Leo Szilard

Leo Szilard (b 1898) was an American physicist originally born in Budapest, Hungary. He served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I, then studied engineering and technology and received a doctorate in physics in 1923. He became a professor of physics at the University of Berlin in Germany in 1927. A Jew, Szilard fled Germany when the Nazi Party took power in 1933 and relocated to London, Britain. In 1938 he moved to New York City in the United States to teach at Columbia University. There he began working with Enrico Fermi in studies of nuclear fission. The pair concluded that uranium was the most useful element for the creation of a fission reaction, and began work on the atomic pile.

In 1939 Szilard and a former professor of his, Albert Einstein, recognizing the awesome destructive potential of the atomic bomb and fearing what Germany would do with such a weapon, coauthored a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt urging that he authorize a program to develop a bomb for the US, hoping it would act as a deterrent to future Axis aggression. The result was the Manhattan Project, which Szliard worked on at the University of Chicago. When the Race's Conquest Fleet invaded Earth in 1942 and used an atomic bomb to destroy Washington, D.C., Szilard suggested to his colleagues that one of them travel to White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia to urge the US government to make atomic research its highest priority. Jens Larssen (who reflected that Szilard's name was very close to the nickname in vogue for the Race, "Lizards") was selected for this duty.

When Chicago was evacuated ahead of an advancing Race army, Szilard and the rest of the physicists working on the project travelled across much of the US to Denver, where they resumed work on the project. It was here that Szilard completed work on the atomic pile, and the atomic bomb itself.