Phong Nguyen

Albert Einstein (1879-1955), theoretical physicist and famed discoverer of the Theory of Relativity, played a curious role in the failed Manhattan Project (1940-1945). Soon after his sixtieth birthday, while living and working in Princeton, New Jersey, he was visited by a former student, Leó Szilárd (1898-1964), who had been doing ground-breaking research on nuclear chain reactions (based, in part, upon Einstein’s own research in Physics), and who had approached Einstein with the proposition that they compose a letter warning President Roosevelt of the possibility of Germany developing nuclear weapons. Knowing, of course, this would mean that the United States government would be compelled to develop nuclear weapons of its own, Einstein demurred. Anticipating heinous future acts of war featuring unfathomable civilian casualties, Einstein regarded it his duty to not contribute to the development of those weapons.

The following excerpt concerns the intersection of the lives of Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd, and what Szilárd regarded as his former teacher’s failure to support his cause. The article was originally written in 1959 by Leó Szilárd, to explain the disappointing conclusion of his work at the Manhattan Project.

* * *

Einstein could not sign the letter. He had the intention, but not the will. He got so close as to hold the pen poised over the letter, which I had written to warn President Roosevelt of the possibility, given new research and technology, of developing a doomsday weapon that could wipe out a city with a single blow. I knew, though, that it would never be heeded unless it came with the authority of Einstein, the leading scientist of our generation.

I stood there in Dr. Einstein’s office, on the top floor of the Institute for Advanced Study, near a window overlooking the pine forest. Young trees, that’s what I noticed. Different from a Hungarian forest. Not so impressive, those trees, except for the rust-colored floor of the forest, from all of the dead pine needles that had been dropped over their small years; brighter even than autumn’s orange.

It was August of 1939, on the cusp of the season, and the very molecules in the air were agitated. As I waited for him to sign, I opened my mouth as if to speak, then thought better of it. I would never say it aloud, but I thought it: would it be easier, Einstein, if you were not German?

“I am sorry, Leó. But I must hold out the hope that we can defeat the Nazis without such a weapon, which would kill so many families, not to mention bringing me nightmares for the rest of my life,” Einstein said, putting down the pen, and offering a signature rise of the eyebrow.

“But the world knows you, Albert. What can I do on my own? What can I do with this terrible knowledge that such a powerful weapon is made possible by science that I developed?” I appealed to his sense of common purpose, as a fellow scientist.

He closed his eyes and bent his head. He put the pen back in its holder. “Leó, my friend, now you know what it is, to have a monster,” said Einstein.

*

In 1905, when Einstein was 26 years old, he discovered the equation for mass-energy equivalence. This is the version of the story as told to me by Einstein himself:

Sitting at his desk at the patent office in Bern, Albert Einstein stared, squinting, at the plaster wall. Somewhere, a superhuman was pursuing a renegade beam of light, almost catching it, but falling back, and then, at such a speed, held a mirror up in front of him to see what was reflected. What did he see? Albert wanted to know. No one could answer him, and few even cared to take up the exercise for mental sport.

The riddle was no different, essentially, from dozens of others that Albert had asked himself over the years, during his idle moments, except that he could not leave it. It was like a toy soldier he had picked up as a child, which he’d been handling for so long that it had now become a household idol.

Days, weeks, months passed in contemplation, and Albert had found no peace from it. Looking up then from his reverie, Albert noticed that all of his coworkers had gone home, and the sun was about to set outside his West-facing window. Where had Michele gone off to? He wanted to talk to him about this puzzle; he knew nothing would come of it, but it would make for stirring conversation. He stood up, slid on his jacket, and left the office, heading to the house of his friend Michele Besso.

He arrived at Michele’s home after dark, in the cool of May. He walked in with barely any attempt at a greeting, eschewed small talk, and went immediately into his imagined scenario, his favorite thought-experiment. What would the light-speed superhuman see who, in his vanity, attempts to admire his own face in the mirror? Would the pace at which the light reflects off his face distort the picture? Would he appear further behind than he really is, because of the speed at which he is moving? Would he see glimpses of the recent past, his reflection calling forward to him from history? Or would he see nothing, nothing at all? The two men volleyed notions back and forth like tennis balls, but the question remained stubbornly unresolved.

