Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

by Eric Schlosser

During the 1930s, the Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd—who’d met with H. G. Wells in 1929 and tried, without success, to obtain the central European literary rights to his novels—conceived of a nuclear weapon that would explode instantly. A Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, Szilárd feared that Hitler might launch an atomic bomb program and get the weapon first. Szilárd discussed his concerns with Albert Einstein in the summer of 1939 and helped draft a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The letter warned that “it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium,” leading to the creation of “extremely powerful bombs of a new type.” Einstein signed the letter, which was hand delivered to the president by a mutual friend. After British researchers concluded that such weapons could indeed be made and intelligence reports suggested that German physicists were trying to make them, the Manhattan Project was formed in 1942. Led by Leslie R. Groves, a brigadier general in the U.S. Army, it secretly gathered eminent scientists from Canada, Great Britain, and the United States, with the aim of creating atomic bombs.