Fathers of the Bomb, part I and II

[Jenny Lake]

Fathers of The Bomb
by Jennifer Lake
 
The famous and "enigmatic" Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, was the real Father of the Bomb in his role as shepherd to a flock of wandering physicists between the two World Wars. The Copenhagen University's Institute for Theoretical Physics was established at the end of WWI (between 1918 and 1920), with Bohr as its director, to become a clearinghouse for nuclear development and the idealization of Bohr's "open world", paid for by the Carlsberg Brewery and Rockefeller Foundations. "Bohr was God and Oppie [Oppenheimer] was his prophet" said Los Alamos scientist Robert Serber. Edward Teller was in awe of Bohr. Werner Heisenberg was inspired, developing the "uncertainty principle" with Bohr. John Wheeler was his devoted student. Eustace Mullins called the Bomb project "the most far-reaching conspiracy of ALL TIME".[1]. Due to his living-legend status, Bohr was assigned the pseudonym of Nicholas Baker when he came to work for the Manhattan Project. The staff called him "uncle Nick".

Niels Bohr was born in the mansion of his maternal grandparents, banker/politician David Baruch Adler and Jenny Raphael, situated across the street from Christianborg Palace, seat of the Danish Parliament and official site of royal receptions. Grandfather David died before Niels' birth and passed his business, D.B.Adler & Co., to his eldest son Bertel. According to an oral history given by Niels' wife Margrethe, life for the Bohr children was centered in the activities of the Adlers under the guidance of grandmother Raphael-Adler, who hosted the brood of cousins together in her summer home "Naerum Gaard".[2]. Niels' mother Ellen was the youngest of six, and it was her next older sister Hannah Adler who took extreme interest in the activities of Niels and his younger brother Harald, arranging travel with them and an endless stream of cultural activities. The oldest Bohr child, Kristen (Jenny), and her mother shared a more retiring personality and seldom participated with Hannah and the boys. At home, Professor Christian Bohr included the children in adult meetings for intellectual discussion befitting the progressive education in which he was engaged. Margrethe Norlund Bohr reports hardly knowing of the Bohr side of the family although Niels' uncle, grandfather Bohr, and greatgrandfather were well-known Danish education reformers.

The Adlers were English, according to Margrethe. The English Raphaels came to Britain by way of Amsterdam in the 1780s along with the Rothschilds and Schroders as merchant-cum-bankers who established businesses in Manchester and later moved to London. In time, the Raphaels also set up banking houses in the major European capitols. David Baruch Adler joined the London firm of Martin, Levin & Adler and married his Adler/Meyer heritage [3] to that of R. Raphael & Sons, early investor in railroads like the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O), America's first railroad that also played a key role in the Civil War. With the backing of Raphael & Sons, D.B. Adler contracted for the Danish and Swedish public loan in his time as manager of Privatbanken and Handelsbanken in Copenhagen. D.B. Adler and other Adler relatives like his son-in-law Hermann Trier, were liberal politicians and free-traders, as D.B.Adler was the outspoken founder of the Free Trade Society.

Niels, born in 1885, attended an elite school for the length of his boyhood, graduating in 1903 and going on to Copenhagen University where his father taught physiology. Raised "on campus", both Niels and Harald were privileged to participate in the family visits from Denmark's social and intellectual luminaries. At the Gammelholm school, Niels joined in a special group of twelve boys called the Ekliptika Circle under the direction of his professor Harald Hoffding. The boys were tightly knit and remained lifelong friends, among them his second cousin Edgar Rubin (the mothers were first cousins) who went on to become a gestalt psychologist of renown and was Niels' closest friend and counsel next to his brother. The Rubin family patriarch, Marcus Rubin, was Director General of the Danish Treasury and the Danish National Bank, attaining his treasury position in 1902, the same year the Zionist movement officially came to Denmark and established the Zionistforening. The Jewish community of Copenhagen at the time was small, perhaps 1,500 people in the years prior to WWI.

