Leo Szilard, the Intellectual Bumblebee (lecture by William Lanouette)

 

This is a nice lecture on Leo Szilard by his biographer William Lanouette. See also ‘An Intellectual Bumblebee’ by Max Perutz.

Wikipedia: Leo Szilard was a Hungarian-American physicist and inventor. He conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, patented the idea of a nuclear fission reactor in 1934, and in late 1939 wrote the letter for Albert Einstein's signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb.

How Alexander Sachs, acting on behalf of Szilard and Einstein, narrowly convinced FDR to initiate the atomic bomb project: Contingency, History, and the Atomic Bomb. 

Szilard wrote children's stories and science fiction. His short story My Trial as a War Criminal begins after the USSR has defeated the US using biological weapons.

I was just about to lock the door of my hotel room and go to bed when there was a knock on the door and there stood a Russian officer and a young Russian civilian. I had expected something of this sort ever since the President signed the terms of unconditional surrender and the Russians landed a token occupation force in New York. The officer handed me something that looked like a warrant and said that I was under arrest as a war criminal on the basis of my activities during the Second World War in connection with the atomic bomb. There was a car waiting outside and they told me that they were going to take me to the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. Apparently, they were rounding up all the scientists who had ever worked in the field of atomic energy ...

This story was translated into Russian and it had a large impact on Andrei Sakharov, who showed it to his colleague Victor Adamsky:

A number of us discussed it. It was about a war between the USSR and the USA, a very devastating one, which brought victory to the USSR. Szilard and a number of other physicists are put under arrest and then face the court as war criminals for having created weapons of mass destruction. Neither they nor their lawyers could make up a cogent proof of their innocence. We were amazed by this paradox. You can’t get away from the fact that we were developing weapons of mass destruction. We thought it was necessary. Such was our inner conviction. But still the moral aspect of it would not let Andrei Dmitrievich and some of us live in peace.

See also The Many Worlds of Leo Szilard (APS symposium). Slides for Richard Garwin's excellent summary of Szilard's work, including nuclear physics, refrigeration, and Maxwell's Demon. One of Garwin's anecdotes:

Ted Puck was a distinguished biologist, originally trained in physics. ‘With the greatest possible reluctance I have come to the conclusion that it is not possible for me personally to work with you scientifically,’ he wrote Szilard. ‘Your mind is so much more powerful than mine that I find it impossible when I am with you to resist the tremendous polarizing forces of your ideas and outlook.’ Puck feared his ‘own flow of ideas would slow up & productivity suffer if we were to become continuously associated working in the same place and the same general kind of field.’ Puck said, ‘There is no living scientist whose intellect I respect more. But your tremendous intellectual force is a strain on a limited person like myself.’

Puck was a pioneer in single cell cloning, aided in part by Szilard:

When Szilard saw in 1954 that biologists Philip Marcus and Theodore Puck were having trouble growing individual cells into colonies, he concluded that “since cells grow with high efficiency when they have many neighbors, you should not let a single cell know it’s alone”. This was no flippant excursion into psychobiology. Rather, Szilard’s idea to use a layered feeder dish worked, while the open dish had not (Lanouette, 1992: 396–397).

After the war Szilard worked in molecular biology. This photo of Jacques Monod and Szilard is in the seminar room at Cold Spring Harbor Lab. Monod credits Szilard for the negative-feedback idea behind his 1965 Nobel prize.

“I have … recorded” in my Nobel lecture, said Monod, “how it was Szilard who decisively reconciled me with the idea (repulsive to me, until then) that enzyme induction reflected an anti-repressive effect, rather than the reverse, as I tried, unduly, to stick to.”

 

Contingency, History, and the Atomic Bomb: Alexander Sachs

[ Financier Alexander Sachs, Look Magazine, March 14, 1950. Article: How FDR Planned to use the A-Bomb ]

Last month I received an astonishing email, partly excerpted below.

Stephen,

By way of introduction, my grandfather, General Groves, led the Manhattan Project. I’m now working on a documentary series about the making of the bomb.

I first came across Robert Jungk’s account of the Sachs-FDR meetings not in Jungk's book, but in your “Contingency, History, and the Atomic Bomb” posting online. Thank you.

It’s an important episode that appears in almost none of the histories, Rhodes’ Making of the Atomic Bomb included. And it’s relevant: anyone who has had to pitch a complicated idea or project knows that getting the initial approval and funding can be more challenging than completing the work proposed.

I’ve since found quite a bit of material pertaining to the story. I thought you might find it interesting.

...

I imagine some graduate history, science, or economics student could turn this into a PhD thesis. (Why did FDR always have time for Sachs? I see some hints that Sachs may have been ahead of his time in macroeconomics.) Or – Szilard and Wigner’s efforts to get the matter in front of FDR could be a management case study.

