Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Albany, and former President of the Peace History Society. He is the author of the trilogy, published by Stanford University Press, The Struggle Against the Bomb: One World or None (1993), Resisting the Bomb (1997), and Toward Nuclear Abolition (2003).

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CONFRONTING THE BOMB

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface.................................................................xiAbbreviations Used......................................................xiii1 The Secret Struggle...................................................12 The Rise of Popular Protest, 1945-1953................................93 Government Response, 1945-1953........................................294 Movement Renaissance, 1954-1958.......................................525 Victories and Retreats, 1958-1970.....................................826 A Third Wave, 1971-1980...............................................1137 Peace Begins to Break Out, 1981-1985..................................1418 Disarmament Triumphant, 1985-1992.....................................1779 Waning Movement, Reviving Arms Race, 1993-Present.....................205Conclusion: Reflections on the Past and the Future......................221Index...................................................................227

Chapter One

The Bomb had its critics long before it became a reality. During the early years of the twentieth century, scientists warned that radioactive materials, if effectively harnessed, could create enormously powerful explosives. Picking up this theme, H. G. Wells, one of the most popular and influential writers of the era, produced a novel in 1914, The World Set Free, featuring a war with "atomic bombs." This war was so devastating that, to avert the world's destruction in a future conflict, its survivors formed a world government which, thereafter, ushered in an unprecedented era of peace and economic progress. Concerned that innovations in science and technology were fast outstripping advances in political institutions, Wells repeatedly argued that an "open conspiracy" of farsighted, rational people must move beyond the war-making state to build a genuine world community.

This notion of a society of the righteous, committed to saving the world from its own folly, had deep roots in world history. It can be traced back at least to the fourth century, to the Babylonian Talmudic teacher Abbayah. According to this Jewish savant, in each generation there existed at least thirty-six righteous people (lamed-vav tzaddikim, in Hebrew) upon whom the survival of the world depended. Jewish fiction and folklore took up the idea of these hidden saints, who played a prominent role in kabbalistic folk legend of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in Hassidic lore after the eighteenth century.

In 1898, with the birth of Leo Szilard, the legend began to acquire a basis in reality. Raised in a Hungarian Jewish family of comfortable circumstances, Szilard was a sensitive, creative, and precocious child. After World War I, he studied in Berlin, where he took his Ph.D. in physics with Albert Einstein. As he watched the rise of fascism in Germany, Szilard hatched an abortive plan to create a small group of wise, unselfish men and women to preserve civilization from the disaster that loomed. Years later, he attributed what he called his "pre dilection for 'Saving the World'" to the stories told to him by his mother. But the idea may also have been derived from Szilard's reading of novels by H. G. Wells, an author whom he greatly admired. Curiously, Szilard did not read The World Set Free until 1932. But thereafter, he noted, "I found it difficult to forget."

Szilard had good reason to remember the book. Having fled from Nazi Germany, he was living in London in 1933 and conducting experiments in nuclear physics. One day that September, when waiting to cross the street, he suddenly conceived the process that could create a nuclear chain reaction and, thus, lead to the construction of atomic bombs. Recognizing what this would mean, Szilard sought to keep the process secret by patenting it and, also, pulling prominent physicists into a conspiracy of silence on the subject. But these efforts had little effect, for Szilard was a relatively unknown, junior scientist and, also, publication of research findings was the norm in his profession. Symptomatically, in late 1938, two German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, published the results of their successful experiment with nuclear fission. Receiving news of this experiment in early 1939 in his new home, the United States, Szilard grew alarmed. "All the things which H. G. Wells predicted appeared suddenly real to me," he recalled. Working with an associate at Columbia University, he conducted his own experiments on nuclear fission, from which it became clear that "the large-scale liberation of atomic energy was just around the corner.... There was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief."

Once again, Szilard sought to generate a conspiracy of silence. And this time, given fears of a German breakthrough in this area, Szilard-joined in these efforts by physicists Eugene Wigner and Victor Weisskopf-had greater success. In Britain, the United States, and Denmark, top nuclear scientists agreed to keep their research findings secret. Miraculously, it seemed that they might avert a scramble for nuclear weapons. But a leading French research team balked. Like many scientists, members of the French team considered it unlikely that an atomic bomb would be built for many years, if ever. Furthermore, they detested secrecy in science. As a result, they published their findings in April 1939, thereby precipitating small-scale atomic bomb programs in Germany, Britain, and the Soviet Union.

Much the same thing happened in the United States. In July 1939, Szilard and two of his Hungarian friends met with Einstein, then himself a refugee and vacationing on Long Island. Recognizing Einstein's immense prestige, they hoped to draw upon it to reach President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a warning about the prospect of a German atomic bomb. Einstein agreed, and dispatched a letter, drafted by Szilard, that did catch the attention of the President. With the beginning of World War II , it led to the organization of the Manhattan Project, a vast nuclear weapons development program directed by the U.S., British, and Canadian governments. Szilard, like many other scientists, worked on the project, convinced that they had to produce the atomic bomb-if it could be produced-before the German government did.

A Conflict Emerges

But, even at the start of the Manhattan Project, there was a built-in conflict between the approach of scientists and that of top government officials. Some scientists, like the German refugee Max Born, were horrified by the prospect of an atomic bomb, and refused to work on it at all. Many other scientists, like Szilard, viewed it as no more than a deterrent to a German atomic attack. By contrast, government officials like President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill were committed to using nuclear weapons-if Available-during the war and to retaining them in the postwar years as instruments of national military power.

As the war progressed, this tension between scientists and statesmen grew more acute. In September 1942, Szilard sent a memo to his associates in the Manhattan Project's Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab) that revived his earlier idea for a society of the righteous, a...