The First Nuclear Protest

On this date in 1945: When the great physicist Leo Szilard launched the only bold, if top secret, effort to keep Truman from dropping two atomic bombs over Japan.

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The Szilard Petition

Seventy-six years ago, on July 3, 1945, the great atomic scientist Leo Szilard finalized a petition that would become the strongest (virtually the only) real attempt at halting President Truman's march to using the atomic bomb a little more than one month later against two Japanese cities, killing at least 200,000 people, the vast majority of them civilians.  

I've written three books on the general subject, including  Hiroshima in America (with Robert Jay Lifton) and Atomic Cover-up (on suppression of film shot in the atomic cities), which ia also the title of my new, award-winning film.  Szilard is featured in my book, published last year, The Beginning or the End:  How Hollywood--and America--Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, on Truman and the military sabotaging the first movie, from MGM, on the atomic bomb.

It’s well known that as the Truman White House made plans to use the first atomic bombs against Japan in the summer of 1945, a large group of atomic scientists, many of whom had worked on the bomb project at various top-secret Manhattan Project sites, privately raised their voices, or at least their names, in protest. They were led by the great Szilard. On July 3, he finished a petition to the president for his fellow scientists to consider, which called atomic bombs “a means for the ruthless annihilation of cities.” It asked the president “to rule that the United States shall not, in the present phase of the war, resort to the use of atomic bombs.”

The following day he wrote this cover letter (below). The same day, Gen. Leslie R. Groves, military chief of the Manhattan Project, wrote Winston Churchill’s science advisor seeking advice on how to combat Szilard and his colleagues. The FBI was already following malcontent Szilard. The bomb would be tested two weeks later at the Trinity site and dropped over Hiroshima on August 6. The letter:

July 4, 1945

Dear xxxxxxxxxxxx,

Enclosed is the text of a petition which will be submitted to the President of the United States. As you will see, this petition is based on purely moral considerations.

It may very well be that the decision of the President whether or not to use atomic bombs in the war against Japan will largely be based on considerations of expediency. On the basis of expediency, many arguments could be put forward both for and against our use of atomic bombs against Japan.

Such arguments could be considered only within the framework of a thorough analysis of the situation which will face the United States after this war and it was felt that no useful purpose would be served by considering arguments of expediency in a short petition.

However small the chance might be that our petition may influence the course of events, I personally feel that it would be a matter of importance if a large number of scientists who have worked in this field went clearly and unmistakably on record as to their opposition on moral grounds to the use of these bombs in the present phase of the war.

Many of us are inclined to say that individual Germans share the guilt for the acts which Germany committed during this war because they did not raise their voices in protest against these acts. Their defense that their protest would have been of no avail hardly seems acceptable even though these Germans could not have protests without running risks to life and liberty. We are in a position to raise our voices without incurring any such risks even though we might incur the displeasure of some of those who are at present in charge of controlling the work on “atomic power”.

The fact that the people of the people of the United States are unaware of the choice which faces us increases our responsibility in this matter since those who have worked on “atomic power” represent a sample of the population and they alone are in a position to form an opinion and declare their stand.

Anyone who might wish to go on record by signing the petition ought to have an opportunity to do so and, therefore, it would be appreciated if you could give every member of your group an opportunity for signing.

Leo Szilard

What happened next?  The petition gained over 150 signatures, but was opposed by revered J. Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, then delayed in getting to President Truman (if it got there at all) by Gen. Groves—until the A-bombs were ready to use.  Groves also commissioned a poll of atomic scientists, which found that over 80% favored a demonstration shot for the Japanese to perhaps produce a rapid surrender, so he squelched that result, too.  (Much more in my book The Beginning or the End.) The petition would not be declassified until the early 1960s.

Szilard would later say that he considered himself a “war criminal” for his part in sparking development of the new weapon, and then failing to stop its use. He even wrote a fantasy where he placed himself on trial.

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Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. His new film, Atomic Cover-up, just had its world premiere and is drawing extraordinary acclaim. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.