Anyway, thank you for posting the story. The full version will definitely make it into my production.

Dick Groves

From Contingency, History, and the Atomic Bomb (excerpt from Jungk):

How Alexander Sachs, acting on behalf of Szilard and Einstein, narrowly convinced FDR to initiate the atomic bomb project. History sometimes hangs on a fragile thread: had the project been delayed a year, atomic weapons might not have been used in WWII. Had the project completed a year earlier, the bombs might have been used against Germany.

See also A Brief History of the Future, as told to the Masters of the Universe.

... It was nearly ten weeks before Alexander Sachs at last found an opportunity, on October 11, 1939, to hand President Roosevelt, in person, the letter composed by [Leo] Szilard and signed by [Albert] Einstein at the beginning of August [1939]. In order to ensure that the President should thoroughly appreciate the contents of the document and not lay it aside with a heap of other papers awaiting attention, Sachs read to him, in addition to the message and an appended memorandum by Szilard, a further much more comprehensive statement by himself. The effect of these communications was by no means so overpowering as Sachs had expected. Roosevelt, wearied by the prolonged effort of listening to his visitor, made an attempt to disengage himself from the whole affair. ...

Sachs, however, was able, as he took his leave, to extort from the President the consolation of an invitation to breakfast the following morning. "That night I didn't sleep a wink," Sachs remembers.

...

[ The next morning, at the White House ]

After Sachs finished speaking the President remained silent for several minutes. Then he wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to the servant who had been waiting at table. The latter soon returned with a parcel which, at Roosevelt's order, he began slowly to unwrap. It contained a bottle of old French brandy of Napoleon's time, which the Roosevelt family had possessed for many years. The President, still maintaining a significant silence, told the man to fill two glasses. Then he raised his own, nodded to Sachs and drank to him.

Next he remarked: "Alex, what you are after is to see that the Nazis don't blow us up?"

"Precisely."

It was only then that Roosevelt called in his attaché, [Brigadier] General [Edwin] "Pa" Watson, and addressed him—pointing to the documents Sachs had brought—in words which have since become famous:

"Pa, this requires action!

Sachs was a trusted but largely anonymous advisor to Roosevelt. He advised Roosevelt through the Great Depression and foresaw the rise of Hitler and the military threat from Germany. From the profile in Look Magazine:

... only one word describes him: genius. A story about how he helped President Roosevelt to understand the atomic energy problem in 1939 throws light on why Dr. Sachs is so described. ...

... Schooled at Columbia and Harvard, he never left the school of self-education.

Dr. Alexander Sachs' career has been in economics, with a special emphasis on the mathematics of statistics. But the range of his intellectual interests embraces religion, science, history, and politics. ...

Contingency, History, and the Atomic Bomb

[ More on Sachs -- profile in Look Magazine 1950. ]

How Alexander Sachs, acting on behalf of Szilard and Einstein, narrowly convinced FDR to initiate the atomic bomb project. History sometimes hangs on a fragile thread: had the project been delayed a year, atomic weapons might not have been used in WWII. Had the project completed a year earlier, the bombs might have been used against Germany.

See also A Brief History of the Future, as told to the Masters of the Universe.

Excerpts below are from Robert Jungk's Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists. (Note the book contains inaccuracies concerning the wartime role of German physicists such as Weizsacker and Heisenberg.)

Alexander Sachs:

... This international financier could always obtain entry to the White House, for he had often amazed Roosevelt by his usually astonishingly accurate forecasts of economic events. Ever since 1933 Sachs had been one of the unofficial but extremely influential advisers of the American President, all of whom had to possess, by F. D. R.'s own definition, 'great ability, physical vitality, and a real passion for anonymity'.

... It was nearly ten weeks before Alexander Sachs at last found an opportunity, on October 11, 1939, to hand President Roosevelt, in person, the letter composed by [Leo] Szilard and signed by [Albert] Einstein at the beginning of August [1939]. In order to ensure that the President should thoroughly appreciate the contents of the document and not lay it aside with a heap of other papers awaiting attention, Sachs read to him, in addition to the message and an appended memorandum by Szilard, a further much more comprehensive statement by himself. The effect of these communications was by no means so overpowering as Sachs had expected. Roosevelt, wearied by the prolonged effort of listening to his visitor, made an attempt to disengage himself from the whole affair. He told the disappointed reader that he found it all very interesting but considered government intervention to be premature at this stage.

Sachs, however, was able, as he took his leave, to extort from the President the consolation of an invitation to breakfast the following morning. "That night I didn't sleep a wink," Sachs remembers. "I was staying at the Carlton Hotel [two blocks north of the White House]. I paced restlessly to and fro in my room or tried to sleep sitting in a chair. There was a small park quite close to the hotel. Three or four times, I believe, between eleven in the evening and seven in the morning, I left the hotel, to the porter's amazement, and went across to the park. There I sat on a bench and meditated. What could I say to get the President on our side in this affair, which was already beginning to look practically hopeless? Quite suddenly, like an inspiration, the right idea came to me. I returned to the hotel, took a shower and shortly afterwards called once more at the White House."

