by P. D. Smith
But biological weapons – which, as we shall see, had already been explored in fiction – remained the one superweapon not deployed in war during the twentieth century, in Europe at least.
* * *
I’ll prove Chemistry is humanity’s best friend
and by using its potential bring war to an end.24
These words are spoken by Fritz Haber in the play Square Rounds. The claim that science could save the world from war, which was only ever achieved in fictional utopias, was made as early as 1864. A British popular science journal argued that ‘if science were to be allowed her full swing, if society would really allow that “all is fair in war”, war might be banished at once from the earth as a game which neither subject nor king dare play at’. The writer used the example of Greek fire to imagine a chemical superweapon that could defeat any army: ‘Globes that could distribute liquid fire could distribute also lethal agents, within the breath of which no man, however puissant, could stand and live. From the summit of Primrose Hill, a few hundred engineers, properly prepared, could render Regent’s Park, in an incredibly short space of time, utterly uninhabitable…’ Science ‘would be blessed’ for abolishing conventional warfare.25 Even soldiers would prefer these new weapons. How could it be more humane to ‘gouge out their entrails with three-cornered pikes’ and leave them to die in agony, he asked. The argument that chemical warfare was more humane would be used by Haber and other of its advocates, such as Haldane, throughout the twentieth century. Those on the receiving end of these weapons in World War I were notably less enthusiastic.
Fritz Haber was always an ambitious man. But once the war began, friends and relatives noted that he appeared to have become obsessed with searching for a decisive weapon that would win the war for Germany. Whenever he talked about chemical warfare and his mission to create the ultimate weapon, Haber, like Malraux’s Professor Hoffman, had an evangelistic gleam in his eye. In 1913/14 the staff at Haber’s Institute consisted of just five scientists, ten assistants, and thirteen volunteers and students. By 1916 his chemists were working solely on military projects. In Dahlem and at other sites across Berlin, Haber coordinated the efforts of nearly 1,500 scientists and technicians. The war created more work for chemists.
Even after the war, when Haber was branded a war criminal by the Allies, he showed no remorse. What is more, he flouted the Versailles Treaty by secretly working with the German military to improve its expertise in chemical warfare, and even helped other countries, including Russia and Spain, to develop chemical capabilities. In 1920 he told a meeting of German military chiefs that ‘gas weapons are definitely no more inhumane than flying bits of metal’.26
Haber worked tirelessly in his quest for a scientific solution to the war. But his obsession has to be seen in the light of the almost millennial faith in scientific progress at the start of the twentieth century. In the popular mind there were no limits to what scientists would achieve in the new century. Frederick Soddy had predicted in 1909 that atomic power would enable science to ‘make the whole world one smiling Garden of Eden’.27
Fritz Haber himself had shown that the science of the previous century, chemistry, could provide the world with enough nitrogen fertilizer to bring that verdant new Eden within reach. If science could make the stony ground fertile and abolish hunger, then perhaps it could also resolve that most intractable of human problems – war. Ironically, as Alfred Nobel believed, to do that scientists had to create a truly terrible superweapon. Thanks to Haber, poison gas became the first weapon of mass destruction.
Up to 1915, poison gas was a weapon that had existed mainly in the minds of writers. According to Haber’s younger son, Ludwig, ‘gas can trace a direct descent from science fiction’.28 In novels and stories written before World War I, authors fantasized about scientific weapons of awesome destructive power. They dreamt up weapons so fearsome that war itself became unthinkable. Science achieved what even religion had failed to do – to bring peace on earth. In these fictions, scientists themselves are transformed into saviours.
