Doomsday Men

by P. D. Smith

  The message forcefully expressed here was that science was no longer progressive, but was taking society down the road to a new barbarism. Such sentiments found a receptive audience among a public shocked and disillusioned by the carnage of World War I. The scientist had once been the man who ended war and heralded an era of wealth and good health. But after World War I, the scientist’s halo slipped. The scientific saviour was becoming Dr Strangelove.

  7

  Einstein’s Open Sesame

  When all the poison gases are exhausted, a man, made like all ther men of flesh and blood, will in the quiet of his room invent an explosive of such potency that all the explosives in existence will seem like harmless toys beside it.

  Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno (1923)

  ‘Modern war is essentially a struggle of gear and invention,’ wrote H. G. Wells in an angry letter to The Times in June 1915, demanding that scientists be at the heart of the British war effort. ‘Each side must be perpetually producing new devices, surprising and outwitting its opponent,’ he argued.1 World War I did indeed stimulate an outpouring of invention from scientists and engineers, as well as from writers and ordinary citizens. In the year that the first soldiers were gassed in their trenches at Ypres, there were Zeppelin bombing raids on London and Paris, and the liner Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine. It was clear to everyone that wars could now be won or lost in the laboratory.

  Even before Fritz Haber had unleashed his superweapon, America’s scientific wizard, Thomas Edison, told the press: ‘The present war has taught the world that killing men is a scientific proposition.’2 He promised the American military a lethal armoury of superweapons and predicted that ‘the soldier of the future will not be a sabre-bearing, blood-thirsty savage but a machinist; he will not shed his blood, but will perspire in the factory of death at the front line.’3

  Despite his claims, by the end of the war Edison had failed to come up with a single usable idea. However, the public on both sides of the Atlantic were eager to come forward with suggestions for the new factory of death. The British Board of Inventions and Research (BIR) was set up in response to the demands of people like Wells and was manned by such esteemed scientists as J. J. Thomson and Sir William Crookes. By the end of the war it had considered over a hundred thousand suggestions sent in by the public, and a similar number were submitted in America. Only thirty were found to be useful.

  One of the British suggestions was to train cormorants to peck out the mortar between bricks. They were to be released over the Ruhr in Germany, where their pecking would, it was claimed, bring down the chimneys of the Krupp steel and armament factories, responsible for making the supergun known as the Paris Gun, capable of firing a shell some eighty miles. Another proposed that sea lions be used to locate submarines by sound. This idea at least was followed up by the BIR. Indeed, Ernest Rutherford conducted pioneering research during World War I into the use of underwater sound detection systems – what later became known as sonar, or ASDIC.4

  For armchair designers of superweapons, heat rays were the weapon of choice. Archimedes – who had the original Eureka! moment – is said to have defended Syracuse against Roman invaders using mirrors to focus the sun’s rays. After the discovery of X-rays and then radioactivity, death rays became indispensable for writers of futuristic fiction. From the ‘sword of heat’ wielded by Wells’s Martians to the light sabres in Star Wars, heat rays have proved perennial science fiction favourites.

  The short story ‘When the Earth Melted’, written by A. Wilkinson in 1918, describes how a heat ray is invented by a mad scientist – his ‘ugly, twisted smile’ is a dead giveaway. However, he starts off as a classic saviour scientist, using his ‘ultra-conductor ray’ to destroy a Chinese invasion fleet that is threatening the United States: ‘only a huge mass of smoking, steaming wreckage’ was left. But, unable to win the woman of his dreams, he turns the ray on his fellow men in a fit of suicidal rage, ending all life on earth. Future visitors from Mars are left to ponder the results of man’s scientific hubris: ‘From this catastrophe let us learn the lesson that the attempted usurpation of the power of the Supreme Being means death.’5

  Martin Swayne’s story ‘The Sleep-Beam’, which appeared in the same year, is rather more imaginative if equally fantastic. Dr Van Hook’s scientific superweapon is a ray that prevents people from sleeping. This very English superweapon looks suspiciously like a wind-up gramophone player: ‘a square metal box, with a black funnel projecting from it’. Initially sceptical, the military are soon convinced by a demonstration. ‘It’s the crowning horror – it’s hell,’ exclaim the awestruck top brass. ‘It’s the devils of the deepest night let loose. High explosives and liquid flame are nothing to it.’ The message to the war-weary reader was clear, even in the fourth year of a war that science had failed to win for either side. As the general says to the inventor, ‘you’ve found the way to end the war in a week or two’. Where science is concerned, hope springs eternal.6

  In 1921, rumours of a German ‘death ray’ so alarmed the British Government that the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (which succeeded the BIR), asked Rutherford and Sir William Bragg to find out whether such a weapon was feasible. Experiments were conducted to see whether rays could be used to detonate explosives. The idea of a death ray was eventually dismissed by the scientists, but such reports continued to crop up regularly. In 1924 Winston Churchill was asked to write an article about future warfare. After consulting a friend, the scientist Frederick Lindemann, he predicted that a deadly ray was indeed a likely weapon. In fact rays did prove vital in World War II, but in the form of radar, an idea tested as early as 1904 by a young German engineer.7

  One man who needed no convincing about the decisive role science would play in future wars was Hugo Gernsback. In 1926 he began publishing Amazing Stories, the first magazine devoted to the kind of scientific fiction popularized by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. At first Gernsback christened the genre he claimed to have discovered ‘scientifiction’. Three years later he wisely dropped this ungainly name and called it ‘science fiction’ instead. The chief annual awards for outstanding science fiction writing are named ‘Hugos’ in his honour.