Roosevelt was sitting alone at the breakfast table, in his wheel chair, when Sachs entered the room. The President inquired in an ironical tone:

"What bright idea have you got now? How much time would you like to explain it?"

Dr. Sachs says he replied that he would not take long.

"All I want to do is to tell you a story. During the Napoleonic wars a young American inventor came to the French Emperor and offered to build a fleet of steamships with the help of which Napoleon could, in spite of the uncertain weather, land in England. Ships without sails? This seemed to the great Corsican so impossible that he sent [Robert] Fulton away. In the opinion of the English historian Lord Acton, this is an example of how England was saved by the shortsightedness of an adversary. Had Napoleon shown more imagination and humility at that time, the history of the nineteenth century would have taken a very different course."

After Sachs finished speaking the President remained silent for several minutes. Then he wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to the servant who had been waiting at table. The latter soon returned with a parcel which, at Roosevelt's order, he began slowly to unwrap. It contained a bottle of old French brandy of Napoleon's time, which the Roosevelt family had possessed for many years. The President, still maintaining a significant silence, told the man to fill two glasses. Then he raised his own, nodded to Sachs and drank to him.

Next he remarked: "Alex, what you are after is to see that the Nazis don't blow us up?"

"Precisely."

It was only then that Roosevelt called in his attaché, [Brigadier] General [Edwin] "Pa" Watson, and addressed him—pointing to the documents Sachs had brought—in words which have since become famous:

"Pa, this requires action!"

More on the challenges:

Teller criticizes as follows one of these excessively rosy views of the early history of the American atom bomb: 'There is no mention of the futile efforts of the scientists in 1939 to awaken the interest of the military authorities in the atomic bomb. The reader does not learn about the dismay of scientists faced with the necessity of planned research. He does not find out about the indignation of engineers asked to believe in the theory and on such an airy basis to construct a plant.'

Wigner remembers the resistance. 'We often felt as though we were swimming in syrup,' he remarks. Boris Pregel, a radium expert, without whose disinterested loan of uranium the first experiments al Columbia University would have been impossible, comments: 'It is a wonder that after so many blunders and mistakes anything was ever accomplished at all.' Szilard still believes today that work on the uranium project was delayed for at least a year by the short-sightedness and sluggishness of the authorities. Even Roosevelt's manifest interest in the plan scarcely accelerated its execution. ...

Stalingrad

Rutgers Historian Jochen Hellbeck, author of Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich.

LA Review of Books: ... The archive was compiled by a historical commission headed by a Moscow professor, Isaak Mints. Members of the commission were allowed into Stalingrad in late December 1942 — this was more than a month before the battle would end, and there was bitter fighting going on in the city. Over the next weeks they conducted more than 200 interviews with soldiers and other eyewitnesses. These first-person accounts were so frank and multifaceted that they couldn’t be published at the time. They were locked away, but not destroyed.

I found them quite by chance. Several Russian colleagues who knew about my interest in first-person accounts told me about entire boxes filled with memoirs, somewhere in the basement of a Moscow archive. When I finally received permission to study these documents, my jaw dropped. I first assumed they were recollections of the war written in the 1960s or 1970s — but the archive was full of first-person statements delivered during the war. It shows the interviewed soldiers steeped in the events that they describe. In 1942 nobody knew when or how the Second World War would end, and the interviews show you the horizons of people at war, they bring you closer to their thoughts and emotions than any other source.

... When I began my project I initially wanted to compare the voices and emotions of German and Soviet soldiers. There are many diaries available on the German side, but hardly any from the Soviet perspective. The Red Army forbade personal diaries, and Soviet censors ensured that soldiers wrote only bland letters along the lines of, “Hello, I’m well and alive,” so that the letters couldn’t be used for intelligence or propaganda if they fell into German hands. Consequently there are few sources that present us with a full record of unmediated wartime voices.

... In the account I mentioned earlier, the otherwise unexceptional Lieutenant Averbukh fell back from his command post after it was overrun and, shot, retreated while carrying his dying unit commander:

Captain Lizunov was showing little sign of life, but I could hear him whispering, saying that I should leave him and save myself. Obviously I didn’t leave him. We crawled to Verkhnyaya Elshanka, in the area of the radio station. I sat up to get my bearings and got hit again. Submachinegun fire to the left side of my chest and my left arm. I lost consciousness. I don’t know how long I was out. I woke up because it got really cold. It was late, around four in the morning. It was already starting to get light. I could hear people speaking German all around me. I couldn’t see Lizunov anywhere. I decided to shoot myself because I didn’t have any strength left, and I didn’t want them to take me alive. I figured there was no way out. I pulled the trigger, but the Mauser was clogged with sand and wouldn’t fire. My right arm was still okay. With my right arm I crawled away and by some miracle made it to the division command post. It was already midday.

