Our Legacy
Late Founder and other Prestigious Board Members
Leo Szilard
Leo Szilard was born on February 11, 1898 in Budapest, Austro-Hungary. In 1916, he began his education as an engineering student at Budapest Technical University. In 1917, he entered the army and was honorably discharged from the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1918 at the end of World War I. In 1919, Szilard was forced to leave Austro-Hungary due to Anti-Semitism, but continued his education in engineering at the Berlin Institute of Technology. In 1920, Szilard became a physics student at the University of Berlin. In 1922, he received a doctorate in physics from University of Berlin. While studying at the University of Berlin he made important contacts with Albert Einstein that would last throughout his life.
In 1933, Szilard fled to London to escape Nazi persecution. While in London, he read an article written by Ernest Rutherford in the London Times, after which he conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction. In the following year, he filed a patent on the nuclear chain reaction. He first attempted to create a chain reaction using Beryllium and Indium, but neither yielded the reaction he deliberated. In 1936, he assigned the chain-reaction patent to the British Admiralty to ensure secrecy of the patent. In 1938, he moved to New York. After learning about fission in 1939, he concluded that uranium would be the element capable of the chain reaction.
In 1939, Szilard worried that Germany would discover the atomic bomb. He urged other scientists to keep fission private in order to postpone Germany manufacturing the bomb. In a letter prepared for Albert Einstein, Szilard wrote to President Roosevelt warning about the possibility of creating an atomic weapon and urged the US government to develop this weapon before Germany. This letter was a catalyst in involving the US government in atomic research, which led to establishing the Manhattan Project. On December 2, 1942, Szilard and Enrico Fermi were successful in creating the first controlled nuclear chain reaction.
In 1944, Szilard adamantly advocated against using the atomic bomb. Szilard was the drafter of a July 17, 1945 petition to the US president opposing the use of the bomb on moral grounds. 68 members of the metallurgical laboratory who worked on the atomic bomb signed the petition. Szilard also made a concerted effort to warn President Truman about the dangers of using the atomic weapons on Japan. Truman sent him to see Jimmy Byrnes, who was dismissive of Szilard.
After World War II, Szilard organized successful opposition to the May-Johnson bill, which would have placed atomic energy under military control. He also publicly opposed the development of the Hydrogen bomb.
In 1946, Szilard co-founded the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists with Einstein. Szilard and Fermi were awarded a patent for the nuclear fission reactor in 1955. In 1957, he began participating the Pugwash Conferences, which were established to bring scientists from the East and West together to discuss peace and security. Szilard proposed methods to reduce US-USSR tensions in 1960 and in 1962, he founded the Council for Abolishing War, which later changed its name to Council for a Livable World.
Szilard coined the phrase "Council for a Livable World" during visits to Stanford and Berkeley in 1962 in support of U.S. Senate candidates who were anti-war and pro-disarmament. Since then, the Council has raised millions of dollars for candidates who support arms control. The first senator elected with financing from the council was George McGovern in 1962 and since then the Council has helped to elect over 100 Senators.
Szilard died of a heart attack in his sleep on May 30, 1964 in La Jolla, California.
*Text adapted from material provided by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
Hans Bethe
Hans Bethe, an American physicist from Strassburg, Germany, was educated at Frankfurt and Munich universities. He was born in 1906 and moved to the United States in 1935 to teach at Cornell University. He was the Director of the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory and participated at the most senior level in the World War II Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic weapons. During 1935-1938, he studied nuclear reactions and reaction cross sections. This research was useful to Bethe in more quantitatively developing Neil Bohr's theory of the compound nucleus. During the '80s and '90s he campaigned for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. He is most noted for his theories on atomic properties. In 1967, Bethe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in solar and stellar energy. desist" from working on any aspect of nuclear weapons development and manufacture:
"I am one of the few remaining such senior persons alive. Looking back at the half century since that time, I feel the most intense relief that these weapons have not been used since World War II, mixed with the horror that tens of thousands of such weapons have been built since that time one hundred times more than any of us at Los Alamos could ever have imagined.
"Today we are rightly in an era of disarmament and dismantlement of nuclear weapons. But in some countries nuclear weapons development still continues. Whether and when the various Nations of the world can agree to stop this is uncertain. But individual scientists can still influence this process by withholding their skills. Accordingly, I call on all scientists in all countries to cease and desist from work creating, developing, improving and manufacturing further nuclear weapons; and, for that matter, other weapons of potential mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons."
Bethe passed away in March 2005, but to honor his legacy, the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation renamed its building after him, The Hans Bethe Center.
*Text adapted from material provided by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
George Kistiakowsky
George Kistiakowsky was born on 18 November 1900 in Kiev, Ukraine, a province of Russia at the time. He attended private schools in Kiev and Moscow until the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, at which time he joined the infantry and tank corps of the White Army. When the Bolsheviks assumed power in Russia, Kistiakowsky spent a year in concentration camps in Turkey and the Balkans, then fled to Germany. He studied physical chemistry at the University of Berlin, earning his doctorate in 1925. The following year Kistiakowsky came to the United States, where he taught at Princeton for two years. He joined the faculty at Harvard University in 1930.
While teaching at Harvard, Kistiakowsky applied his expertise in thermodynamics, spectroscopy, and chemical kinetics to military research, corporate consulting, and political advising. During World War II, Kistiakowsky served as chief of the National Defense Research Committee's Explosives Division.