In 1911, Niels received his doctorate in physics, having proved himself in 1908 with an original publication in the new physics of Quantum Theory. He was set out immediately to Oxford for post-doctoral work under J.J. Thomson at the Cavendish Lab, moving to Manchester within the year to study with Ernest Rutherford. Possibly, Bohr had kinship with Thomson through a cousin-in-law, the husband of Ada Sara Adler, though in the memoirs Niels was not fond of J.J. Thomson. Thomson was shortly replaced by Rutherford. In 1912, on a visit home, he married Margrethe Norlund whose brothers were part of the Ekliptika. In Copenhagen that same year of 1912, the B'nai B'rith opened its first Danish Lodge. In 1913, Marcus Rubin was elected to direct the National Bank and during the War, as of 1914, the World Zionist Organization moved its entire headquarters to Copenhagen and presumably its assets as well. The careful administration of Marcus Rubin at the Danish National Bank is said to have preserved the wealth of the Danes, the Bank itself being Denmark's largest "industry".

The Nobel Prize was awarded to Bohr in 1922 for describing the structure of hydrogen, after which he embarked on a lecturing junket that took him to Harvard University among other places. In these years he would meet young American students who "followed" him for the rest of their careers and perhaps also Harvard's famous law professor Felix Frankfurter. By 1932 the 47-yr old Bohr was Denmark's greatest citizen. He was offered a princely home to live in called "The House of Honor". And what had Denmark's greatest citizen accomplished? Copenhagen had become the world center for physics research. Recent breakthroughs had proven that the entire periodic table of elements could become radioactive. After Hitler gained the Chancellery in 1933, Niels and Harald Bohr created the "Danish Committee for the Support of Refugee Intellectuals". At the same time, the British formed the Academic Assistance Council and the Americans chartered the Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars.[4]. An invitation went out to Jewish physicists and academics in Europe to come to Denmark. Teller reports his own experience in his autobiographical "Memoirs" as being "recruited" by the British and paced through a lengthy interview and application process. The American Committee received over 6000 applicants during its operation and accepted roughly 330. Noting at the time a lack of German anti-semitism, which persisted even to Teller's last journey through Germany in 1936, the "refugee" process appears to be a selective pre-war brain-drain. The British claimed to be "saving science".

Later, during the height of WWII, Niels Bohr had an obviously intimate friendship of some kind with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter whom he may have met after receiving the Nobel during his 1923 U.S. lecture tour. Frankfurter had an institutional home at Harvard Law where he taught for decades. Bohr and Frankfurter were suspected within the U.S. intelligence community of collaborating to funnel atomic secrets to the Russians, and Bohr himself was an openly persistent advocate for doing so. As a Manhattan Project "consultant" with an international base of cohorts, Bohr would hardly have needed the collaboration of anyone for passing secrets. In Copenhagen where Bohr remained until 1943, Russians, communists, Indians, Britons, and Chinese all shared in the most current theories of physics. The American government invited his participation as a "refugee" in 1943 and ignored a recommendation that Bohr be interned. By then, all the necessary physics had been worked out anyway and the project was in the hands of engineers. The questions remaining were whether or not a "Super" (thermonuclear H-bomb)was in the pipeline.

In the midst of building the Atom Bomb, Niels Bohr inspired the Los Alamos team of J. Robert Oppenheimer to plow ahead in spite of their flagging spirits, struggling with the moral implications of nuclear weapons. Many of these men were "intellectual communists" if not political ones. Bohr convinced the scientists that a weapon too dangerous to use would force the nations to unite for mutual security. His dream of an internationally unified and "open world" could be realized by the Absolute threat then being posed --meaning nothing, of course, without "the gadget". Bohr had said in 1939 that it would take the resources of a whole country to make the Bomb --or more literally, turning the country into a bomb factory. In the reminiscene of Teller at Los Alamos in 1943, Bohr ran up to him on arriving and exclaimed, "Teller, didn't I tell you that you could not make a nuclear explosive without turning the whole country into a huge factory? Now you have gone ahead and done it." Teller relates that "from that day on [Bohr] participated diligently in the effort...".[5].                        