See also Hellbeck's project Facing Stalingrad.

Portraits of German and Soviet Survivors

The Battle of Stalingrad was one of the most ferocious military campaigns of all time. Ending with the rout of an entire German army, it marked a turning point in World War II. “Facing Stalingrad” features portraits of German and Soviet veterans who were interviewed in their homes in 2009. The project illuminates the battle’s human dimension and juxtaposes perspectives from both sides.

Johan Scheins, 16th Panzer Division, captured January 29, 1943. Released from captivity in late 1949.

... The general said nothing; they said nothing. They were afraid. They were officers. I then said: “What should we do now?” And then a staff sergeant, who could speak perfect Polish, entered at a trot. He was Polish, but a German Pole. He announced that four tanks, Russian T-34, had run over and cut the cables, that there was no longer any connection. There was nothing that could be done. One could no longer make telephone calls. They had run over the cable. We should surrender. The general then stood up. He adjusted his collar to make it neater. He was tall. He put on his cap. I stood here; he stood there. He just stood there, then he took his revolver – Long live Germany! Long live my country! – and he shot himself here and then fell forwards. I thought he would fall off the table. I stood right there. I had never seen such a thing: some white stuff came out at the top. The stuff that comes out of a herring when you cut it up. Not the bones. The white stuff. ...

Does Stalingrad appear in your dreams?

I’ve only been speaking to you for a couple of days. I can say that I sit every day in my bed – for hours. All the memories surface. Always before Christmas. Terrible. Christmas was the worst time when I was a prisoner. On Christmas Eve the Russians would come in at 10 PM. They would count us. We then had to go outside – quickly, quickly. Nearly barefoot, only wearing socks. 20, 30 degrees cold. We stood outside half-naked. Just padded jackets on. And we had to form groups of five men each. Raz, dva – always five men.

Then the Russians started counting. The commander. And then they went back to the headquarters, in the house, to booze. Then they returned after an hour. Nichevo [Russian: “no problem”]. “Have you counted?” I said: “Nope.” “Count!” Then there was a new count. We counted from 10 PM, 11 PM till 2, 3 AM. The sentries stood outside with carbines. Then one man fell over due to the cold. Another man fell over… 10, 12 men, 16 men, the number varied, fell over. They had to be placed in front. So that they could also be counted. Oh, zavtra [Russian: “tomorrow”] it’s all over. Tomorrow morning he’ll be dead. We went indoors and they remained lying on the ground. They weren’t allowed to be brought indoors. In the morning they were frozen stiff – broken. Zavtra utrom – tomorrow morning it’ll be all over with them. Posmotri! [Russian:“Look!”] Look up, that’s where God is, He’s seen that and you bandits will go to hell.

I was invited several times to Stalingrad. It’s definitive – I’ll never go there again. I’d rather walk with a dead man.

Mein Krieg: time and memory

The footage in this documentary will appeal to any History or WWII buff. The interviews with the old men, juxtaposed with moving images of their wartime youth, are a poignant meditation on time and memory.

Mein Krieg (1991)
Review/Film; Movies Shot By 6 Germans In the War

By JANET MASLIN (NYTimes)

The documentary "Mein Krieg" ("My Private War") offers stunningly un-self-conscious World War II memories from six German veterans, each of whom took a home movie camera with him into the fray. As directed with chilling simplicity by Harriet Eder and Thomas Kufus, it presents both a compilation of eerie wartime scenes and a catalogue of the photographers' present-day attitudes toward their experience. "I wouldn't be talking about these things if my conscience weren't clear as crystal," one of them calmly declares.

The film makers have their own ideas about their interviewees' complicity, as demonstrated by the emphasis they place on that particular remark. But their approach is restrained as they allow each of these six veterans to reminisce about everything from the condition of their movie cameras (which are well maintained and have yielded high-quality home movies) to the indelible sights they have seen. "Here we're going into Warsaw, and this is a tour of the buildings destroyed in '39," one man says, casually describing his images of wholesale destruction.

Much of the material seen here has a peculiar gentleness, as German soldiers cook and exercise and smile for the cameras. (There do not appear to have been restrictions on what the soldiers could photograph, since the later part of the film also includes glimpses of mass graves and civilian casualties.) And some of it recalls the more calculated wartime images we are more used to seeing in connection with Allied troops. So pretty nurses beam at Nazi soldiers; the soldiers' faces betray both fear and determination; the troops are seen celebrating after they shoot down an enemy plane. They were, a photographer recalls about the plane's dead Russian pilot, "full of joy over having been able to destroy this hornet." ...

