For five years he worked to find the element that would sustain a nuclear chain reaction. But, focusing on beryllium and then indium, he failed. He was left looking at best a deluded visionary and at worst a scientific shyster. His prospects were far from certain, for, as his friend and fellow physicist Francis Simon wrote to him, ‘there are quite a few people who are dying to converse with you for a few days but none who would like to offer you a job’.

  Uninclined to listen to the advice of others while very willing to give it, Szilard was by the winter of 1938 withdrawn, in a depressed state, spending ever more time in the bathtub in his latest room at the King’s Crown Hotel in New York, having moved to the US sensing, with his usual prescience, that the Munich agreement signalled not peace in our time but a Europe hostage to Nazism. Finally, he conceded defeat. He wrote to the British Admiralty asking that his patent no longer be a secret.

  Unknown to him, the very same day German scientists led by Otto Hahn in Berlin demonstrated a successful nuclear chain reaction using uranium. It released an unexpected amount of energy, a process they named fission.

  10

  Leo Szilard learnt the startling news a month later, in January 1939, while visiting his friend, the Hungarian physicist and later Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, who was ill with jaundice at the Princeton infirmary. Szilard realised his intuition had been right all along and that a chain reaction was possible. Only his choice of element to prove it had been wrong. ‘All the things H. G. Wells predicted,’ he later recounted, ‘appeared suddenly real to me.’

  His 1933 Russell Square revelation would have been just one more extraordinary insight that had come too early and, because of Szilard’s concern to keep it secret, perhaps would have proved to be a dead end were it not that Szilard had in consequence devoted more than half a decade to deeply pondering the technological, military and political consequences of a man-made nuclear chain reaction. And when Wigner told Szilard of the breakthrough with uranium, Szilard, alone in the world, immediately understood the terrifying implications of the discovery.

  ‘You know what fission means?’ he told another friend, the physicist Edward Teller. ‘It means bombs.’

  Szilard redoubled his urging of his fellow scientists of the need for secrecy. Yet as late as 1939 almost all physicists continued to believe with Rutherford that atomic energy and atomic bombs were moonshine, and that, in any case, science was best served by openness across borders that were now lamentably beginning to close all over Europe.

  Szilard’s worst fears quickly proved correct. On 29 April 1939 a secret conference in Berlin resulted in the commencement of a Nazi atomic research program, a ban on German uranium exports and the provision for the supply of radium from Czechoslovakian mines to the Third Reich with the aim of developing an atom bomb. Nazi Germany had become the first country in the world to begin actively working to develop nuclear weapons.

  11

  It was a hot summer’s day in early July 1939 when Albert Einstein, who had spent a morning sailing in a small wooden dinghy off Peconic, Long Island, went to answer the door of his holiday home in shorts tied up with string and a pair of size eleven women’s sandals that he had bought from the local store in the absence of any men’s sandals in his size. To his surprise none other than Leo Szilard and another old colleague from his Berlin days, Eugene Wigner, stood there.

  The two men had spent a frustrating, now overly long morning driving from New York to Long Island searching for their former teacher who they had heard was spending his summer holidays there, with no more details other than that he was staying at a cottage owned by a Dr Moore. Two of the greatest minds in twentieth-century physics had confused place names and ended up lost on Long Island’s south shore instead of its north, taking two hours in the unnecessary detour, then wasting more time while Szilard, a now fat-faced man sounding not unlike Bela Lugosi, took to leaning out the window of Wigner’s 1936 Dodge coupe asking Peconic vacationers if they knew where Dr Moore’s cottage might be.

  No one knew.

  Finally, reasoning every child knew who Einstein was, Szilard decided to ask a young boy with a fishing rod if he knew where the great man was.

  He did.

  The three men sat on Dr Moore’s porch sipping iced tea and chatting about the latest German atomic discoveries, their own recent experiments and calculations, and how these discoveries might be the basis of atomic bombs. Einstein, who hadn’t followed atomic research for some years, was shocked. A pacifist, he nevertheless saw the extraordinary danger of a nuclear-armed Nazi Germany.