  Gernsback was born in 1884 in Luxembourg. From an early age he was fascinated by electricity, and after emigrating to the United States in 1904, he set up a dry-cell battery business. Shocked by Americans’ ignorance of science, Gernsback soon switched to writing, publishing his first article – on building radios – in 1905. Three years later he founded his first magazine, ‘to teach the young generation science, radio and what was ahead for them’.8

  By 1911, the indefatigable Gernsback had turned his hand to fiction, publishing the futuristic serial ‘Ralph 124C 41+’ in his magazine Modern Electrics. For Gernsback, as well as many subsequent writers in the genre, science fiction offered the ideal vehicle for technological blue-sky thinking. There is little or no attempt to create believable characters, but the gadgetry of the future is explained in loving detail. Fantastic inventions, saviour scientists, damsels in distress, superweapons, space travel and the obligatory bug-eyed monsters – these were the ingredients that fuelled the boom in futuristic fiction that the pulp magazines created after 1926.

  Hugo Gernsback’s technology magazine The Electrical Experimenter, begun in 1914, combined science fiction (including death-ray stories, such as engineer George F. Stratton’s ‘The Poniatowski Ray’ in January 1916) with enough articles on gadgets and do-it-yourself inventions to satisfy even the most demanding technophile. The issue of November 1915 had articles on ‘How to Build a Dictaphone Desk Set’, as well as instructions for assembling a ‘Simple Electric Egg Beater – fits any bowl’. In an article entitled ‘What the Housewife Should Know About Electricity’, L. Shaw Jr tried to convert the magazine’s male readers into missionaries for science: ‘get busy Mr Man and tell the women folks something about electricity’.9

  With war raging in Europe and Fritz Haber’s scie
ntific superweapon barely six months old, new weapons were topical. The Electrical Experimenter contained a long article with a full-page illustration on ‘The Electro-magnetic Gun and Its Possibilities’, as well as an unsigned piece, probably by Gernsback himself, on ‘Warfare of the Future: The Radium Destroyer’. In this, Gernsback points out that ‘the European War has clearly demonstrated what a tremendous part modern science plays in the offense as well as in the defense of the contending armies’. It was, he said, ‘not a war so much of men as of machines’.10

  In common with other scientific idealists, Gernsback believed that war could be abolished by the invention of a scientific superweapon. Only when ‘some scientific genius (or shall we call him devil?) invents a machine which at one stroke is capable of annihilating one or several army corps’ will soldiers think long and hard before offering themselves ‘to be slaughtered by the hundred thousand’. Present warfare is bad enough, writes Gernsback, ‘with its poison shells, its deadly chlorine gas, its bomb-throwing aeroplanes, its fire-spraying guns, its murderous machine guns’. But what does the future of warfare have in store for us, he asked, ‘when the scientists of a hundred years hence begin making war on each other?’

  In fact, the professional futurologist was bang on target with his prediction. According to Gernsback, the future’s most terrible weapons would come once scientists had discovered how to ‘unlock atomic forces’. But in 1915, he thought it would take an entire century to solve ‘the puzzle of the atom’. The colour cover of The Electrical Experimenter’s November 1915 issue features an eye-catching artist’s impression of what Gernsback imagined an atomic superweapon would look like. The ‘Radium Destroyer’ is in fact a radio-controlled tank – a year before tanks appeared on the Western Front – with an ‘atomic gun’. Its lethal combination of armour plating and death rays is reminiscent of H. G. Wells’s mechanized Martians in The War of the Worlds. Indeed, in Byron Haskins’ 1953 film of the book, the invaders use both a Wellsian heat ray and a more futuristic green atomic disintegrator ray that seems to pay homage to the Radium Destroyer’s death ray.

  Gernsback explains how the ‘solid green “Radium-K” emanation… has the property of setting off spontaneously the dormant energy of the Atom of any element it encounters except lead’. Everything hit by the atomic gun disappears into a ‘dense cloud of vapor’. The lethal power of the Radium Destroyer is demonstrated on a city of 300,000 people, leaving just a ‘vast crater in the ground’ and a ‘titanic Vapor cloud’. The inhabitants were, of course, evacuated well before the city was vaporized. It would take another world war to convince the public that a whole city of people could be destroyed without warning.