Favored son of Zionist world bankers, Bohr nurtured every nuclear development for over two decades and knew the hearts and minds of the scientists who made them --Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller,and more. The "intelligence" provided by Bohr was the rubber-meeting-the-road; he gave the impression that the superbly able Germans under Heisenberg were persevering as well as they could. Samuel Goudsmit, the scientific head of Operation ALSOS to assess the Germans' Bomb status, said in 1947 that they were not even close to producing a nuclear weapon. But then, Bohr knew all this. He, Goudsmit, and a few others had sent reams of correspondence to each other for over 20 years. Goudsmit, career professor at the University of Michigan, officially  invited Heisenberg to "emigrate" to the U.S. before the war during a visit. Heisenberg declined. The appearance of a neck-and-neck race for the Bomb is remarkably timed in sync, but within the physics community a few of the scientists themselves were aware that the German effort was a hoax. Heisenberg would see to it. More than a year after Denmark was invaded and occupied by the Nazis (April of 1940), Heisenberg came calling on Bohr and stayed with him for one week, Sept.15 to Sept.22, 1941. Jews had been forbidden to leave Germany four months previously. Among the "last" scientists to make it to the U.S., Fritz Reiche carried a message about the status of the German Bomb-- Reiche reported they were delaying.[6]. Months later, only Bohr and Heisenberg would know the content of their week-long meeting.

The Cold War began on August 6, 1945 according to physics professor Patrick Blackett at Cambridge University Oxford. Blackett claimed the "show" at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was really aimed at the Soviets. The scientists who resented the military control over Bomb development went into gear for international disarmament. Bohr as a leader among them would launch his own speaking campaign for world government, disarmament, and the "peaceful" uses of nuclear power. In 1955 he organized the Geneva convention on "Atoms for Peace" with 1,200 delegates attending. The Ford Motor Company lauded Niels Bohr as the first recipient of the "Atoms For Peace Award". He also helped to found CERN at that time. Located just outside Geneva, CERN is an international consortium of member-states that paid in one billion dollars towards its 2008 budget for high-energy nuclear research. Bohr's longtime lab assistant, Hendrik Kramers, became the Chairman of the United Nations Committee on Nuclear Policy.
     
                                                                                ____________________________________________

Among the committees and distinctions of Niels Bohr lifetime achievements are the following:

President of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, President of the Danish Cancer Committee, and Chairman of the Danish Atomic Energy Commission. He was a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (London), the Royal Institution, and Academies in Amsterdam, Berlin, Bologna, Boston, Göttingen, Helsingfors, Budapest, München, Oslo, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, Uppsala, Vienna, Washington, Harlem, Moscow, Trondhjem, Halle, Dublin, Liege, and Cracow. He was Doctor, honoris causa, of the following universities, colleges, and institutes: (1923-1939) - Cambridge, Liverpool, Manchester, Oxford, Copenhagen, Edinburgh, Kiel, Providence, California, Oslo, Birmingham, London; (1945-1962) - Sorbonne (Paris), Princeton, McGill (Montreal), Glasgow, Aberdeen, Athens, Lund, New York, Basel, Aarhus, Macalester (St. Paul), Minnesota, Roosevek (Chicago, Ill.), Zagreb, Technion (Haifa), Bombay, Calcutta, Warsaw, Brussels, Harvard, Cambridge (Mass.), and Rockefeller (New York). (Nobel Lectures, Physics 1922-1941)
Niels Henrik David Bohr died in Copenhagen on Nov. 18, 1962

 ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Part I
Notes and references
[1] Eustace Mullins in "Secrets of the Atomic Bomb". Mullins says the U.N. decision-makers were determined to test the A-bomb on a living population, read it here www.whale.to/b/mullins8.html
[2] 1963, with interviewer Thomas Kuhn, Margrethe Norlund Bohr gives an oral history to the American Institute of Physics in conjunction with her son Aage Bohr (who accompanied his father Niels to Los Alamos), and Leon Rosenfeld www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4514_1.html
[3] David Baruch Adler genealogy, in Danish http://tom.bronsted.dk/genealogi/rothenborg/2_21.php In the general search for Meyer relatives, D.B. Adler appears to have an uncle Saul Meyer who was a banker, and an unconfirmed relation to Dr. Kirstine Meyer, physicist. Hannah Adler and Kirstine Meyer were the first women doctorates in physics from the University of Copenhagen. Margrethe Bohr states that Kirstine Meyer was not "of the family" however Dr. Meyer was a special and personal advocate of Niels Bohr and in the small Jewish population of Copenhagen it seems unlikely that she is not a relative also
[4] Refugee assistance from the British AAC was paid for by Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), the UK arm of I.G. Farben. In the U.S. the Committee for Aid to German Scholars ("German" was changed to "Foreign") was ostensibly a philanthropy chaired by lawyer Bernard Flexner.
[5] Edward Teller, "Memoirs", page 186, Pershing books 2001
[6] Fritz Reiche carried a message from Friedrich Houtermans, a devout communist who was working in the Soviet Union 1935-37 and later in Britain and Berlin. At the time of the message, Houtermans worked in the private lab of Manfred Baron von Ardenne. There are several versions of this message. Author Thomas Powers, "Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb" quotes the message as "a reliable colleague [Houtermans] who is working at a technical research laboratory asked [Reiche] to let us know that a large number of German physicists are working intensively on the problem of the uranium bomb under the direction of Heisenberg, that Heisenberg himself trys to delay the work as much as possible, fearing the catastrophic results of a success." The "us" being informed by Reiche were a dozen Princeton physicists who were first to get this news. Reiche stayed in the home of Albert Einstein through the summer of 1941.


 
 
 
Fathers of the Bomb, part II
 
 
The "Hungarians" who came to work on the Manhatten Project were called the "Martians" by their peers, according to Edward Teller in his Memoirs. They ascribed to themselves a unique "Hungarian Genius" that set them apart from their scientific cohorts. Choosing the god of War in nicknaming this oddfellow foursome, coworkers and associates may have insightfully understood something about the nature of these men. Foremost among the Manhatten Engineer District's Martians was Leo Szilard, known for his eccentric and demanding behavior. Born with the surname "Spitz" which the family would change in 1900 while Leo was a toddler, the Szilards were descendents of  "lesser nobility" who emerged as a small, wealthy, and overwhelmingly Jewish "middle class" in a land of agricultural peasants.  Leo's parents are described as nonreligious Jewish freemasons; his father worked as a civil engineer and his grandfather was an "agricultural entrepreneur". Similar backgrounds are seen among the other Hungarian "polymaths" like Michael Polanyi, who grew up in the political environment of Balkanized eastern Europe. Researcher Tibor Frank writes that "The Hungarian intellectual diaspora was huge and not confined to German-speaking Europe [but] was scattered all over the Continent."[1]. Perhaps more than others, the Jewish sons of the Austro-Hungarian empire considered themselves the premier internationalists, following in the footsteps of Theodore Herzl, a scion of Budapest.
 
As a schoolboy, Leo Szilard and his younger brother 'Bela' created the Hungarian Association of Socialist Students for the purpose of distributing a pamphlet on tax and monetary reform purportedly written by Leo. The Szilards were also inducted into the Galilei Circle (founded in 1908 by the Polanyi brothers, Michael and Karl, at the University of Budapest) to discuss and design the nationalistic future of Hungary. Compare this to the indoctrination of Niels Bohr and his brother in Copenhagen, through the Ekliptika Circle. Tibor Frank records that Leo was otherwise not political, but in the characterization of his life, biographers affirm that Szilard was exceptionally political to his last day and onwards into his legacy. Schooling was interrupted by the necessities of war and Leo was drafted as an officer candidate in 1917, but he contracted severe influenza (Spanish flu?) and was discharged before ever giving service. In the rising social tension of Budapest that was soon to erupt, Szilard displayed a turnabout that marked his personal nature. As Tibor Frank describes it "on July 24, 1919, he converted from Judaism and was baptized into the Calvinist faith...in the Calvinist church on the street where he lived with his family...the date of his baptism, however, reveals a sense of urgency : The Hungarian Council Republic would exist for just one more week, and the signs of an anti-semitic wave of revenge for what was generally viewed as a Jewish takeover of the government were evident." Showing a certificate of baptism to the boys who pushed him around in the streets brought only more derision, adding perhaps to Szilards lifelong "anxiety neurosis". In time, as a mature man, even his friends called him the "General" for his dictatorial behavior. They said that he liked to "startle" people with unexpected pronouncements, effecting an off-balancing of friend and foe alike.
 