A new literary genre arose in Europe in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71: future war stories, which fanned the invasion fears of the magazine-reading public. Beginning with G. T. Chesney’s ‘The Battle of Dorking’ (1871), these stories typically described Teutonic invaders reducing ‘the quiet squares of Bloomsbury… to great yawning ruins’, to quote a 1906 bestseller.29 It was a speculative (though non-fictional) study of future wars in this vein that shocked Tsar Nicholas II into taking the unprecedented step of calling an international conference at The Hague in 1899, in order to limit the weapons that could be used in war. High on his list of undesirable weapons was one that did not even exist yet – poison gas.30
In the pages of fiction, however, wars had already been fought and won, not just with chemical weapons, but also with biological and nerve agents. The French illustrator and writer Albert Robida’s La Guerre au vingtième siècle, published in 1887, described and depicted a war fought in 1945 that was eerily prescient in its scientific weaponry. In Robida’s war, between France and Germany, airships bombard armoured vehicles on the ground and civilians in a town are killed by chemical shells exploding ‘in a greenish cloud’. Robida describes how, thanks to ‘recent advances in science’, both armies are able to use mines laden with ‘malignant fever bacilli’ and other germs, as well as ‘paralysing gas bombs’.31 By the end of the nineteenth century, scientific romances were conjuring up images of invincible invaders and scientific superweapons. H. G. Wells’s classic 1898 novel The War of the Worlds featured Martians armed with a fearsome ‘heat-ray’ as well as chemical weapons: rockets containing ‘Black Smoke’, a heavy gas that hugs the ground like chlorine.
For real soldiers fighting on the Western Front in cratered, moon-like landscapes, having to face clouds of suffocating gas, flamethrowers (first used in 1914) and attacks from above by aircraft, it must have seemed as if they had entered an alien world, dreamt up by the crazed imagination of a fiction writer. The futuristic aspects of modern warfare were not lost on one American professor of chemistry at the time. Chas Baskerville described how battle-hardened soldiers ran in terror from the ‘weird waves’ of gas and how later, when respirators were issued, the masked soldiers looked like strange ‘anteaters’ rather than human beings. He too saw the parallels in fiction, adding that when one day the history of gas warfare was written, ‘it will prove to be a document that would have caused Jules Verne to turn green with envy’.32 But it was not just poison gas that was born in the minds of fiction writers.
The British military was deeply sceptical about the value of super-weapons, believing that old-fashioned soldiering would win the day. So when British inventors came up with a new weapon, the top brass failed to grasp its full potential. The weapons were transported to the front in conditions of utmost secrecy. Their crates were marked simply TANK, and indeed they did look more like a water cistern than a deadly superweapon. But surprising the enemy with a fiendish new invention offended the British sense of fair play. As a result, when the tank was first used, in 1916 at the Somme, too few were sent into battle and their effect was indecisive.
Before it appeared on the battlefield, the tank had already rumbled its way across the pages of fiction. Albert Robida predicted tanks as early as 1883. Then, thirteen years before the metal monsters saw the light of day, H. G. Wells described their use in battle in his story ‘The Land Ironclads’ (1903). This was closely followed by Captain C. E. Vickers’ story ‘The Trenches’ (1908). The tank’s inventor, engineer Ernest Swinton, had read these stories. Indeed, Swinton was himself a writer whose stories had appeared in Strand Magazine.33
The idea of scientific superweapons, from heat rays to gas bombs, became firmly rooted in the public consciousness in the years before World War I. Most novels and stories about them accepted without question that social progress was an automatic result of scientific advance. This optimistic vision of the future would last long into the
twentieth century, despite the technological horrors of World War I. Indeed, it would make a deep impression on Leo Szilard, who in the last year of the war was a young and very green recruit in the Austro-Hungarian army. The man who in 1950 came up with the doomsday bomb was, appropriately enough, an ordnance cadet learning how to use explosives.
As we have seen, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race – inspired by the sciences of evolution and electricity – was one of the first novels to link the discovery of new energy sources with superweapons. Vril gave its owners godlike power, and as a result warfare had become an act of suicide. In a world where both sides are armed with superweapons, the fear of mutually assured destruction (subsequently abbreviated to ‘MAD’) acts as a deterrent. The message from Bulwer-Lytton and many later writers was that peace could be won in the laboratory.