  It was agreed that Einstein would sign a letter that would be personally delivered by an intermediary to President Roosevelt, alerting him to the danger and seeking support for research into an atomic bomb. The letter was principally Szilard’s work, Einstein later saying he ‘really only acted as a mailbox’ for his former student.

  The letter pointed out that Nazi Germany was already securing uranium supplies from Czechoslovakia and German research was already repeating American work on uranium. Warning of ‘extremely powerful bombs of a new type’, just one of which ‘carried by a boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory’ the letter urged the government to take ‘quick action’.

  Roosevelt was persuaded. In October 1939 the US government began work to develop an atom bomb, leading to the later historic Manhattan Project.

  12

  Szilard remained an influential and at times pivotal force in the bomb’s development through the war. Though his energies were devoted to defeating the Nazis and ensuring that they were not the first with the bomb, his efforts were perversely limited by official persecution. His independence of mind and approach enraged General Leslie Groves, a portly bull of a man put in charge of the Manhattan Project and described by a fellow officer as ‘the biggest sonovabitch I’ve ever met in my life, but also one of the most capable’.

  Groves loathed Leo Szilard. ‘I am not prejudiced,’ Groves said in his defence. ‘I don’t like certain Jews and I don’t like certain well-known characteristics of theirs, but I am not prejudiced.’ He observed that were the US ‘a country like Germany’ there were a dozen scientists ‘we should have shot right off. And another dozen we could have shot for suspicion or carelessness.’ If Groves had been allowed an execution list Leo Szilard almost certainly would have been at its top. He unsuccessfully sought to have Szilard interned for the war’s duration and had the FBI follow and investigate Szilard.

  The agents for their part described a man ‘inclined to be rather absent-minded and eccentric . . . [he will] go out on the street without his coat or hat and frequently looks up and down the street as if he were watching for someone or did not know for sure where he wanted to go.’

  At times there would be upwards of six agents watching Szilard breakfast in a diner. Szilard compared Groves’s methods to the Nazis’, but he met the torment with good humour, offering the hapless shadows coffees, inviting them into his cab, even proffering umbrellas when it was raining.

  Despite Groves’s persecution, Szilard continued with his work. A critical step in developing an atom bomb was building a nuclear reactor. To succeed, a substance—known as a moderator—was needed to slow down the speed of neutrons so that they would strike enough nearby uranium atoms to create a nuclear chain reaction. Szilard discovered—typically not in the lab but over lunch in conversation with some contractors—that commercial grade graphite contained boron. Szilard knew boron absorbed neutrons, thus preventing a chain reaction.

  On 2 December 1942, in a squash court beneath the stands of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field football field, the world’s first man-made nuclear reaction took place in a nuclear reactor built by Szilard and Fermi, now a Nobel laureate, using, thanks to Szilard’s insight, a newly developed, highly purified graphite.

  ‘There was a crowd there and when it dispersed, Fermi and I stayed there alone,’ Szilard later wrote. ‘I shook hands with Fermi and I said that I thought this day would go down as a black day in the history of mankind. I was quite aware of the dangers. Not because I am so wise but because I have read a book written by H. G. Wells called The World Set Free.’

  13

  Szilard’s indefatigable advocacy of self-censorship on atomic research was also finally yielding results. Scientists were breaking with long-standing tradition and no longer publicly publishing papers on the subject, thereby starving Nazi scientists of knowledge of critical breakthroughs that would have greatly helped them build an atomic bomb.