Szilard left Budapest in 1919 and centered his life in Berlin around the activities of his mentors; Einstein, Max Planck, and Max von Laue. Famous for his role behind-the-scenes in organizing the 1933 relocation of Jewish scientists, Szilard is notorious for crafting the "letters from Einstein" that were passed to FDR urging the creation of an atomic bomb. The first letter is credited to the 3 Martian physicists --Szilard, Eugene (Paul) Wigner, and Edward Teller. [2]. Teller says he only gave Szilard a ride over to Einstein's house in Princeton, and that Szilard was prepared with a ready document from his pocket. This letter was signed by Einstein and given to Rothschild agent Alexander Sachs, subsequently reaching the hand of the President in August of 1939. According to an article by William Lanouette, FDR responded by tasking an investigative committee to look into it, promising funds for Szilard and Enrico Fermi to establish an experimental chain-reaction laboratory at Columbia in New York. When the funding failed to show, a second letter in the spring of 1940 from "Einstein" threatened to publish the working details of a nuclear device for the world community of physicists. Lanouette reports, Szilard got his funding. [3].
 
1933 was the year Szilard claims to have thought of the "chain-reaction" while walking in London and waiting on a traffic light. He had landed a job at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in radiology, but he was also deeply engaged in the creation and administration of the Academic Assistance Council that maintained an office at the headquarters of the London Royal Society. [4]. Szilard came to London following on the heels of Sir William Beveridge who happened to meet him in Vienna. Szilard resigned his post in Berlin-Charlottenburg at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute after the Reichstag Fire (Feb.27) and drifted back into Austria looking for a new position. Under British patronage, the likes of William Beveridge and Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell), Szilard spearheaded the nuts-and-bolts effort from London to coordinate the exodus of science out of Germany. He took it upon himself to weave the actions of other rescue organizations together and provide a claimed "even distribution" of  job applicants among receiving nations. For his own personal contribution, Szilard was looking for a sponsor to fund his chain-reaction experiments, an effort that his friends at the University of Manchester, Michael Polanyi and Chaim Weizmann, engaged in the years 1936 to 1938 when the emergence of atomic power was a certainty. [5]. Szilard patented his ideas for atomic chain-reactions in 1934 and signed them over "in trust" to the British Admiralty in '36. In 1934, Chaim Weizmann was occupied with the opening of the Weizmann Institute for Science (as it was renamed in 1949). Niels Bohr, a participant in the creation of the Academic Assistance Council as well as mirror organizations elsewhere, was downplaying the feasibility of atomic power and is noted for saying it would take the resources of a whole country to produce a nuclear weapon. In 1936, as Szilard, Weizmann, et.al., were exploring their options, Einstein was giving reassurances to the American government that nukes were next to impossible. By 1938, as the main activities of the relocation committees were drawing to a close, Szilard himself would emigrate out of Britain as a refugee and come to Columbia in New York where he reunited with his friend Enrico Fermi. [6]. As far as the public knew, no one had yet conceived of how to build superweapons.
 