Belonging and Genocide: Hitler's Community, 1918-1945

I recommend this podcast interview with Thomas Kuhne, author of Belonging and Genocide: Hitler's Community, 1918-1945.

Kuhne claims that no German soldier ever faced court martial for refusing to kill a civilian. He estimates that (only?) about 200k German soldiers in total were involved in the killing of Jews or other civilians. But by the end of the war every German who wanted to know about "crimes in the east" could easily find out. This last observation is supported by letters and diary entries of ordinary people. Matters of national guilt or conscience weighed heavily on soldiers and ordinary Germans by the end of the war, Kuhne claims.

Kuhne makes interesting observations about the male social hierarchy within military units. Those who refused to carry out Nazi orders against civilians were regarded as weaklings, but were not subjected to direct reprisal.

There are two means to unite a people — common ideals and common crime.
—Adolf Hitler, Party Leader, Munich, 1923

If this Jewish business is ever avenged on earth, then have mercy on us Germans.
—Major Trapp, Police Officer, Poland, 1942

For there is a great, bright aspect to this war: namely a great comradeship.
—Adolf Hitler, Reich Chancellor, Berlin, 1942

We Germans are the nation that has gone for this war enthusiastically and will have to bear the consequences.
—Franz Wieschenberg, Wehrmacht Private, Eastern Front, 1944

To stick together and to fight side by side and be wounded side by side, that’s our wish.
—Kurt Kreissler, Wehrmacht NCO, Germany, 1945

All that is left is the wind in the pines

The FT's Asia editor has lunch with Japan scholar Donald Keene (shown above with Yukio Mishima and Hiroshi Akutagawa). Keene has a keen intelligence and fine literary and historical sensibilities. He recently became a Japanese citizen at the age of 89. I highly recommend his memoir Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan. See also Japanese Diaries and Yukio Mishima. (Via Gwern.)

Financial Times: ... I steer Keene back more than 70 years to when, as an 18-year-old, he came across a translation of The Tale of Genji in the Astor Hotel in New York. At the time, Keene was studying French and Greek literature at Columbia University, having won a scholarship to study there at the age of 16. He bought the book because, at 59 cents, the epic story, written 1,100 years ago, contained more words per dollar than any book in the store. That was how the love affair began.

... “He was an extraordinary person,” says Keene, who knew Mishima well. They had met, symbolically enough, outside Tokyo’s Kabuki-za theatre in 1954, and had gone to see plays together. Keene had translated one of Mishima’s modern Noh plays.

“He died, as you know, at the age of 45, leaving at least 45 stacked volumes of novels, plays, criticism, poetry.” Mishima slit his belly after leading a failed, and farcical, coup to restore the emperor’s power but Keene thinks he committed suicide because he was passed over for the Nobel Prize. During the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Mishima had written Keene a letter with the line, “I envy the athletes who know if they are first, second or third.” Keene says: “That was all he said but I knew exactly what he meant.” The irony was that Kawabata, who did win the Nobel Prize, also committed suicide because of the pressure of living up to his new reputation.

As our coffee arrives, I mention the writer Jun Takami (1907-1965), one of whose plays ends with the line, “All that is left is the wind in the pines.” Keene gives me an ecstatic look. “Yes, it’s the most marvellous end to any play. There’s nothing on the stage at all, nothing but the pine.” He shakes his head at the sadness and the beauty. “Oh, what a stroke of genius that was. I think of it now and I’ve got shivers going down my spine.”

One passage in Takami’s diaries was written in 1944 during the wartime bombing of Tokyo when he was trying to get his mother to safety in the countryside. At Ueno station “everybody is quiet, everybody’s just moving slowly and no one is trying to get ahead of anybody else,” says Keene. “And Takami thought, ‘I want to live with these people. I want to die with these people’. And that is what I [Keene] thought in January, when I was in hospital. ‘I want to live with these people. I want to die with these people.’”

Keene is in a kind of reverie by now, lost in the personal and literary wanderings of a lifetime. “I knew Takami Jun,” he says, using the Japanese name order. “He was a very elegant man. The last time I saw him, he was wearing a white suit and he was surrounded by about seven or eight young women. And he was smiling.” Keene’s eyes are moist. He is staring past me or through me. The restaurant is still quite empty but Keene has flooded it with the memories of people, mostly long dead. He stands to leave and is helped up the narrow stairs to the city above. Down in the basement, I am left at the empty table. There is nothing, not even the wind in the pines.

Lore

This is a beautiful but difficult movie. You can watch it right now on Google Play. Interview with director Cate Shortland.

See also Bitter Defeat.

Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying

Highly recommended. There were also German tapes of Allied prisoners, but those have not yet been found!