In January 1944, Kistiakowsky joined the Manhattan Project, replacing Seth Neddermeyer as head of the implosion program. He oversaw 600 people on the development of a triggering device to detonate the atomic bomb-explosive lenses that uniformly compress the plutonium sphere to achieve critical mass.
Kistiakowsky returned to Harvard at the end of World War II and divided his time between teaching and advising several US administrations on arms control and foreign policy. He served on the President's Science Advisory Committee between 1957 and 1964, and as the Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology from 1959 to 1961. In 1958, Kistiakowsky was a member of the US delegation to Geneva, where the US and USSR discussed how to minimize the danger of a surprise nuclear attack.
Kistiakowsky was concerned with public policy and the allocation of government resources. He worked to influence these arenas through the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), serving as chairman of its Committee on Science and Public Policy from 1962 to 1965, and as vice-president of NAS from 1965 to 1973.
Kistiakowsky became increasingly doubtful about the possibility of changing politics from within the administrative channels in Washington. In 1968, Kistiakowsky severed his connections with the Pentagon to protest US involvement in Vietnam. After retiring from Harvard as professor emeritus in 1972, Kistiakowsky became even more involved in political activism in the areas of de-escalating the arms race and banning nuclear weapons. In 1977, he assumed the chairmanship of the Council for Livable World, campaigning to de-escalate the arms race and reorient the domestic political agenda.
Kistiakowsky received numerous awards throughout his lifetime for his work in science and in politics, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Joseph Priestly Award of the American Chemical Society.
George Bogdan Kistiakowsky died on December 7, 1982.
*Text adapted from material provided by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan played a leading role in the American space program since its inception. He has been a consultant and adviser to NASA since the 1950s, briefed the Apollo astronauts before their flights to the Moon, and was an experimenter on the Mariner, Viking, Voyager, and Galileo expeditions to the planets. He helped solve the mysteries of the high temperature of Venus (a massive greenhouse effect), the seasonal changes on Mars (windblown dust) and the reddish haze of Titan (complex organic molecules).
For his work, Dr. Sagan has received the NASA Medals for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and for Distinguished Public Service twice, as well as the NASA Apollo Achievement Award.
Asteroid 2709 Sagan is named after him. He has also been given the John F. Kennedy Astronautics Award of the American Astronautical Society, the Explorers Club 75th Anniversary Award, the Konstantin Tsiolokovsky Medal of the Soviet Cosmonautics Federation, and the Masursky Award of the American Astronomical Society:
"...for his extraordinary contributions to the development of planetary science... As a scientist trained in both astronomy and biology, Dr. Sagan made seminal contributions to the study of planetary atmospheres, planetary surfaces, the history of the Earth, and exobiology. Many of the most productive planetary scientists working today are his present and former students and associates." He is also the 1994 recipient of the Public Welfare Medal, the highest award of the National Academy of Sciences for "distinguished contributions in the application of science to the public welfare."
This award read as follows:
"Carl Sagan has been enormously successful in communicating the wonder and importance of science. His ability to capture the imagination of millions and to explain difficult concepts in understandable terms is a magnificent achievement."
Dr. Sagan served as Chairman of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, as President of the Planetology Section of the American Geophysical Union, and as Chairman of the Astronomy Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
For 12 years he was Editor in Chief of Icarus, the leading professional journal devoted to planetary research. He was the cofounder and first President of The Planetary Society and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology.
A Pulitzer Prize winner, Dr. Sagan is the author of many bestsellers, including Cosmos, which became the best-selling science book ever published in the English language. The accompanying Emmy and Peabody award-winning television series has been seen by 500 million people in 60 countries. He received 20 honorary degrees from American colleges and universities for his contributions to science, literature, education, and the preservation of the environment.
At the time of his death on December 20, 1996, he served as the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University. Dr. Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark was released by Random House in March 1996. A collection of writings called Billions and Billions was published posthumously. He is co-producer and co-writer of the acclaimed Warner Brothers movie Contact, based on his novel.
Jerome Wiesner
Jerome Wiesner was an educator, a science advisor to U.S. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, an advocate for arms control, and a critic of anti-ballistic-missile defense systems. He was also an outspoken advocate for the exploration of outer space using only unmanned satellites, most notably in his consistent denouncement of the Mercury Program and its follow-ups.
He was associated with MIT for most of his career, joining the MIT Radiation Laboratory in 1942 and working on radar development. He worked briefly at Los Alamos, returned to become a professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, and worked at and ultimately became director of MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). He became Dean of the School of Science in 1964, Provost in 1966, and President from 1971 to 1980. He was also elected a life member of the MIT Corporation.
He held numerous positions as a government policy advisor on science and technology.
During the Watergate scandal, on June 28, 1973 it transpired that Charles W. Colson, counsel to President Nixon, had prepared an "enemies list" of people deemed "hostile to the administration," while a memo from John Dean discussed "how we can use the available Federal machinery to screw our political enemies." This "enemies list" included Wiesner among twenty-one academics. Other memos indicated that Nixon had ordered that MIT's subsidy be cut "in view of Wiesner's anti-defense bias." Three MIT associates — Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, and Edwin Land — were also on the list, giving MIT more names on the list than any other single organization.
Wiesner was portrayed by Al Franken in the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon.