The first inklings of New Age weaponry were forecast by the work of Samuel Tolver Preston in his 1875 publication of "Physics of the Ether".  H.G. Wells picked up the ideas and demonstrated them as science-fiction in 1908 and 1914, most notably in a story called "The World Set Free". By this time in history, the available nuclear technology of X-rays and "radium emanations" was well employed and known to be deadly. The dangerous medical applications of radiation were subversively buried along with the victims but known to the researchers themselves and reflect the overriding mindset that "safe" use was a technical determination that was not yet understood but attainable with sufficient experimentation. In the coming years, Leo Szilard would read Wells' stories and decide to be first among scientists to harness the atom. The parallel inventions of particle accelerators (including Szilard's) before 1930 enabled fission experiments to operate concurrently in the U.S. and Europe, and the production of radionucleides for medical use was ostensibly creating a need for reactors. In this milieu of 1930, Abraham Flexner founded the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton as a "haven where scientists may regard the world and its phenomena as their laboratory". Offering huge salaries for the time, with no requirements to teach or publish, Flexner contracted for Albert Einstein to come in 1932, although Einstein didn't actually arrive until October of 1933 when he qualified as a "refugee" eligible for relocation grants. Einstein was a jewel in the IAS crown, and would follow the Hungarians, mathematician John von Neumann and physicist Eugene Wigner, who were recruited in 1930. The flambuoyant and reckless von Neumann, as he's been described, offered invaluable "intel" to the relocation enterprise.
 
When Szilard and Fermi finally got funding for chain-reactions, the University of Chicago became the new home of the Metallurgical Lab division of  the Manhattan Project. The Met Lab developed the critical function of sustainable and controllable fission based on a U.S. patent that the Szilard/Fermi team had registered in 1939. The two men were apparently collaborating in Europe to produce a chain-reaction in 1934, years before the "Germans" Hahn, Strassman, Meitner, and Frisch. [7]. Accomplishing the task late in 1942 on the record, the Manhattan Project became official. Oppenheimer and his team were sequestered in New Mexico under the Army's guardianship at Los Alamos, a situation that brought great tension to the participating scientists, but one that nearly all would look back on as the greatest time of their lives. Teller relates that the whole Manhattan Project was a reunion for "international science". Szilard, having already made his major contribution to the war effort, now began to agitate against the military interference, which he perceived as a takeover threat to marginalise the preeminence of the scientists. As the reality of the Atomic Bomb was nearing fruition, Szilard mounted an all out campaign to prevent it from being used, circulating a petition to stage a "demonstration" in place of a hostile strike. William Lanouette reports that there was another, little known letter from "Einstein" written by Szilard "seeking to influence post-war arms control" that went ignored. The petition, called the Franck Report (named for physicist James Franck), was circulated among the Project scientists, but that too was suppressed and never reached President Truman for whom it was intended. The "demonstration" came after the war as Operation Crossroads in the Marshall Islands. Szilard turned away from physics then and began a career in the field of molecular biology.[8].
 
For the other physicists, things were just heating up. Edward Teller had been a relatively unhelpful presence in Los Alamos due to his obsession with building a "Super", but the way was soon cleared after the McMahon Bill created the Atomic Energy Commission in 1946. The higher-ups in military and government circles were enthusiastic about the Super, and so was Ernest Lawrence at the University of California's Berkeley Rad Lab. Lawrence was a golden boy who was brought into the Bohemian society on his ascendancy into Berkeley in the late '20s. Thermonuclear Super supporters squared off with the disarmament faction over the next three years, but the Soviet A-bomb test of August 1949 would tip its development in their favor. Despite the appearance of debate and delays, the H-bomb was a sure thing, backed by the empirical Lewis L. Strauss who took his efforts behind closed doors. It took less than 2 years to set the stage for thermonuclear tests, which were performed in the Marshalls in the spring of 1951 and unleashed in full terrifying splendor during Operation Ivy, November 1952. Over the course of that year, the United States recorded an all-time high of epidemic polio. The "Mike" shot on November first was a 10.4 megaton surface blast that sucked one million tons of contaminated soil into the mushroom cloud. By the end of '52 and from then on, "summer" polio became a year-round affliction. Oddly, Leo Szilard the biologist, had proposed at the start of thermonuclear testing that an increase in the killing power of H-bombs could be accomplished by cladding the plutonium core with "dirty" cobalt, an act that he said could "wipe out all life on the planet". [9]. As Teller explains it, an explosive yield beyond 10 megatons (10 million tons of TNT) is blown into space and therefore "wasted" as unusable firepower. Szilard, it seems, still had a contribution to make. He married his longtime girlfriend, health physicist Dr. Gertrude Weiss, and in the coming years he helped Jonas Salk organize the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, and sat on the Board of Directors.
 