Sönke Neitzel, Professor of International History, London School of Economics, discusses his investigations into the mind-set of the German fighting man during World War II. Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying, written with social psychologist Harald Welzer, is based on declassified transcripts of covert recordings taken within the confines of the holding cells, bedrooms, and camps that housed the German POWs, providing a view of the mentality of the soldiers in the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the German navy.

See also What it was like, specifically:

Tapping Hitler's Generals: Transcripts of Secret Conversations, 1942-1945. Farm Hall for captured German generals. Who knew what, when? More here. Those tricky Englanders!

For more on Farm Hall, where German nuclear scientists were held and secretly taped, see The Heisenberg uncertainty.

Dyson, the bomb, and the Japanese surrender

This interview with Freeman Dyson pointed me to the recent reanalysis by historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa of the Japanese surrender at the end of WWII. There is an old controversy over whether the atomic bombs or the entry of the USSR played the decisive role. Were the bombs necessary at all? Dyson mentions (about 30 minutes into the interview) that, due to Hasegawa, he is now 90 percent confident that they were not. This despite his close association with many of the Manhattan Project figures (Oppenheimer, Bethe, Teller, Feynman and others), and his acceptance for sixty years that atomic weapons played the key role. Dyson's recapitulation in the interview is quite good (it starts at about 20 minutes); see also here.

I recently learned from Donald Keene's diary translations (see also here) that Japanese modernizers had been worried about the Russian threat since the Meiji era.

Dyson also has some interesting comments about space exploration and genomics immediately following the discussion about nuclear weapons. I almost skipped listening to this interview, having spent several hours with him relatively recently. But someone as knowledgeable and brilliant as Dyson will always generate surprising insights.


Hasegawa's book: Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan

Summary: ... According to Hasegawa, Japanese leaders' diaries and testimonies suggest that the imminent Soviet invasion was more influential in compelling them to accept the Potsdam conditions. Although Emperor Hirohito's desire to end the war became more urgent after Hiroshima, only on August 9 after the Soviet declaration of war did he clearly say that "it is necessary to study and decide on the termination of the war" [26]. The other peace advocates in the Foreign Ministry on the same day began to urge acceptance of the Potsdam ultimatum [27]. The reactions of the more hawkish military officials seem to have been similar. Both Admiral Toyoda and Army Deputy Chief of Staff Kawabe were surprised at the news of Hiroshima but were not ready to temper their views on continuing the war [28]. Many military officials hoped to mount a final defense, but had counted on Soviet neutrality in order to do so [29]. The Soviet declaration of war destroyed those hopes, and severely weakened the war faction's leverage within the government.

The major strength of Hasegawa's work, and one reason for its new arguments, is its in-depth analysis of Japanese primary sources. Few previous historians in the US had consulted the personal writings of figures like Toyoda, Kawabe, and Tanemura. But Hasegawa also makes more extensive use of Allied primary sources, including the memoirs and diaries of Truman, Byrnes, Brown, and others, which play a key role in his argument about the intent of the Potsdam Proclamation. Hasegawa's careful scholarship has significantly enriched our understanding of the intentions behind the demand for "unconditional surrender," as well as the dynamics behind the Japanese decision to surrender.

I recently had a memorable conversation with a colleague (another former Junior Fellow) who is a professor in the history department. Despite early evidence of talent in mathematics, he decided to study history because he wanted a career in which his abilities would continue to grow and deepen well into maturity. He preferred to reach the peak of his powers late in life, rather than suffer the continuous decline so dreaded by precocious young geniuses in theoretical subjects. I begin to see his point.

Japanese diaries

So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers



I had a look at this in the bookstore recently -- it is beautifully written and translated. Both Keene and the diarists he has translated have exceptional psychological insight into an interesting time in Japanese history. There are many striking anecdotes. For example, one diarist records the applause of cinema goers in occupied Japan during American newsreels showing kamikaze fighters striking US ships.

See also Modern Japanese diaries: the Japanese at home and abroad as revealed through their diaries, which chronicles the impressions of early Japanese travelers visiting America, Europe and other parts of the world.

What it was like

Some WWII book recommendations. Lately, I've been most interested in first hand accounts, or novels written by those who actually experienced the war. Soon everyone who did will be gone.

Related posts: Bitter Defeat, Les Bienveillantes: The Kindly Ones.

Unfortunately some of the books listed below are hard to find, unless you have access to a good library.

Curzio Malaparte: The novels Kaputt and The Skin are worth reading, but The Volga Rises in Europe, which is a collection of dispatches from the Eastern Front, is priceless. His dispatches were censored, but have been collected with the author's additional comments.

Ernst Junger: The Details of Time (interview), Chatwin profile in NY Review of Books. I had high hopes for his journals, particularly his recollections of occupied Paris and trips to the east, but they are a bit disappointing.

Tapping Hitler's Generals: Transcripts of Secret Conversations, 1942-1945. Farm Hall for captured German generals. Who knew what, when? More here. Those tricky Englanders!

