Leo Szilard

And when World War II broke out, Warner Heisenberg stayed in Germany, and he worked on their nuclear programs.

And guys like Albert Einstein, Ed Teller, Leo Szilard, uh, John von Neumann, all these guys, uh, went to the United States because otherwise they would've been killed by Hitler's Nazis.

The, the thing that started the Manhattan Project in the first place was a letter from Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt, and they were warning President Roosevelt that The Germans seemed to have a program that was enriching uranium, or that the Germans were, seemed to be interested in this new science they found that can make really powerful bombs with uranium.

Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein warned FDR that the United States had to get ahead of the Germans on this technology.

And, uh, anyways, after the war, Werner Heisenberg, he says, uh, this is the quote from Heisenberg.

He says, quote, I would say that I was absolutely convinced of the possibility of our making a uranium engine, but I never thought that we would make a bomb.

But it's a story of humanity.

And the next story was around 1933, And it's the story of Leo Szilard.

And he had a very terrifying imagination.

Szilard standing at a London crosswalk thinking about neutrons.

There's, there's sort of this, there's this argument about moral responsibility that comes out in some of these conversations.

Um, Dario is, is an interesting case, uh, because I, I learned while reporting this book that his scientific hero, the, the person he has sort of patterned his career after, is this World War II scientist, um, who sort of helped to invent what became the, the atomic bomb, Leó Szilárd.

Um, he was a, a sort of reluctant participant in the Manhattan Project.

He came up with the nuclear chain reaction, and then he tried to keep this a secret so that the Nazis couldn't discover it.

But what happened with nuclear weapons was very interesting.

So the person who came up with the idea of the nuclear weapon was a physicist named Leo Szilard, and he basically calculated that a nuclear bomb would be possible.

L- again, long before one was built, before we even had nuclear reactors.

He just did some math on a paper, and he was like, "Oh, shit, you really can totally build a nuclear bomb."

What's his name again?

Leo Szilard.

Leo Szilard.

Yeah, S-Z-I-L-A-R-D.

Here's your other unlock question, Sarah.

In August of 1939, Leo Szilard.

Pronunciation?

I'm not actually sure.

Yeah, I know.

I just want to say it right.

In August of 1939, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner drafted a letter warning of extremely powerful bombs of a new type by the Germans.

A letter that was signed by what theoretical physicist before being delivered to President Roosevelt?

Einstein's 1939 letter to President Franklin Roosevelt helped bring the potential military implications of nuclear research to the attention of the US government.

I'm just gonna read, um, an excerpt, not the whole thing "Sir, some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future.

Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness, and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the administration.

I believe, therefore, that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations.

Uh, there were economists on the Coles Commission- Okay, the Coles Commission was then located at the University of Chicago, perhaps the most prominent of them being Schalling, uh, Copeman's.

Uh, uh, and also there were natural scientists, the physicist Enrico Fermi, uh, Leo Szilard, uh, uh, population geneticist Sewall Wright.

So these people were all there discussing what is science? Okay? The very methodological question that we started with.

Uh, should it be practiced in different ways in different fields, et cetera.

In Japan, the view was that the attacks were unjustified and the magnitude of the devastation made the actions inherently immoral.

Many people around the world agreed, including such luminaries as Albert Camus and a number of the scientists involved with the Manhattan Project, such as Dr. James Frank, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard.

The future president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, wrote of his grave misgivings in his memoir, The White House Years, citing his belief that Japan was already defeated and that America should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.

The director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at the American University in Washington, Peter Kuznick, wrote these damning words about President Truman.