. From the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, the cover name for the atomic research center there, came the outspoken Franck Report, formulated by Physicists James Franck and Leo Szilard and Chemist Eugene Rabinowitch. Dropping the atom bomb on Japan, the report suggested, might unleash a nuclear arms race and a period of international distrust that would far outweigh any temporary advantage the U.S. might gain...