Nuclear Weapons And The Moral Accountability Of The émig Scientists
Introduction:
In the years following the discovery of nuclear fission, the prospects of this new phenomena having some technological application (in the form of a bomb) were gradually realised. During this period, Leo Szilard and fellow émigré scientists involved in the Manhattan Project became clearly entangled between their moral obligations to the United States, to the scientific community, and possibly even to their homeland in Europe. By analysing the details of key events, this paper will aim to explain exactly what their moral obligations to each party were, and to what extent these obligations were adhered to, up until VJ-Day . By the conclusion it will be clear that the émigrés primarily honoured their obligations to the U.S. government over and above those to the scientific community.
Experiment and Censorship:
Even four years before fission was proven, Szilard intuitively sensed its possibility. What's more striking were his efforts to censor his first successful chain reaction experiment with Enrico Fermi in 1939. Both the experiment, and the censorship of it begged two important moral questions: Were Szilard and colleagues morally justified in exclusively deciding not to publish information which (according to them) if made public, could have been used by the Nazis to help them do the unthinkable? And were they morally justified in trying to discover such facts knowing that, if they found what they were looking for, it could lead to such a deadly weapon?
Both questions must take into consideration that, at the time of Szilard's experiment, the U.S. was still more than 3 years from declaring war on their only WWII enemy, Japan (and not Germany). There is a possibility that émigrés decision may have been influenced by the fact that the Nazis posed a threat to their European homeland. But even leaving this aside, it would be difficult to conclude that by not sharing this information, that the decision of the...
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