Leó Szilárd: A Forgotten Father of the Atomic Bomb

Read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. Leo Szilard plays a very prominent part in the history of the bomb.

One of my favorite texts back in my college days was The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski. USA folks may not be familiar with this. It was actually more of a polished transcript of his TV series, which had aired in the UK and some other countries (including Malta, where it was required reading for getting into college in fact). Leo Szilard is a familiar name from that text - he certainly gets plenty of airtime in there.

It looks like Szilard always had moral qualms about atomic bombs (http://www.dannen.com/chronbio.html).

The "military head" of the Manhattan Project, General Groves appeared to have really disliked Szilard: Groves wanted to have Szilard "interned for the duration of the war" as "an enemy alien" (http://www.doug-long.com/szilard.htm)

I'll bet that Szilard's iconoclasm and reaction to authority means that his contributions get downplayed. Can't have a non-team-player elevated to hero status, now can we?

Forgotten by whom?

One of the original Martians.

- The universe is vast, containing myriads of stars, many of them not unlike our Sun. Many of these stars are likely to have planets circling around them. A fair fraction of these planets will have liquid water on their surface and a gaseous atmosphere. The energy pouring down from a star will cause the synthesis of organic compounds, turning the ocean into a thin, warm soup. These chemicals will join each other to produce a self-reproducing system. The simplest living things will multiply, evolve by natural selection and become more complicated till eventually active, thinking creatures will emerge. Civilization, science, and technology will follow. Then, yearning for fresh worlds, they will travel to neighboring planets, and later to planets of nearby stars. Eventually they should spread out all over the Galaxy. These highly exceptional and talented people could hardly overlook such a beautiful place as our Earth. - "And so, " - Fermi came to his overwhelming question, - "if all this has been happening, they should have arrived here by now, so where are they? " - It was Leo Szilard, a man with an impish sense of humor, who supplied the perfect reply to Fermi's rethoric: - "They are among us," - he said, - "but they call themselves Hungarians."

http://mek.oszk.hu/03200/03286/html/tudos1/martians.html

The bit in there about Hollywood is also amusing:

The American word "movie" probably derived from the Hungarian "mozi. " Cynics says that Hungarians created America's Hollywood before other Hungarians less destructively created America's A-bomb.