After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  To Pitt, to Bentham, even to their contemporary Napoleon, such nightmare phenomena as the Nazi death-camps and the slave camps of the Gulag would have been unimaginable. Yet, once the principle had been admitted that states had power over persons to the extent of being able to look at them all day long through a Panopticon, some fundamental ingredient of freedom had gone, and when populations had swollen sufficiently, and economic conditions become sufficiently unfavourable, great nations could find themselves submitting to tyrannies from which extrication could not easily be had, even at the cost of world wars and millions upon millions of deaths.

  Victorian economic liberalism was a long way from National Socialism or Soviet Russia, but with its increased preoccupation with the way that the swelling population behaved – its sexual morality, its drinking habits – it was laying the foundations for twentieth-century systems of control. No Western state can be absolved from the charge of abusing its prisons and prison camps during the twentieth century. The atrocities which took place under the cover of war can be rehearsed endlessly, and should never be allowed to be forgotten; but the imagination can still fail to absorb the sheer enormity of it all: not merely the numbers of dead, nor even just the disgusting things done, sometimes for the sake of casual sadism. What shocks, almost more than anything, is that at the end of the Second World War, a war which historians still speak of as one of liberation, so many more millions of human beings should have remained imprisoned and enslaved than at its beginning.

  33

  If God Wearied of Mankind

  Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire caused dismay to eighteenth-century churchmen with its controversial and primary contention: that European civilization was undermined, less by the advance of the barbarian hordes without, than by the growth of Christianity within, its borders. What was it about Christianity, according to this diagnosis, which was so corrosive to the civilized idea? It was, surely, that the fanatical early Christians, zealous for a holy death, and fervently credulous about the greater reality of the life beyond than the life before it, made civilization itself seem superfluous. What use are the skills of statesmanship, of civil planning, of architecture, of laws, if at any moment, as the early Church taught and believed, the very edifice of worldly existence was going to be wound up, if the Maker was to bring the pageant of human history to a close, taking to Himself His few chosen ones in robes of white to sing perpetual hymnody before His throne, and hurling the rest, the huge majority, into pits and lakes of everlasting fire and destruction?

  Gibbon’s book is one of the most eloquent works, not merely of history, but of apology for what is called the Enlightenment, that phase of European self-consciousness which on the one hand challenged the received dogmas of Christianity as they had never been challenged for a thousand years, and, in the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire, laid the foundations for a new political order. The American Revolution was the stateliest, the French Revolution the bloodiest expression of the new idea that human societies could order themselves not upon aristocratic privilege and the superstitions of religious monarchy, but upon reason, and law and justice. Out of such political innovations sprang the modern political settlements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of course, there are no hard-and-fast beginnings and endings in political history. Long before Voltaire, the British had a civil war in which they disposed of the absolutism of monarchy and, in their settlement of 1689, established a principle of oligarchic or aristocratic government which in some ways continued until the mid-twentieth century. This settlement, based on ideas of law and reason, paid lip-service to Christianity. But it did so lightly. The early Christian conviction that this world was on the point of dissolution did not figure largely in the political thinking of John Locke. Those late seventeenth-century, early eighteenth-century English rationalists wrote with an eye to the future, with a belief which is central to political stability, a belief that the future exists.

  The development of nuclear weapons, first the atom bomb and then the hydrogen bomb, brought about a fundamental change in human consciousness which was comparable to the conversion of the Roman Empire to Apocalyptic Christianity. In both cases, in the generation of Constantine and that of Harry S. Truman, the curtain of material being seemed as if it could be imminently ripped apart. In such circumstances, the institutions of law and peace, painstakingly and wisely tried over generations, themselves seemed insubstantial. Queen – Parliament – Lords and Commons – Empire; Senate – Congress – President; they still continued, just as the Roman senate and the Roman emperors continued for hundreds of years after Constantine saw the illumination of his Saviour’s Cross in the visionary sky before his victory at the Milvian Bridge. But life was never to be the same.

  The Victorians were, some of them – though in decreasing numbers – nominal Christians, but very nominal. The New Testament taught that Here we have no abiding city. The generations which had established Britain as the greatest free-trading nation believed that their city would abide on Earth for ever. Free trade and the Great Exhibition of 1851 paid deferential tribute to the Almighty as a family might arise to toast a decrepit and no longer powerful grandsire before reinvesting and tripling his capital. The great industrial cities of Britain, its shipyards in Glasgow and Belfast and Newcastle; its manufacturing towns of Birmingham and Manchester, Bradford and Leeds; its imperial and manufacturing capital of London; its ever-burgeoning Empire, had all seemed to signify a power which might endure a thousand years.

  It is symptomatic, and probably an essential part of his world-vision, that Churchill did not believe in life after death. Here was an abiding City. Here was a City which could be expanded, threatened, fought over, strengthened, but which was all that there was.

  The devastations and revolutions of the First World War and its aftermath might have shaken such confidence, especially when it was followed by the great crises of capitalism of the late 1920s and early 1930s, with all their grotesque political consequences. It was still possible to build, and rebuild the world, to hope for the future, to sing, ‘It’s a lovely day tomorrow’.