In his pursuit of scientific hegemony, Leo Szilard learned the hard way how to become an "insider" and better use his influence and other people's money. He gave up writing letters and circulating petitions. He joined the effort in 1954 with Niels Bohr to found CERN in Geneva. He created numerous organizations and used them to gain political leverage, like The Council For A Livable World that shrewdly stretched its money by "buying" a Senator from the sparsely populated state of South Dakota, helping George McGovern to take a seat. It was among the last worldly actions that he took. Diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1960, Szilard designed his own radiation treatment at Sloan-Kettering, requiring a second course in 1962. The claim is he was cured. In May of 1964, Leo Szilard died of a heart attack in his sleep.
 
                                                                           ______________________________________________
 
A theory on ageing was put forward by Szilard, (reproduced in brief by Tibor Frank at http://www.franktibor.hu/img/kozl/05_frank_236-web.pdf) where he "postulates that different individuals age at different rates, and the rate of ageing of an individual is determined by the number of 'faults' inherited. These 'faults' are mutants of what he dubbed 'vegetative genes' that are inherited through the chromosomes containing them and whose number increase with age and cause some people to be relatively old even before they are born. He derived mathematical formulae for ageing based upon this hypothesis of 'ageing hits' on the human cell, from which he interpreted the shape of a mortality curve of the U.S. population and predicted the decrease in life expectancy of children who are exposed to ionizing radiation. He concluded that the inherited faults increase the death rate 'in conjunction with the hits of time, and they increase it appreciably only above 40 (years of age)' and 'thus in its crudest form, the theory postulates that the age at death is uniquely determined by the genetic make-up of the individual'. Further, he concluded that his theory of ageing would illuminate scientific issues involved in the practice of birth control....Szilard's theory was received warmly in England. John Lear suggested in the New Scientist that it was 'inevitable that this latest of the Hungarian-born theorist's long line of brilliances will in time be recognized as a major contribution to human thought.' "
 
Before Szilard in 1932, Hermann Muller, who worked at inducing mutations in fruit flies with X-rays, made a similar prediction and went even further, offering his view of disease conditions that would plague the population. Muller suggested that radiation induced mutations would cause human extinction and denounced the practice of Eugenics as fraudulent. William Lanouette wrote about Szilard's brand of science as "subversion...He advanced by infiltrating and negating and reformulating what was already known by other scientists..."
 