  Lacking that knowledge and lacking a Szilard, unaware of the problem of boron contamination, the German scientists had wrongly concluded in January 1940 that graphite would not work as a moderator. The Germans turned to the use of heavy water in its place, a far rarer substance that required extensive electrolysis to isolate it from normal water. The principal source of heavy water in Europe was a Norwegian hydro-electricity plant at Vemork which the Allies were able to successfully cripple through partisan sabotage and aerial bombing. In consequence, the Germans never succeeded in building a successful nuclear reactor. Even before Germany’s unconditional surrender in May 1945 it was clear that the Nazis had no nuclear weaponry. The target for the bomb was now to be Japan which the US knew had no capacity to build an atomic bomb.

  The rationale for Szilard’s support for the bomb vanished. Einstein later said he would never have signed his famous letter to Roosevelt if he had known the Germans didn’t have the bomb. Faced with the imminent birth of the nuclear era for which he bore so much responsibility, a far-fetched fiction he had helped transform into fact, Szilard feared a new era of barbarism loomed unless immediate steps were taken.

  14

  In the latter part of The World Set Free the world is saved during a global nuclear war by the unlikely figure of Leblanc, the French ambassador to the US, who convenes ‘a last desperate conference to “save humanity”’. Leblanc, small, bald, bespectacled, ‘with his transparent childish innocence . . . possessed of one clear persuasion, that war must end’ appeals directly to the president ‘for the Americans were also among the simple peoples by whom the world was saved’.

  The paradox of Leo Szilard is that as his life progresses, this brilliant man with an almost mystical ability to see the future nevertheless seems to come under the spell of a mediocre novel so completely that at first the book appears to predict his life only to then mock it.

  And so, as if aping Leblanc, Szilard secured a meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt, the president’s influential wife, scheduled for 8 May 1945, to press the need for delaying any use of the atomic bomb and developing a system of international controls. His hopes for the meeting died with Roosevelt on 12 April.

  Szilard’s torment was only beginning. In late May, weeks before the first atomic bomb was tested in New Mexico on 16 July he passed a memorandum to James Byrnes, soon to be secretary of state for the new president, Harry Truman, for him to deliver to Truman. Szilard asked that the president withhold his approval of using the bomb against Japan, pleading that Japan be given advance warning, arguing for a demonstration bomb explosion to be witnessed by Japanese officials to show the terrifying power the US could now unleash.

  Byrnes never delivered the memorandum.

  The day after the first atomic bomb test Szilard, frightened by what he had been central in creating, forwarded a petition to Truman signed by 155 Manhattan Project scientists that advanced a moral argument against the bomb’s use against Japan, warning that any subsequent global nuclear confrontation could be catastrophic. There would have been more signatories but J. Robert Oppenheimer, director at Los Alamos, forbade the petition’s circulation there.

  General Groves delayed the petition’s delivery. To negate its impact he ordered a poll of his scientists only to discover that 83 per cent supported a demonstration of the bomb to Japanese officials before using it. He buried these findings also.

  When Szilard tried to publish the petition the following month, Groves had it classified. It was not declassified until 1961. There is no evidence Truman ever read it. On 25 July 1945 he authorised the dropping of an atomic bomb on Japan as soon as weather permitted after 3 August. There were four possible sites. One was Hiroshima.

  15

  Captain Paul Tibbets was given twelve cyanide capsules before departing the Tinian Island base for Hiroshima. If the Enola Gay was shot down, each crew member was to swallow one so that they could not be taken captive and reveal any information. Tibbets was ordered to shoot anyone who refused. Mid-flight he told his co-pilot, Robert Lewis. Lewis responded by showing him a pack of condoms he carried in his flight pocket ready for the post-war party.

  ‘Bomb away!’ said Thomas Ferebee, as the great silverplated B-29 banked up and away and 60,000 or 80,000 or 140,000 Japanese souls passed through the plane’s silver aluminium cladding and superstructure and the aircrew’s leather air suits, penetrating their skin and bones and organs such that they lit up as if they had swallowed a light more brilliant than the sun. This worried Thomas Ferebee. Over the plane’s intercom he asked Captain Paul Tibbets if he would still be able to have children.

