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optimists. (You know, an optimist is a man who
     jumps out of the window of the 22nd floor and who says smiling when he passes the 10th floor, falling down: ‘Well, nothing
     happened to me up till now.’)” 10 Szilard’s sarcasm belied his deep pessimism and despair.
    On the night of February 27, 1933, Nazi saboteurs set fire to the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament. Hitler blamed the arson
     on a Jewish-Communist plot and bullied Reichstag deputies into granting him dictatorial powers. On April first the Nazis directed
     a national boycott of Jewish businesses and beat Jews in the streets. On April seventh thousands of Jewish academics lost
     their positions in German universities. Szilard was particularly incensed by the prohibition against teaching “Jewish science”—any
     theory, even Einstein’s profound theory of relativity, that had been developed by a Jew. He decided the time had come to get
     out. He grabbed his suitcases and took the night train to Vienna. The following day Nazi border guards stopped the same train
     and held back everyone whose passport was stamped “non-Aryan.” This close call so traumatized Szilard that, forever after,
     he kept two suitcases packed and close at hand wherever he lived. 11
    In Vienna Szilard called on Western embassies and warned them that the Nazi assault on Jews was just beginning. The diplomats
     listened politely but said, and did, nothing. So Szilard decided to leave the Continent for the greater safety of Britain.
     He sought a permanent academic position there, but Depression-era Britain had only a limited ability to absorb refugees—there
     were neither enough positions nor enough money to fund them. Unable to secure a university appointment, Szilard decided to
     camp out in a modest hotel in London while he contemplated his next step. For the moment, he lived on the income from his
     patent licenses and money he had saved from tutoring fees.
    Szilard was an idea man par excellence. Each day for months he strolled London’s busy streets and beautiful parks pondering
     nuclear physics and his fears for Europe’s future. One afternoon, while walking on a sidewalk in Bloomsbury, he had a fateful
     idea. He later recalled:
    As the light changed to green and I crossed the street, it suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which
     is split by neutrons and which would emit
two
neutrons when it absorbed
one
neutron, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large mass, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction. I didn’t see at
     the moment just how one would go about finding such an element or what experiments would be needed, but the idea never left
     me. 12
    Szilard imagined that if a neutron struck a nucleus and split the atom, the breakup might release the binding energy that
     holds the atom together. Some of that atom’s neutrons might in turn be released, which could hit and split other atoms. If
     more than one neutron was released from each split atom, the process could expand exponentially. “One neutron would release
     two, which would each strike an atomic nucleus to release four… and so on. In millionths of a second, billions of atoms would
     split.” 13
    Suddenly Szilard remembered the H. G. Wells novel he had read a year earlier. Published in 1914, just before the outbreak
     of World War I,
The World Set Free
prophetically described a conflict in which cities were destroyed by atomic bombs. “Of course,” Szilard wrote a friend to
     whom he sent a copy of the novel, “all this is moonshine, but I have reason to believe that the forecast of the writers may
     prove to be more accurate than the forecast of the scientists.” 14
    Szilard stood alone in his belief in a chain reaction. At the time, his mentor and friend Einstein—the world’s preeminent
     theoretical physicist—told reporters that such an effort would be “fruitless.” 15 Attempting to unlock the energy of the atom by neutron bombardment, said Einstein, was