Frank Stockton’s The Great War Syndicate, published in America in 1889, is typical of many subsequent novels to examine the role of science and scientists in war. Stockton predicts the alliance between science and industry that would become a distinctive feature of total war in the twentieth century. His matter-of-fact account of a war between the United States and the global superpower of the day, Great Britain, tells how the unprepared US Government accepts an offer from a syndicate of industrialists to fight the war. Motivated by the desire to avoid the harmful economic effects of a ‘dragging war’, the Syndicate is formed from ‘men of great ability, prominent positions, and vast resources, whose vast enterprises had already made them known all over the globe’.34
From the outset, these global capitalists know they need a winning weapon. They employ eminent scientists to advise on buying up patents in ‘certain recently perfected engines of war, novel in nature’. These include revolutionary armour plating for their ships and a devastating missile, the ‘instantaneous motor-bomb’, launched not by gunpowder but by the new energy source of the day – electricity. How these missiles work is a ‘jealousy guarded secret’.35 Their use is supervised by a team of ‘scientific men’. Indeed, in Stockton’s novel, the military has little role in the war; the ship from which the instantaneous motor-bomb is fired is crewed by merchant seamen, and the missile is launched by scientists. This is ‘experimental’ warfare, writes Stockton, conducted at the touch of a button.36 Twenty-six years later, the first use of poison gas would be described by Fritz Haber as a Versuch, an ‘experiment’.37
Frank Stockton’s novel dramatically anticipates the age of total war that would begin in World War I and lead to the vast scientific and industrial endeavour of the Manhattan Project. The Syndicate mobilizes the ‘manpower’ (a word coined in 1915)38 of the entire nation in its efforts to defeat the British: ‘In the whole country there was scarcely a man whose ability could not be made available in their work, who was not engaged in their service; and everywhere, in foundries, workshops, and ship-yards, the construction of their engines of war was being carried on by day and by night.’39
The instantaneous motor-bomb is so devastating that the Syndicate decides to make a public demonstration of its power on a disused fortress. This reluctance to spring a surprise attack on an enemy with a new weapon shows that the belief in fair play was equally strong in both Great Britain and America. However, Fritz Haber felt no such constraints and, by 1945 this change in attitude had been accepted on both sides of the Atlantic. Leo Szilard’s pleas for the power of the atomic bomb to be demonstrated on an uninhabited island rather than on an unsuspecting city fell on deaf ears.
British officers are filled with ‘amazement and awe’ as they watch the devastation caused by the instantaneous motor-bombs. From Frank Stockton’s The Great War Syndicate of 1889.
Like modern nuclear weapons, the motor-bomb could be set to explode either above or below the surface of the ground. To destroy the fortress, a ground-penetrating missile is used. In an instant the fort is vaporized, producing an ominous mushroom cloud: ‘a vast brown cloud… nearly spherical in form, with an apparent diameter of about a thousand yards’. Like atomic fallout, the ‘vast dust-clouds’ are carried across the land by the breeze, ‘depositing on land, water, ships, houses, domes, and trees an almost impalpable powder’.40 For the British military, as for the Japanese in 1945, the new weapon is utterly beyond their comprehension. ‘This was not war,’ said the British. ‘It was something supernatural, awful!’ Shock and awe began in the minds of writers such as Frank Stockton.41
With its two-dimensional characters and deadpan style, The Great War Syndicate did not deserve to win any literary awards. But such books had a powerful effect. They changed attitudes to war, creating an expectation that, thanks to science and technology, future conflicts would be quick and low in casualties. As Stockton says at the end of his novel:
The desire to evolve that power which should render opposition useless had long led men from one warlike invention to another. Every one who had constructed a new kind of gun, a new kind of armor, or a new explosive, thought that he had solved the problem, or was on his way to do so. The inventor of the instantaneous motor had done it.42
In this fictional war between Britain and America, just one man died: a coal loader on one of the Syndicate’s ships who was killed by a falling derrick.