As it grew late, the possibility of discovering the solution and the significance of that solution in proportion to their exhaustion was narrowing. The answer, Einstein supposed, must wait for another lifetime. Meanwhile, the question would have to endure.

On the way home by streetcar, however, Einstein happened to catch, out of the corner of his eye, the clock tower. He concentrated on that clock, and the streetcar in which he rode, accelerating away at not-quite-light speed; the clock, the car; the turning of the hands, the tires wheeling away into the distance. He put himself, mentally, in the place of the clock, where time moves at exactly the pace of the hands on its face. Then, he watched himself soaring off into the distance, turning back to see, not a mirror, but a clock-face slowing down, stopping entirely, as the light it emitted failed to reach his light-speed body.

The next day, Einstein again intruded onto the solitude of his friend Michele, this time by brashly announcing, “Thank you, I’ve completely solved the problem.”¹

“Oh, yes? Is there a solution?” Michele had just gotten into his work clothes, his hair still wet from the morning’s ablution. He was amused by the sudden appearance of the disheveled genius at his door.

“An analysis of the concept of time was my solution. Time cannot be absolutely defined, and there is an inseparable relation between time and signal velocity.”²

Michele’s first reaction was to smirk. “So in order to answer your riddle, you have to do away with time altoge….” And like that, Michele understood implicitly the catastrophic depths of this revelation.

When Einstein told me of that moment, when he first discovered the constant speed of light, it’s relationship to mass, and the extraordinary amount of energy that could be produced by a small amount of matter, he claimed that he had no inkling of its potential for being used for bombs. But when Einstein came to the home of his colleague Michele Besso that evening and explained what would become his greatest revelation, I imagine that Michele, the more practical of the two, must have sighed a wide and deep sigh that could have swallowed us all.

*

Einstein’s monster, I knew, could not be caged for long. So I proceeded without the help of my friend Albert, and without the full support and funding of the U.S. government. I was given a small office in Manhattan, which implied without a doubt that they had no expectation of my success. From my liaison in Washington I learned that the Defense Department had taken to jeeringly referring to my small operation in an office building on the Lower East Side as “The Manhattan Project,” a title which I then appropriated, in a moment of quixotic pride.

I was able, over time, to acquire a staff, but no matter how steadfastly we worked, we were too small, our resources too few, to conduct any substantial research on nuclear fission, an entirely new direction in physics and one demanding the attention of the greatest scientific minds of our time.

Though Einstein had not lent his name to my cause, he nevertheless visited the office on occasion. He had been my teacher in Berlin, so if I were more prone to flattery I might have chalked it up to his admiration of my talent as a researcher. But I could not help but question why this man would take the train all the way from Princeton every couple of weeks, just to visit one of many of his former students. In retrospect, it is clear to me that Einstein did not come by our lab to give his blessing to this birth, but rather, knowing that it would be born no matter what, wished at least to baby-sit his monster.

*

That a functional doomsday weapon could be built in five years, from conception to prototype, I now realize, was a preposterous suggestion to begin with. By 1944, Germany had been defeated, and the Nazis were far behind us in research, despite having a great deal more resources devoted to the development of these weapons. Yet I could not abandon the project. I was inspired by the story of Einstein’s discovery of mass-energy equivalence, and now that Maleva had passed away, she could not add, “yes, Einstein’s perseverance paid off in the end; but in the meantime, oh, how miserable he made all of those around him!”

We were both Ahabs; the only difference was that Einstein, when he set out on the sea, knew not what monster he had been pursuing. I knew exactly the markings on the white whale, could recognize its every feature; I simply could not spear it with the tools I had—too blunt and flimsy to do anything but anger the beast.

From a conversation with Niels Bohr (one of the few physicists who would still associate with a disgraced physicist such as I’d become), years later, I learned that Einstein had truly believed that such a weapon would be developed in his lifetime. He had written to Niels that, “when the war is over, then there will be in all countries a pursuit of secret war preparations with technological means which will lead inevitably to preventative wars and to destruction even more terrible than the present destruction of life.”³

How humbling, how innocent it seems to me now, to think that my former mentor believed that I could build a weapon so devastating as to change the nature of war itself.