Life and Death in the Third Reich: a historian confronts the hard questions. Diaries and letters reveal the attitudes of average Germans. Excellent interview (podcast). Was Goldhagen right?

Ka-Tzetnik: The House of Dolls. Only if you have a strong stomach. It's pulp, but Feiner can write.

The Sound of His Horn: Science fiction, but deeply disturbing. Read online. More here.

The Heisenberg uncertainty

Why was the German atomic bomb effort during WWII unsuccessful? Was it because Heisenberg deliberately undermined the project (perhaps because he did not want Hitler to have atomic weapons), or because of simple incompetence?

I thought the question had been answered definitively by the release of the Farm Hall transcripts (Operation Epsilon). In the spring and summer of 1945 ten of the leading German nuclear physicists, including Heisenberg, were sequestered at a house near Cambridge, England. The house was bugged, and there is no reason to doubt that the conversations recorded were genuine:

Diebner: "I wonder whether there are microphones installed here?"

Heisenberg: "Microphones installed? (laughing) Oh no, they're not as cute as all that. I don't think they know the real Gestapo methods; they're a bit old fashioned in that respect."

I read the transcripts a few years ago, and my impression was that Heisenberg had grossly overestimated the amount of U235 necessary for a bomb. Here is what appears in the Wikipedia entry on Farm Hall:

Most historians have no reason to believe that he was not being genuine, and the attitude of Heisenberg and the other scientists over all the months and especially their reaction to the shattering news of the bomb explosion was so genuine that it is almost inconceivable it was staged.

All of the scientists expressed shock when informed of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The transcripts seem to indicate that the physicists, in particular Heisenberg, had either overestimated the amount of enriched uranium that an atomic bomb would require or consciously overstated it, and that the German project was at best in a very early, theoretical stage of thinking about how atomic bombs would work.

Recently I came across an exchange in the NY Review of Books, between physicist Jeremey Bernstein, who wrote Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall, and Thomas Powers, author of Heisenberg's War. Powers believes that Heisenberg had a much better understanding of the requirements for a bomb than are suggested by his Farm Hall comments immediately after learning of Hiroshima.

[Bernstein:] ... In June of 1942 Heisenberg was asked how much uranium a nuclear bomb would use that could destroy London. If one kilogram of uranium could be completely fissioned it would produce an explosion equal to about twenty thousand tons of TNT; about the size of the Hiroshima bomb. This would correspond to a sphere of uranium with a radius of a little over two centimeters—a ping- pong ball. But in a real bomb only about 2 percent of the uranium is fissioned so that about a hundred kilograms of uranium are needed, which corresponds to a radius of about eight and a half centimeters. At Farm Hall Heisenberg did not seem to have a clear idea of the efficiency question, so it is totally unclear to me what he had in mind when, in 1942, he apparently indicated that it was the shape of a pineapple. ...

[Letter from Charles Frank, British physicist and intelligence advisor to Operation Epsilon]: As I remember it, Heisenberg gave just the calculation you quote, except that my memory says he reached the answer 5 tons.... He gave this calculation at the beginning of an elegant colloquium, delivered the day after they heard about Hiroshima, in which he used a rather polished version of diffusion-and-multiplication theory (which he was no doubt familiar with from their pile work) to arrive at an answer for critical mass of the order of 1 or a few kilograms. He gave the crude and faulty calculation at the beginning, as the way they had worked it out before, and I think he said it was the way he had worked it out, and I think he said it was the estimate he gave at the 1940 conference about what was to be done with nuclear fission in relation to the war. I think he said he had done the revised calculation overnight, and I think that the whole style of the lecture implied that he was presenting a result and argument new to him and to his audience.

[Powers:] Bernstein interprets Heisenberg's remarks, available to us since the 1992 release of the Farm Hall tapes recorded by British intelligence during the war, to mean that Heisenberg failed to calculate the critical mass of an atomic bomb earlier in the war. Because fissionable material is extremely difficult and expensive to manufacture, the amount of it necessary for a bomb—the "critical mass"—is by far the most important technical question to be asked before embarking on a bomb program. A figure on the order of tons would have made building a bomb impossible for any nation at the time, the United States included. From his interpretation of Heisenberg's remarks on this point Bernstein concludes there was no German bomb, and no German bomb program, as the result of "simple incompetence"—the phrase he used in an article in the May 1999 issue of Commentary. In his letter he writes, "There is no evidence that he [Heisenberg] or anyone else in the German project did this calculation correctly during the war," but in fact there is such evidence—in the Farm Hall discussion recorded on the night after Hiroshima, Otto Hahn, one of the ten German scientists, protested Heisenberg's claim that huge amounts of fissionable uranium were required for a bomb. "But tell me why you used to tell me that one needed 50 kilograms of '235' in order to do anything. Now you say one needs two tons." ...