  The Bomb changed this. Churchill saw it – ‘nothing so menacing to our civilization since the Mongols’. That was a private observation. In his public discourse, the old Victorian agnostic used the language of biblical apocalypse. ‘Which way shall we turn to save our lives and the future of the world? It does not so much matter to old people; they are going soon anyway, but I find it poignant to look at youth in all its activity and ardour and, most of all, to watch little children playing their merry games, and wonder what would lie before them if God wearied of mankind.’1

  The development of nuclear physics was the collective achievement of physicists in the West before the Second World War. Rutherford had been the pioneer, and as early as 1928 he had exclaimed to the gentleman-amateur physicist Alfred L. Loomis: ‘You damned American millionaires. Why can’t you give me a million volts and I will split the atom.’2 Dr Otto Hahn, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, had split in two the nucleus of the uranium atom a few days before Christmas 1938. His assistant, Lise Meitner from Vienna, was able to confirm that when the uranium isotope 235 was bombarded with neutrons it split into two lighter elements with a loss in mass and an enormous release of energy. The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and the Dane Niels Bohr were both in America for the Fifth Conference on Theoretical Physics when they heard the news.

  Plainly, in the context of the war, the possibility of nuclear fission was of far greater than theoretical interest. The struggle for the power which these experiments demonstrated now took on Wagnerian dimensions. Just as in the case of radar, the scientific expertise came from Europe; it was ‘you damned American millionaires’ who had the means to develop the idea.

  It was generally believed among world physicists, especially by those physicists who had fled Hitler for their lives, that the Germans would stop at nothing to develop nuclear power as a weapon. T
hen, as they saw it, the forces of darkness would hold the world to ransom. As it happens, even allowing for the fact that the Germans dealt themselves a self-inflicted wound through their insane anti-Semitic policies – which guaranteed that many of their best physicists went into exile – they held back from developing the Bomb. Why so, has been a subject of endless debate. A recent book on Hitler’s Scientists gives credence to Albert Speer’s testimony that Hitler himself considered the idea of nuclear weapons immoral.3

  Whatever the reasons, it was the enemies of Germany who raced ahead with the vital research; undoubtedly the thought of Hitler with control over a nuclear bomb, even if such a policy filled even his destructive mind with revulsion, was a spur to action. The potential of nuclear fission as a source of energy had been known to scientists ever since Rutherford’s experiments in 1919. Professor Meitner had demonstrated its possibility on the very eve of war in Berlin. One of the earliest refugees from Hitler, Leo Szilard, as early as 1933, had realized, in a sort of daydream while crossing the road near the British Museum in London, that when a neutron bombarded a nucleus it would release more energy than the neutron itself supplied: he had seen, in effect, the truly explosive and destructive quality of this phenomenon.

  But none of this meant anything unless the energy could be harnessed; unless a device could be invented, that is a nuclear bomb, which could contain the necessary equipment to set off such a chain reaction. Many physicists at the beginning of the war believed that the notion of nuclear warheads was the stuff of science fiction. Szilard admitted himself that he owed as much to H. G. Wells’s late novel The Shape of Things to Come as he did to Einstein or Rutherford for his insight. Sir George Thomson, son of the great Edwardian physicist ‘J.J.’, and professor at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, was one of those who believed that it was technically impossible to harness a uranium chain reaction for military purposes. ‘There were two stages in the military application of such a thing,’ he wrote later.

  The first would be the establishment of an endless chain reaction, releasing energy in large and (perhaps) controllable amounts as a source of power; the second possibility was to make the process so rapid that an appreciable fraction of the available energy would be released before the whole contrivance was blown to the four winds and ceased to work … By the outbreak of war we had established that an endless chain was not possible using uranium oxide and ordinary water or paraffin as the second constituent. It seemed likely that it could be done by using heavy water, but this was not available in Britain in large amounts, and the military value of the first stage alone seemed too remote to justify further work in wartime. The second stage seemed nearly impossible, and if this conclusion now seems disgraceful blindness I can only plead that to the end of the war the most distinguished physicist in Germany thought the same.4

  It was therefore more or less inevitable, from an economic, scientific and political viewpoint, that the perfection of this deadly thing would happen in the United States. Two vital developments in the story, however, occurred in Britain. It was in Britain that scientists discovered the importance of fast neutrons. And it was in Britain that the actual possibility of building a nuclear weapon was demonstrated. A key figure in this was Rudolf Peierls, pronounced Piles, who, like Franz Simon, Nicolas Kurti, Max Born, Otto Frisch and Leo Szilard, found himself in England because of the German anti-Jewish laws. It prompts the thought that, were it not for its anti-Semitism, the Third Reich would have mastered the world.