At the end of Stockton’s story, the Great War Syndicate is rewarded with a vast sum of money for preventing a drawn-out and costly war. Faced with the Syndicate’s superweapon, Britain enters an alliance with the United States to dominate the world. But Stockton leaves his reader with an ominous afterthought: with such a devastating weapon, future wars would be ‘battles of annihilation’.43
The science of biology provided M. P. Shiel with his superweapon in The Yellow Danger (1898), in which an invading army from the Far East is defeated by a new virus. Shiel dehumanizes the Chinese and Japanese by describing them as locusts and rodents. This common propaganda tactic, employed both by the Nazis against Jews and by America against the Japanese in World War II, opens the door to a war of total extermination, a final solution.44
The oriental army is led by Dr Yen How. In a confrontation with the British hero, John Hardy, the key role to be played by science in the carnage becomes clear. When Yen How taunts Hardy that a vast army of more than 20 million men is waiting to invade Britain on the other side of the English Channel, Hardy replies:
‘Ten good men against a hundred million rats – I bet on the men.’
‘Poh! I bet on the rats.’
‘On the side of the men – science.’
‘Science. What sort of science?’
‘The science of the gunmaker, of the tactician, of the —.’
‘Well?’
‘Need I say it?’
‘Yes, say it.’
‘Of the – chemist.’45
Faced with insurmountable odds, only weapons of mass destruction can save the day for Britain. Supplied with vials of a new virus from ‘Dr Fletcher of Harley Street’, Hardy injects prisoners with the disease and releases them in mainland Europe, which has been completely overwhelmed by the invaders. A needle-prick marks the right forearm of each prisoner, and ‘as they went walking toward the town, an ink-black spot appeared on their cheek, and a black froth ridged their lips’.46 The ‘new Black Death’ turns Europe into ‘a rotting charnel house’.47 In three weeks, 150 million Chinese and Japanese invaders are dead. Infected people are also transported back to Asia in the hope that the entire population of 400 million will be wiped out.
Shiel’s novel appeared in the same year as Wells’s classic The War of the Worlds, which compares the Martians’ genocidal campaign against humans to the ‘ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought’ upon animals and ‘inferior races’, such as the Tasmanians.48 In both books, microscopic germs rescue Britain from certain annihilation.
These genocidal fantasies were by no means unique. A whole genre of ‘Yellow Peril’ fiction followed in the wake of Shiel’s book, in which superweapons were often deployed to defeat the invading Oriental ‘hordes’. Presi
dent Harry S Truman, who authorized the dropping of the atomic bomb on cities in Japan, was a keen reader of McClure’s and other popular magazines which published many stories such as these before World War I. Like Leo Szilard, Truman grew up in the culture of the superweapon, a culture that nurtured fantasies about wiping out whole cities, and indeed races, at the press of a button.
Missiles which could take out any target, microscopic viruses which could annihilate vast armies without a shot being fired – these were the imaginary scientific weapons at the dawn of the new century that inspired the real sciences of destruction. Fritz Haber was obsessed with the search for a scientific weapon which would wipe out Germany’s enemies, and poison gas was the result. But it was not the overwhelmingly devastating weapon its inventor had hoped for. Not until 1945 would science give humankind a weapon to match the imaginations of the writers of popular fiction – the atomic bomb. But to read European and American fiction from the years before 1914 is to enter the dark dreams of the young Dr Strangelove. Such dreams would become terrible reality in the cold war and make possible the cobalt doomsday bomb.
The United States of America entered World War I under the slogan of ‘the war to end wars’. Never has idealism been so badly used. From Hollis Godfrey’s The Man Who Ended War (1908) to H. G. Wells’s The World Set Free (1914), the idea of fighting a final battle to win universal peace had gripped readers in Europe and America. Wells’s novel even introduced the phrase the ‘war that will end war’.49
Once again, science played a vital role in these stories. A new figure emerged in pre-war fiction – the saviour scientist, a Promethean genius who uses his scientific knowledge to save his country and banish war for ever. It is the ultimate victory for Science and Progress. In His Wisdom The Defender (1900), Simon Newcomb, one of the most famous astronomers of his day, tells how a scientific genius with ‘the responsibility of a god’ decides to ‘put an end to war now and forever’.50 The inventiveness of such super-scientists know no bounds. The figure of the saviour-scientist appears repeatedly in the science fiction magazines of the inter-war years (known as ‘pulps’ because they were printed on cheap paper), culminating in comic-strip superheroes such as The Flash, aka mild-mannered chemist Jay Garrick.51