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the modesty of his impromptu request.
    Despite the paltry nature of the sum that had been mentioned, Adamson bridled. ‘Gentlemen,’ he berated them, ‘armaments are not what decides war and makes history. Wars are won through the morale of the civilian population.’ Wigner, normally polite and formal in his dealings with colleagues, became angry and spoke up for the first time in the meeting. ‘If that is true,’ he declared in his high-pitched voice, ‘then perhaps we should cut the Army budget thirty per cent and spread that wonderful morale through the civilian population.’
    Adamson visibly flushed, and muttered that the physicists would get their money.
    Szilard drafted a blueprint for the American uranium research project and mailed this to Briggs five days after the committee’s first meeting. In it he suggested which experiments should be conducted and identified the American laboratories that should be involved. He also urged that all future research reports be subject to the strictest secrecy and withheld from publication in the open scientific literature.
    But the Advisory Committee lacked resolve. It reported back to Roosevelt on 1 November a commitment to explore controlled chain reactions in uranium as a potential power source for submarines which, if the reaction turned out to be explosive, could be further explored as a source of highly destructive bombs. It agreed to supply four tons of purified graphite to support Fermi and Szilard’s experiments, to be followed by 50 tons of uranium oxide, if this could be subsequently justified.
    Briggs was respected but obsessed with secrecy and dogged by poor health. He was unable to imbue the committee or its sponsors with any real sense of urgency. The war in Europe was, after all, a long way away. What’s more, he was reluctant to commit large sums of money to the project. The money that had been promised at the 21 October meeting was not quickly forthcoming.
    Szilard might have been elated by the fact that the importance of uranium fission had now been recognised, but this gave way to morefrustration as the first months of 1940 unfolded. He was still without formal employment, and uncertain how long his loose affiliation with Columbia University could be maintained. He was not in a position to repay the $2,000 he had borrowed to carry out experiments to verify the production of secondary neutrons and was obliged to go back to his sponsor to declare this a bad debt.
    He heard nothing from Briggs.
    Zeal for secrecy
    News that a secret German research project on nuclear fission had begun at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin reached America in January 1940 through Pieter Debye, recently expelled from his position at the Institute and now on extended ‘leave of absence’. Debye played down the significance of the project. The Uranverein physicists were very well aware of the German army’s objectives but considered success ‘improbable’, he claimed. In the meantime the German physicists had a splendid opportunity to carry out fundamental research at the army’s expense. On the whole, Debye was inclined to consider the situation a good joke on the German army.
    Debye visited Fermi at Columbia University shortly after arriving in America. Fermi too, it seemed, was unconcerned by Debye’s news. The Uranverein physicists were working at laboratories all over Germany, he observed, and would not be able to make any kind of concerted effort towards a bomb.
    But the news had precisely the opposite effect on Szilard. He had spent the previous weeks working on a couple of theoretical papers on self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions, 1 work which no doubt convinced him that a nuclear explosive of some kind was now inevitable. The existence of a German fission project greatly alarmed him. He discussed the matter with Einstein at Princeton, and together they decided to draft another letter, this time to Sachs.
    In this letter they emphasised that interest in