Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb

"He’s a minor character in the movie but a major force in starting the whole atomic bomb effort. He was really instigator of the letter that was sent to Roosevelt, that started the Manhattan Project. He and Edward Teller went to Einstein and convinced him to put his name on this letter. He was such an interesting and eccentric character. He did not have a conventional career, like scientists usually do. He never really had a particular place that he settled. He was always very peripatetic. The legend about him is that he always kept two packed suitcases. He was a refugee from Europe, so that experience, I think, affected him. Genius in the Shadows is really the first full biography of him that I had encountered. Szilard was very politically active. We see this in the Oppenheimer movie: he’s the one with the petition, trying to get the demonstration of the bomb. He was a gadfly. He was somebody who was always going against the grain, annoying people, but also making them think about things. He always had out-of-left-field ideas, but very interesting ones. Szilard was distraught by nuclear weapons. He fought to stop the use of the atomic bomb on Japan. He became very, very involved in the anti-nukes movement. Probably more than anyone else, he was the one who saw the definite damaging potential of them and what could happen. He predicted that there would be an arms race—many of the things that he predicted have come true. And he was so disillusioned by it all that in his later years, he switched from physics to molecular biology. I think it would have, but maybe a little bit later. After fission was discovered, everyone in the physics community knew was going on, and knew the potential of it. And of course, since that happened in Germany, everyone was worried about the Germans getting the bomb first. So I think even without Szilard pushing for it, it would have would have gotten done. Maybe a little bit later, maybe too late for us. And of course, Szilard really regretted his role in that, in getting it started. That led, in later life, not so much to guilt, but feeling responsibility for it—he was trying to offset that."