*

When Roosevelt died, and Truman took office, the timeline for the Manhattan Project rapidly accelerated. I went from being tucked away and forgotten by the government, to being told, on a surprisingly cool late-summer day, when the fans were still turning, but to no purpose, “It is time.” There would be no time for a test-run, and there was only enough uranium to build a single prototype. The President wanted it to be dropped on the enemy, and wanted the war ended decisively within the month.

Against my better judgment, and against the vow of secrecy I had made to the President himself, I sought to consult Einstein on this fatal step. I found myself, once again, in the town of Princeton, at the Institute for Advanced Study, a supplicant at the doorway of genius. This time, I endured no wait. I suffered no disappointment on his behalf. He grabbed his suit-coat and ushered me out of the office; I followed him to the pine forest, where he padded down to what appeared to be a favorite path, worn to the dirt.

At first, he said nothing. Deeper into the woods, the trees were older; some of them older than the man walking beside me. There was a rope bridge overhanging a brook, such as you could see all over the mid-Atlantic states in the middle decades of the 20th century, now completely overlain by concrete. Then, before stepping onto the bridge, he said, “Don’t do it, Leó.”

How he knew what I was about to tell him, I can only guess. Perhaps he had connections in the Defense Department that I didn’t know about. Perhaps he was a spy for Russia (he had, at one point in time, been a member of several communist groups). Or perhaps he simply had an intuitive sense of the narrative of science; that one thing leads to another, and that it all ends with a great entropic emptying of things into the void.

“It is not up to me, Albert,” I confessed. “It is an order given from President Truman himself, that the atomic bomb is to be tested on the city of Hiroshima.”

Einstein sunk lower into his collar than before, as though a chill wind had just passed over us. “President Roosevelt would have forbidden the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, were he alive.”⁴

“Were he alive,” I said. “But there’s no use in such speculation. We have to deal with the conditions we have here and now.”

“But the conditions we have here and now are unthinkable, Leó. Science does not belong to us—I cannot fault you for pursuing the knowledge. But to use this knowledge!” Even when inveighing, Einstein used a flat, rational tone. “No, science does not belong to us, but the lives of men do not belong to us either, to snuff out at our pleasure.”

“So, would you then oppose the bombing of Japan?” I asked, testing out my resolve, my indignation at any trace of doubt that what I was about to do was the right thing.

“I will always condemn the use of the atomic bomb against Japan.”⁵ He took a step forward, onto the shaky rope bridge.

I could not help but notice that, as he walked shakily along the boards of the rope bridge, he spoke about it as though it had already taken place, as though there was truly nothing to be done. Despite lacking absolute existence, the persistence of time could be a persuasive force.

*

The slogan for the mission was, “no surprises.” On such a dangerous mission, so much could go wrong. A crash, a lightning strike, an electrical outing, a false discharge. Any number of triggers might have detonated the charge, and left us a pinch of ash in the urn of history. By our very nearness to the beast, we risked our deaths. Or so we believed.

The Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress, had been selected personally by the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, who would eventually fly the bomb over Hiroshima. In her wake, there would follow another B-29, called Necessary Evil, which would photograph and document the event, for history and for science. Because I had spent so much of my life in development of the science behind the creation, I wanted to be present for its birth. I refused outright to deliver the plans for the bomb unless I was guaranteed a spot on the Necessary Evil.

It was a risky move, to make such demands, and it caused me grief later on, as a Senate Committee questioned my intentions in withholding the blueprint and my loyalties as a citizen. But the great wingless bird was about to leave its nest, and all the mother can ever do is watch and pray it takes flight.

Before taking off, I joined in the last-minute inspection of the bomb, a simple projectile. I was struck again by the simplicity of it, the deceptive ordinariness. “With a fatal drop of this tear-drop shaped steel structure,” I remember thinking, “man will finally have wounded God.”

A few of the boys had drawn obscene pictures on the side of the Mk1, which they code-named “Little Boy,” with the same spirit of smug cheer in which an athlete might name his largest teammate “Tiny.” A more puritan mind might have considered this profane, as though a dirty picture of a naked woman diminished the austerity of the act. But, to me, the influence of the woman upon the bomb was not nearly so ugly as the influence of the bomb upon the woman, and it was the nuclear heat pulsing like a restless demon from within it that despoiled those crude lines, which were, by comparison, divine.

