Chapter 10 "Neutrons" Summary

Leo Szilard, sick with a cold in January 1939, is determined to prevent news about a chain reaction in uranium from reaching German physicists. He talks with his friend, Isador Isaac Rabi, Nobel laureate in physics in 1944, who tells him Fermi discussed the possibility of a chain reaction at Washington the week before. Rabi talks with Fermi, who discounts fission in natural uranium. Szilard cables Oxford to ship him the cylinder of beryllium he left at the Clarendon so he can do his own neutron-emission experiment. He convinces Lewis Strauss to become his patron. Szilard must rent radium to combine with his beryllium and needs financial support.

Szilard meets with the Tellers in Washington to discuss keeping nuclear fission secret from the Nazis. Szilard also talks with Eugene Wigner at Princeton. Neils Bohr, at Princeton, talking with colleagues, abruptly understands...