 Part II
Notes and References
[1] contemporary Hungarian researcher, Tibor Frank, gives favorable reviews of the scientists in the migrations of 1919 to 1933 www.storicamente.org/05_studi_ricerche/02frank2.htm. Research selections are from the "Recent Articles" page at www.franktibor.hu/index_de.html
[2] from the Princeton archives on Einstein, documenting the Hungarian influence behind the "Einstein" letter to FDR www.princetonhistory.org/museum_alberteinstein.cfm In 1945, Einstein published "Atomic War or Peace" and wrote, "I do not consider myself the father of the release of atomic energy". Szilard and Einstein collaborated closely for many years and famously share a refrigerator patent.
[3] William Lanouette, writing for the Pugwash archives www.pugwash.org/reports/ees/lanouette.htm The Pugwash Conferences came about after the publication of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto.
[4] the Academic Assistance Council, HQ at the Royal Society on Piccadilly, documented by Tibor Frank in reference [1]. The Royal Society history and Fellows are listed here --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellows_of_the_Royal_Society#Fellowship. Versions of the Royal Society motto allude to secrecy, as it was called the "invisible college" with a modern interpretation of the motto given as "nothing in words".
[5] .Michael Polanyi* and Chaim Weizmann at the University of Manchester, also called Victoria University. Niels Bohr had a post-doctorate teaching appointment here (Victoria U)  at the same time that Weizmann began teaching chemistry in 1913. Within a decade, Weizmann became the President of the World Zionist Organization.
[6]Szilard and Fermi seemed to have had a fertile friendship --it's possible that the original suggestion made by Fermi to Oppenheimer (at the start of the Manhattan Project) about using a weapon to irradiate the Germans' food and water could have come from Szilard. The idea is in keeping with his "cobalt" bomb.
[7] Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman joined the German program under Heisenberg. Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch fled to Scandinavia. This very brief bio of Frisch locates these scientists before the war www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/library/biogr ... h-otto.htm
[8]in molecular biology, Szilard collaborated with Aaron Novick at Argonne Nat'l Lab outside Chicago
[9]the "Cobalt" bomb, couched in the light of a "warning" as what others might do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb
 
 *Michael Polanyi formed a "study group"  in 1928 with Leo Szilard , Eugene Wigner, and John (Jansci) von Neumann to analyze Soviet affairs, and appears to have had a strong influence over the careers of the "Martians". Read a bio of Polanyi here www.kfki.hu/chemonet/polanyi/9602/trad1.html . Szilard's communist activities after his youth are obscured, but during WWII and his "agitation", Gen. Leslie Groves requested Szilard's internment as an "enemy alien". His World Government endeavors never ceased. On JFK's election, Szilard moved to Washington, DC in an effort to intervene with the Soviets on the President's behalf. He is credited with suggesting a special "hotline" for the superpower leaders to speak directly.
 
 Frans Boas at Columbia Univ. was the main source of contact for Szilard. Boas was receiving his "intel" from Benjamin Liebowitz who was travelling around Europe and writing letters after the first Nazi "ban" in April 1933 (Restoration of the Professional Civil Service). Franz Boas is the "father" of modern anthropology, a nephew by marriage to Dr. Abraham Jacobi, the "father" of pediatrics. Dr. Jacobi emigrated to New York City in 1853 after release (or escape) from jail for armed insurrection in the communist Revolutions of 1848-- he married the daughter of publisher and Bonesman George Putnam.

[Ognir]

Very interesting research

[Anonymous]

Tale of Two Cities - Hiroshima and Nagasaki, footage from 1945

http://www.mininova.org/tor/2399130

http://www.archive.org/details/TaleofTw1946

http://www.archive.org/details/AV_258-H ... XPERIENCED

[Jenny Lake]

A page here about Niels Bohr's home, "the House of Honor" also known as Carlsberg Palace, built next to the Brewery. Apparently plumbed with a tapper directly from the source-- http://home.att.net/~jdhodge/Carlsberg.htm


Here's an article concerning the roles of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the pre-bomb days of WWII. Historians Thomas Powers and Jeremy Bernstein have a few disagreements.
From what I've read in the memoirs of physicists, Powers has the better case. He says Heisenberg spent his private time with Bohr describing ideas on how to design a reactor and not a bomb. Edward Teller, who knew Heisenberg very well, is certain that he did not want to bring nuclear weapons into the world.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/3219

Samuel Goudsmit is a central character in the birth-of-the-bomb story. The article reports his parents were killed in concentration camps, but online genealogy refutes the claim. His mother, Marianne Gompers Goudsmit has a death date of May 27, 1939. Other relatives do appear to have died at Auschwitz. They were in the gold and diamond business in Amsterdam.

Goudsmit went to the University of Michigan in 1927 --UMich, a key institution of Biological Weapons development next to Yale (#1)-- until he was recruited for war work at MIT, followed by a long career as the chief of physics at Brookhaven Nat'l Lab. This man is tangled up in "above top secret" research on UFOs.