The German physicist Manfred von Ardenne confirms in his memoirs, as he did to me personally in an interview in 1989, that Hahn told him in 1940 that critical mass would be on the order of kilograms, not tons, citing Heisenberg as his source. The fact that Heisenberg had calculated a roughly correct value for critical mass is also demonstrated by his answer to a question during the June 1942 conference in Berlin with Albert Speer. In a letter to Samuel Goudsmit of October 3, 1948, Heisenberg wrote: "General Field Marshall Milch asked me approximately how large a bomb would be, of which the action was sufficient to destroy a large city. I answered at that time, that the bomb, that is the essentially active part, would have been about the size of a pineapple." (Goudsmit papers, American Institute of Physics) The "essentially active part" of a bomb is called the core. Erich Bagge, who was also present at the meeting with Speer, told interviewers, including me, that Heisenberg had shaped his hands in the air to suggest an object about the size of a "football." ...

So there seems to be some residual uncertainty over what Heisenberg knew and when. I guess I'll have to look at the transcripts again, but I distinctly recall Heisenberg being confused about the required critical mass for a bomb. He may very well have worked out the correct figure by his colloquium the following day, but of course that was with the additional knowledge that the Americans had actually produced a working bomb! As all theoreticians know, it's much easier to produce the right calculation once you know the final answer ;-)

An amusing story related by Powers:

... In a letter written to me a few years back the Italian physicist Ugo Fano described a party at the Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of Samuel Goudsmit, scientific director of the Alsos mission, in late August 1939. There two Nobel Prize–winning physicists, Werner Heisenberg, soon to return to Germany, and Enrico Fermi, a refugee from Mussolini's Italy, were both honored guests. "At that party," Fano writes, "[Edoardo] Amaldi drew me aside to point out its humor: 'See Fermi, see Heisenberg, sitting in that corner. Everyone in this room expects a big war and the two of them to lead fission work on opposite sides, but nobody says!'" (Letter of September 18, 1993) Within a month Heisenberg had in effect been drafted to do theoretical work on bomb physics and he soon wrote two papers which were the basis of further German research during the war.

Notes of a Japanese soldier in the USSR

The drawings below are by Kiuchi Nobuo, a Japanese soldier captured in Manchuria, who survived capitivity in the USSR. He was transported all the way to a camp in Ukraine. His web site is fascinating -- the sketches depict beautiful Soviet women (officers and doctors), children, Mongols, and prisoners of all nationalities. The emotional tone of the pictures is remarkably cheerful, despite what must have been harsh conditions.

By the end of World War II about 600 thousand Japanese soldiers and officers have been held captive in thousands of prison camps on a territory, stretched from Kamchatka in the East, across Urals to European part of USSR in the West and Yenisei Basin in the North. The History Chapters not only hold Japanese Army sound victories but also atrocities of defeat that I intend to tell about to the new generation. I decided to draw these pictures in memory of those of my comrades-in-arms, who were not destined to return home..

Picture of Kiuchi:



Some sketches (English translations of captions to be found on the web site):

Bitter defeat

Some more reading recommendations, this time on the immediate aftermath of WWII: the Russian occupation of Berlin and the US occupation of Tokyo. It's interesting that (at least in English translation) both the Germans and Japanese referred acerbically to their conquerors as the Victors.

Why this subject? I'm interested in how people behave when the framework of civilization has all but collapsed (i.e., the Hobbesian natural state, where life is nasty, brutish and short), and also in how order and the social contract are subsequently reimposed.





A Woman in Berlin: this memoir is interesting because of the period it covers -- 8 weeks beginning in April 1945, including the siege of Berlin, the early Russian occupation, and emerging postwar normalcy -- but also because of the unmatched clarity and insight of the 34 year old German author, a Russian-speaking journalist with a cosmopolitan background. Most readers will be shocked at the behavior of the Russian occupiers (in particular the mass rapes), but if the recollections of the author are correct the Russians seemed to have behaved much better than their German counterparts in the earlier eastern campaigns. I was quite impressed by the literary quality of the writing and feel that this memoir should someday make an excellent film.

Related recommendations: the early short fiction of Nobel laureate Heinrich Boll. Until I read this memoir I felt Boll's stories ("Trümmerliteratur"—the literature of the rubble) best captured the feel of occupied Germany. See also After the Reich: the Brutal History of the Allied Occupation for a historian's summary with none of the literary merits of Boll or the memoir (which seems to be used as a primary source by a number of historians).

Tokyo Year Zero: this is a novel, and a bit over the top, but captures well the deprivation and despair of Tokyo in 1946 (Guardian review). The title evokes Rossellini's film Germany Year Zero, which I also recommend. See also John Dower's Embracing Defeat, which seems to have provided some of the historical background.