- Person
- Leo Szilard
- Lived
- 1898–1964
- Field
- Nuclear physics
- From
- Hungarian-American
The story
In late 1945 Congress debated who should control atomic energy in peacetime. The first proposal, the May-Johnson Bill, introduced on 3 October 1945, was drafted by War Department lawyers and modelled on the wartime Manhattan Project. It created a powerful administrator and deputy who could be serving military officers, and it carried severe secrecy penalties of up to ten years in prison for security breaches.
Leo Szilard, who had first conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933 and had worked on the Manhattan Project as chief physicist at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, had long been uneasy about the military's dominant role in the project. He feared that military control would stifle science and make an arms race more likely. He and Harold Urey became two of the most notable critics of the bill, and Szilard worked with other scientists from the Chicago and Oak Ridge laboratories to defeat it.
The scientists' campaign was something new in American politics. Researchers who had never been vocal before suddenly testified and lobbied in Washington, and they found allies among legislators wary of a standing military establishment. On 20 December 1945 Senator Brien McMahon introduced an alternative bill, broadly supported by scientists, with five full-time civilian commissioners and no exemption for serving officers. Szilard lobbied for the amendments that placed nuclear energy under civilian control.
After months of debate the Senate passed the act unanimously and the House by 265 votes to 79. President Truman signed the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 on 1 August 1946. It established that nuclear weapons development and nuclear power would be under civilian rather than military control, and created a civilian Atomic Energy Commission, which took over from the Manhattan Project on 1 January 1947.
It was an early victory for the idea that scientists and citizens, not only generals, should decide how the power of the atom is used. Szilard had already left the Metallurgical Laboratory on 1 June 1946 to turn to biology, but he remained politically active for the rest of his life, campaigning for arms control and founding the Council for a Livable World in 1962.
Why it matters
Civilian control of atomic energy became a lasting principle of American law and helped open nuclear science to peaceful research and medicine.
About Leo Szilard
Physicist who conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, drafted Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt, co-built the first reactor, then campaigned for the rest of his life against nuclear war.
More about Leo Szilard
- Szilard's advice helped clone the first human cellLeo Szilard gave essential advice that, according to Theodore Puck and Philip Marcus, made their 1955 cloning of a human cell a reality.
- Leo Szilard saw the chain reaction, and rescued scholarsWaiting at a London traffic light in September 1933, Leo Szilard conceived the nuclear chain reaction; that same year he helped found a group that found posts for 2,500 refugee scholars.
- Szilard found a way to make medical isotopesIn 1934 at St Bartholomew's Hospital, Leo Szilard and Thomas Chalmers discovered the Szilard–Chalmers effect, widely used to prepare medical isotopes.
- Szilard co-invented the chemostat for growing microbesAfter the war Leo Szilard and Aaron Novick invented the chemostat for growing microbes and discovered feedback inhibition, a key way cells control their chemistry.
- Szilard first proposed the cyclotron and electron microscopeLeo Szilard filed the earliest known patent applications for the electron microscope (1928) and the cyclotron (1929), and one for the linear accelerator (1928).
- Szilard and Einstein invented a silent refrigeratorBetween 1926 and 1930 Leo Szilard worked with Albert Einstein on a refrigerator with no moving parts, patented in the United States in 1930.
- Leo Szilard linked information and thermodynamicsIn his Berlin research of the 1920s, Leo Szilard showed a deep connection between information and entropy, making him a founding figure of information theory.
- Szilard petitioned Truman not to bomb without warningIn July 1945 Leo Szilard drafted a petition, signed by about 70 Manhattan Project scientists, urging President Truman not to use the atomic bomb on Japan without warning.
- Leo Szilard helped rescue 2,500 refugee scholarsIn 1933 Leo Szilard helped found the Academic Assistance Council in Britain, which by 1939 had found places for more than 2,500 refugee scholars.
Sources
- Leo Szilard Wikipedia
- Leo Szilard Atomic Heritage Foundation / National Museum of Nuclear Science & History
- Atomic Energy Act of 1946 Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.