...As August 1945 approached, Leo made one last attempt to stop the bomb: Along with Arthur Compton, Edward Teller, Eugene Rabinowitch, and a number of other prominent scientists, Leo helped draft the secret petition that would come to be known as the Franck Report, cautioning Washington about the likelihood of a postwar arms race should the bomb be deployed on Japan. The petition marked the end of Leo’s career in nuclear physics. It was the last of his many attempts to spurn Groves and his ilk, for whom the military use of the bomb beckoned as a career capstone.
...It’s space aliens, not scientists, who promise salvation in Leo’s fiction. Subverting the decade’s B-movie tropes, Leo’s aliens aren’t hostile invaders but melancholy intellectuals—cosmic outsiders who don’t want to blow up Earth but understand why it blew up in the first place. They’re not Communists, perhaps, but intergalactic fellow travelers; innocent of commerce, they appear to believe that the only thing crazier than nuclear war is capitalism itself. It’s the very unsubtlety of that symbolism that makes The Voice of the Dolphins such a ribald, risky marvel: Leo Szilard, enemy alien trailed by the FBI, wrote a widely-published book of fiction condemning the bomb and eulogizing Karl Marx.
...He understood, ever since that failed meeting with Byrnes, how thoroughly the bomb was embedded in forms of economic domination.
...The book, ultimately, suggests that history—its weight, its wounds—is inherited by the losers.
