Szilard, Leo

Szilard, Leo (1898–1964), physicist, molecular biologist, and arms control activist.Szilard was born in Budapest, Hungary. Educated at Budapest's Technical University, he earned a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Berlin in 1922. Fleeing to London in 1933, he conceived the nuclear chain reaction, which he patented in 1934 and assigned to the British Admiralty as a military secret. He pursued chain reaction research at Oxford until 1938, then emigrated to the United States.

At Columbia University in 1939, he codesigned with Enrico Fermi the world's first nuclear reactor, and drafted for Albert Einstein the 2 August 1939 letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that warned about German nuclear weapons research. This letter eventually led to the American effort in 1942, known as the Manhattan Project, to build the atomic bomb. Despite feuds over science and administration with the director, Gen. Leslie R. Groves, Szilard worked in 1942 and 1943 on reactor design, and by 1944 initiated postwar control schemes for atomic energy.

In 1945, Szilard organized an unsuccessful petition to President Harry S. Truman, urging that the atomic bomb be demonstrated before use against Japanese cities. He led the successful lobbying by scientists in 1945 to shift the atom's control from the army to the new, civilian Atomic Energy Commission, and thereafter worked against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

In nuclear strategy, Szilard postulated in 1945 the concept of a “preventive” nuclear war, and in 1961 he proposed the balance of nuclear weapons necessary to assure minimal deterrence among armed states. He met privately in 1960 with Nikita S. Khrushchev, gaining the Soviet leader's assent to a Moscow‐Washington hot line. A founding participant from 1957 in the arms control and disarmament activities of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, Szilard created the first political action committee for arms control, the Council for a Livable World (1962). He also published both fiction and nonfiction positing wildly original and later useful techniques for nuclear arms control and verification.
[See also Atomic Scientists; Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bombings of.]

Bibliography

Gertrud Weiss Szilard and Spencer Weart, eds., Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts, 1978.
Helen Hawkins, G. Allen Greb, and Gertrud Weiss Szilard, eds., Toward a Livable World: Leo Szilard and the Crusade for Nuclear Arms Control, 1987.
William Lanouette , Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb, 1993.

William Lanouette