  Peierls was a young Berliner who left Germany aged thirty-two, migrated on a Rockefeller Fellowship to Cambridge, worked for a time in Manchester, and for a time at the Mond Laboratory in Cambridge, where he worked with John Cockcroft, before moving to the university of Birmingham as the professor of Mathematical Physics. His work ran parallel with Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch. In June 1939, in a paper to the Cambridge Philosophical Society, he investigated the question of how to measure the critical mass of a block of pure uranium. To anyone listening, it must have seemed in the first half of his paper as if he were interested in the conundrum from a purely academic point of view, but by the end it was clear what Peierls was asking himself. He was the first physicist to address in purely practical terms how large a mass of uranium would be required to manufacture a nuclear bomb. He concluded at this stage that it would be so large that it could not fit into any aeroplane. He was thinking of something the size of a Windscale reactor. Had he realized that he was on the verge of providing a solution to his own problem, he said that he would never have allowed the paper, ‘Critical Conditions in Neutron Multiplication’, to be published.5

  James Chadwick, professor of Physics at Liverpool, and a pupil of Rutherford’s, a dark-haired, ivory-faced, smiling Buddha of a man, and his colleague, the Pole Dr Joseph Rotblat, were working on the same problem. Bohr’s theory – that uranium isotope 235 (U235) could be smashed at a rate 10,000 times faster than U238 atoms – was demonstrated by Chadwick with his invention of the cyclotron.

  In February 1940, Peierls’s naturalization papers came through; he was officially an Englishman, and could settle down in his Georgian house in Edgbaston with his friend Otto Frisch and work out the implications of the new discoveries. They were not doing so in the idle isolation of academic peacetime. They sat, literally scribbling on the backs of envelopes, two German Jews, in an English house, in February 1940. They were trying to work out the proportion of U235 in uranium that would be required to produce a radioactive super-bomb. As they scribbled, Peierls realized that his calculation in the Cambridge paper the previous summer had been wildly inaccurate. They had hugely overestimated the size of the proportion; what he had been weighing in tons of hundredweights could be measured in pounds. ‘In fact,’ Peierls said, ‘our first calculation gave a critical mass of less than one pound.’6

  They were thunderstruck by what they had worked out on the backs of their envelopes. What they saw with these new calculations was that a few pounds of uranium could produce millions of degrees of heat, and an explosion of almost unimaginable destructiveness. They were aliens in a foreign land; and a land at war. To whom could they turn? Peierls consulted his colleague Sir Marcus Oliphant, an Australian who had been working in secret on radar for the Admiralty under cover as a research physicist at Birmingham. ‘Write to Tizard’ was his advice.

  There was the usual red tape and palaver. This was Chamberlain’s Britain. A committee was set up, under the chairmanship of Sir George Thomson, whose confession that he did not believe in the possibility of nuclear weapons has already been quoted. In the course of the spring and early summer of 1940, while Hitler’s panzers advanced over Europe and conquered France, Peierls and his associates in Birmingham – he got a very young man called Klaus Fuchs out of his internment camp to help him with his mathematical calculations – had taken the investigation one stage further. The matter was so vital to national security that Tizard was worried that those who were technically aliens should be working on it; and there was for a period the absurd possibility that ‘classified information’ might be forming itself inside the brains of Frisch, Fuchs and others before it was even committed to paper. Much of the material was so dangerous that Peierls typed it up himself, and after the Fall of France, knowing his own certain fate (and that of so many of his colleagues) if Hitler were to stage a successful invasion that summer, he went to see Churchill’s scientific adviser Professor Lindemann. Peierls was by now completely desperate. He had in his hands sealed envelopes with the results of the research he and his colleagues had perfected at Birmingham. He wanted ‘the Prof’ to assure him that, in the event of a German invasion, these documents would be sent to America.

  Lindemann, with his German name and ancestry, was more English than the English, bowler-hatted, immaculately clad, and never happier than when staying in the grander country houses. He treated the geekish Peierls, with his risible accent and hyperanxiety, with the loftiest disdain. The thought of Hitler invading, l
et alone conquering, Britain was dismissed as improbable; and Lindemann let Peierls know that he thought it highly unlikely that a uranium bomb, even if developed, would have an effect on the current war.7

  The physicists in America were equally concerned to alert their government, not just to the possibility of the Germans developing a nuclear weapon, but to the advantages of the United States doing so first. Leo Szilard had not advanced as fast as Rudolf Peierls in his calculations; he and Enrico Fermi, however, had discovered enough in experiments with carbon and uranium to know that the possibility of a chain reaction was almost within their grasp. By May 1939, Szilard was personally touting his idea round the US military trying to raise capital to construct some kind of enormous bomb. Together with Edward Teller, now teaching physics at Columbia University, Eugene Wigner at Princeton, and eventually Albert Einstein himself, they alerted the President. Einstein had been amazed when Szilard told him of his and Fermi’s experiments, with secondary neutrons leading to chain reaction. Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht – I never thought of that! he exclaimed. Einstein had the idea of telling, of all people, the Queen of Belgium as a way of alerting the Allied powers. It was eventually Dr Alexander Sachs, Vice President of the Lehman Corporation, who was deputed to go to the White House with a letter, signed by Einstein, telling President Roosevelt of the magnitude of the scientific discovery.