  16

  In Los Alamos that evening, Oppenheimer, the head of the project there, took to the stage in front of an assembly of all those who had worked on the bomb. ‘I’ll never forget his walk,’ the physicist Isidor Rabi later recalled. ‘His walk was like High Noon . . . this kind of strut. He had done it.’ Oppenheimer raised both hands and clasped them together ‘like a prize-winning boxer’.

  The crowd cheered.

  ‘Using atomic bombs against Japan is one of the greatest blunders of history,’ Szilard wrote the following day to his close friend, later to be his wife, Gertrud Weiss. ‘I went out of my way (and very much so) in order to prevent it but as today’s papers show, without success.’

  ‘It was one of the most important letters he ever wrote to me,’ Weiss later said, adding, ‘I always thought it was his way of apologising.’

  17

  Thomas Ferebee died in 2000, survived by his four sons and five grandchildren. Time can never be stopped or reversed, and nor can the unimaginable suffering and immeasurable death be stopped or reversed. To suggest otherwise is a form of kitsch. To suggest otherwise would be to pretend that we know what happened at Hiroshima. But no one knows what happened at Hiroshima. Everyone who knew had already passed through Thomas Ferebee’s body as pure energy, lighting his body up like a neon tube.

  What if vengeance and atonement both are simply the lie that time can be reversed and thereby some equality, some equilibrium restored, some justice had? Is it simply truer to say Hiroshima happened, Hiroshima is still happening, and Hiroshima will always happen?

  18

  Three Japanese women came to see my father many years later. They came with gifts. They asked him to tell his story and they listened. They said they were sorry.

  There was a sense of strange ceremony, the awkwardness of ensuring something exquisitely fragile was not dropped before being given and received. There was a reserve on the part of both my father and the women, perhaps explicable as a nervousness about giving offence where none was intended.

  They were part of a group of Japanese women committed to exposing Japanese war crimes. Two were middle-aged and one was elderly. They were brave and they were dignified. The eldest was their leader. She had survived the Tokyo fire bombing. My father expressed his sorrow.

  His children and his grandchildren were all there. We watched this meeting with its strange weight of human dignity and goodness. I could not ever have believed that saying sorry might mean so much. None was their government. None bore responsibility. No one spoke for anyone other than themselves. Nothing said or done had any national consequence. Yet in that strange communion lay liberation. What other answer can any of us make to the terrible question of history?

  19

  Thomas Ferebee’s body was lit up like a neon tube, his body is lighting up like a neon tube, his body will always light up like a neon tube as until the end of all things the suffering of the dead illuminates the living.

  That’s life.

  Six

  1

  I must be two years old when we stand in the departing mist on some embankment or rise looking down at the flooded South Esk flowing around our village of Longford in which we are now cut off, my mother’s warm hand enclosing mine. A vast flatness of water moving imperceptibly and inexorably, which is to say strangely and outwardly not at all, erasing detail, labour, the frail markings of man. Before us, everything is transforming into a mystery of water as inscrutable as a floating mirror.

  I didn’t know it was a river. I thought it was the world, that the world moved. I thought my mother meant me to understand that it would be necessary to ride it and move with it somehow if we were to live. If she had said we must row our home to another world, I would have asked if I might help pull an oar.

  From the beginning I was haunted by rivers.

  I remember above all my mother’s excitement—of life upended, perhaps thrilling to the loss of control, or adventure, or the whole world turned fluid and upside down; the possibility of finding freedom in the world beyond human beings when it is denied to you otherwise. For one glorious moment any loss seemed worth the cost.

  2

  After some time there appears out of the mist a car, a Ford Zephyr overloaded with children and suitcases and bags, driving along a new road in 1963, a muddy track slashing a seemingly negligible gash through a temperate rainforest. In this world where the measure of all things is not man made, it seems at first the merest scratch, a slight wound that will quickly heal over, rather than what it is, the beginning of something gangrenous and fatal.