The hatch opened with a pneumatic hiss. The launching device lowered and aimed. Little Boy slid out. The dragon’s tail tilted down. The Kraken released.

*

In the city of Hiroshima, word had already reached many of the people of a bombing raid on its way, though no one could say precisely when. And then, as the shadow of Enola Gay passed over the paper buildings, I had the sensation of holding a match to a model city, igniting the curiosity of a boy unappeased by his imagination only; who needs to feel the fire in order to believe in its heat.

The men and women of Hiroshima had been through bombings before, and the more jaded of them simply went about their business, indifferent to the threats. So that, when Little Boy touched down, there was a small crowd gathered around the crash site.

It was supposed to detonate moments before touching the ground. But after a moment, nothing. Enola Gay and the Necessary Evil circled like vultures, flying lower, eventually, it became clear that there would be no detonation, the camera still rolling.

It landed, thud, in Edo Street near the Imperial gardens, but not before passing through a high arching tree, throwing peach-blossoms down in a slow-falling aftermath. No boom, no blast, no gust. Little Boy’s crash landing cracked the street beneath it, rolling ever so slightly, then settling. A young girl in school uniform, an elderly man carrying fishing gear, an amorous couple still dressed in last night’s wrinkled eveningwear, a city official halting his frantic gesturing, all stopped to gather and stare at the monolith. Some people backed away, or ran, or hid behind what shelter they could find, but a few of the spectators to the scene moved in on the object, slowly. The schoolgirl reached out her arm, and touched the metal with the flesh of her forefinger, and didn’t draw it back until her nerves had time to report back its heat.

Would it be unfair to them to say that they looked like apes staring upon a UFO? Very well then, I am unfair. But when it comes to Einstein’s monster, we are all apes looking on, fascinated and confused, waiting to see what will happen.

* * *

When Leó Szilárd learned of the failure of the bomb to discharge, and to create the chain reaction necessary to cause the destruction of Hiroshima, as he tells it, his first thought was, in a word, “Einstein!” But despite volumes of FBI data on the elderly German physicist, there is nothing to directly suggest that he was anything but a humble man of science; certainly his resume was not that of a saboteur.

Yet the failure of the Manhattan Project was the beginning of the end for nuclear research. After Japan’s surrender, the allied powers determined that nuclear technology was unstable and unpredictable. The science for building such a bomb was sound, of course, but in the frenzy to end the war, the United States had nearly committed a sin of global scale, and used its misfire to make a public denouncement of doomsday technology. The Truman Doctrine, articulated only a few years after the failed mission of the Enola Gay, held that all nations must work together to prevent the development of nuclear weapons by any individual nation, a policy that remains in place today.

*

Suggestions for Class Discussion: If Szilárd had gotten Einstein’s support, the Manhattan Project had been fully supported, and the Enola Gay’s mission had been completed successfully, would the United States be seen differently throughout the world? If Einstein could have anticipated Szilárd’s innovations in nuclear chain reactions, would he have withheld his own ground-breaking scientific research from the public? Does the scientist have any responsibility to the greater humanity, or is his obligation to scientific truth only?

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Phong Nguyen teaches fiction writing at the University of Central Missouri and is an editor of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing. His own stories have been published in North American Review, Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, Florida Review, Texas Review, Mississippi Review, Southern Indiana Review, Portland Review, and others. He is trying for all 50 states.

“When I think of the front porch of the house I grew up in, I immediately think of rushing up to it and shouting, ‘base!’ During a game of Capture-the-Flag or Kick-the-Can, my front porch was the only safe spot in the neighborhood. There was a zig-zagging pattern to the bushes in front of them, though, so there was a built-in obstacle: even if you got there first, to reach ‘base,’ you’d have to navigate this last obstacle to be really home-free. Someone could easily grab your collar as you rounded the last bend.

“Later, in high school, I learned that I could reach ‘base’ by leaping over the bushes, which was not only the quickest way to reach my front porch, but could usually stun whomever was giving chase into a moment of perplexity. In addition to being ‘safe,’ I also felt cool and athletic, with a unique claim to my home turf, like a suburban
guerrilla warrior.

“When I visit the old house now, I cannot imagine the mind of the person who saw those bushes and thought, ‘what a great thing to jump over.’”