The Szilárd petition, drafted and circulated in July 1945 by scientist Leo Szilard, was signed by 70 scientists working on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, Illinois. It asked President Harry S. Truman to inform Japan of the terms of surrender demanded by the allies, and allow Japan to either accept or refuse these terms, before America used atomic weapons. However, the petition never made it through the chain of command to President Truman. It was not declassified and made public until 1961. Later, in 1946, Szilard jointly with Albert Einstein, created the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists that counted among its board, Linus Pauling (Nobel Peace Prize in 1962). Background The petition was preceded by the Franck Report, written by the Committee on the Social and Political Implications of the Atomic Bomb, of which James Franck was the chair. Szilárd and Met Lab colleague Glenn T. Seaborg co-wrote the report, which argued that political security in a post-nuclear world would rely upon international exchange and ownership of atomic information, and that in order to avoid a nuclear arms race and preserve goodwill towards the United States, Japan must be given proper warning ahead of the dropping of the bomb. Unlike the Franck Report, which by and large focused on the politics of using the atomic bomb and the possibility of international collaboration, the Szilárd Petition was a moral plea. Its signatories, foreseeing an age of rapid nuclear expansion, warned that, should the United States drop the bomb to end the war in the Pacific theater, they would "bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale." They feared that, in using the bomb, the United States would lose moral authority to bring the subsequent nuclear arms race under control. More than 50 of the initial signatories worked in the Chicago branch of the Manhattan Project. After much disagreement among the other scientists in Chicago, lab director Farrington Daniels took a survey of 150 scientists as to what they believed the best course of action would be, regarding the bomb. The results were as follows: 15% - the bomb should be used as a weapon by the military in order to bring about Japanese surrender with the fewest possible Allied casualties. 46% - the bomb should be demonstrated by the military in Japan, with the hope