  In the same year that Hugo Gernsback was speculating about the horrors of future atomic warfare, a novel appeared which echoed his hopes that, in the right hands, the power of the atom might abolish war altogether. The Man Who Rocked the Earth, by Arthur Train and Robert Williams Wood, is set in 1916 in the middle of a world war that has reached a bloody stalemate, both on the battlefield and in the laboratory: ‘the inventive genius of mankind… had produced a multitude of death-dealing mechanisms, most of which had in turn been rendered ineffective by some counter-invention of another nation’.11

  Suddenly, a mysterious scientific inventor, symbolically named Pax, sends a radio message to the world demanding the cessation of hostilities and the abolition of war. Pax uses uranium to power a futuristic aircraft that is identical to the flying saucers that would fascinate America during the cold war. The ‘Flying Ring’ is doughnut-shaped, with portholes in the side and a ray of bright light projecting downwards. His aircraft and his superweapon are powered by atomic energy. Like Gernsback’s Radium Destroyer, the disintegrating ray invented by Pax sets off an explosive chain reaction in matter. The ray is lavender blue in colour, evoking the glow of radium.

  Pax provides a demonstration of his fearful weapon by destroying the Atlas Mountains near the Mediterranean. Eyewitnesses describe the apocalyptic effect: ‘Instantly the earth blew up like a cannon – up into the air, a thousand miles up. It was as light as noonday… The ocean heaved spasmodically and the air shook with a rending, ripping noise, as if Nature were bent upon destroying her own handiwork. The glare was so dazzling that sight was impossible.’12 The flash of an atomic explosion is so bright that it blinds anyone who dares to look at it. Observers of the first atomic bomb test in July 1945 were provided with welder’s goggles to avoid damaging their eyes. It was, said Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Bhagavad Gita, like ‘the radiance of a thousand suns’.13

  The Man Who Rocked the Earth contains other striking parallels with real nuclear weapons. An Arab mussel-gatherer and his two brothers were out in their boat when they were caught in the ‘Lavender Ray’. At first they noticed no ill-effects. However, five days later ‘all three began to suffer excruciating torment from internal burns, the skin upon their heads and bodies began to peel off, and they died in agony within the week’.14

  Exactly forty years after this was written, a Japanese fishing boat in the Pacific, the Lucky Dragon, had the misfortune to be caught in the fallout from an American hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll. Nearby islanders and the Japanese fishermen experienced radiation sickness – vomiting, diarrhoea, skin burns and hair loss. By the end of the year one of the fishermen was dead, and the other twenty-two were still in hospital, receiving blood transfusions. As early as 1904, Jean Danysz, the biologist who worked with the Curies, had described such effects as skin loss as a result of radiation exposure and predicted that two pounds of radium could wipe out the population of Paris. Now, just months after the first weapon of mass destruction was used at Ypres, a popular novel anticipated the horrors of future superweapons.

  In The Man Who Rocked the Earth (1915), Pax’s ‘Flying Ring’ uses its atomic disintegrating ray to destroy the Atlas Mountains near the Mediterranean. The crew of a nearby fishing boat later die after being exposed to the radiation.

  In The Man Who Rocked the Earth, Pax loses patience with the warring Europeans and threatens to use the unparalleled power of atomic energy to shift the earth on its axis so that Strasbourg becomes the new North Pole. He tells the world that Europe will become a wasteland: ‘The habitable zone of the earth will be hereafter in South Africa, South and Central America, and regions now unfrequented by man. The nations must migrate and a new life in which war is unknown must begin upon the globe.’15

  This idea also recurs in the atomic age. In the era of ever-larger H-bomb tests, headlines and even a film – The Day the Earth Caught Fire – envisioned the earth’s orbit being disastrously disturbed. Such themes in popular culture carried an important and far-reaching message. The forces contained in the atom offered humankind truly god-like power over not just their own fate but that of the entire planet. Superweapons – of which Szilard’s cobalt bomb was the most terrible – fundamentally changed our relationship to the earth.

  Pax achieves his dream of a world without war: ‘The nations ceased to build dreadnoughts, and instead used the money to send great troops of children with [their] teachers travelling over the world.’16 Ironically, Pax doesn’t live to see the utopia he has created as he is accidentally killed by his own invention. But once again, a scientist and his superweapon have saved the world from the scourge of war. It is easy now to dismiss the novel as a scientific fairy tale, one in which sometimes dubious science provides a fantastic solution to the problem of war. But such fictions do provide powerful evidence of how people identified atomic energy and atomic weapons as the key to a utopian future. The saviour scientists of the future would be physicists.

  Benjamin Hooker is a Harvard physicist in The Man Who Rocked the Earth who manages to track down the maverick scientist, Pax, to his secret laboratory before he dies. Hooker is full of fantastic dreams of how atomic energy might be used to abolish war and disease. He has read Frederick Soddy’s The Interpretation of Radium and believes that he can use ‘the quantum theory’ to improve on Pax’s appl
ication of atomic energy. ‘A single ounce of uranium’, he says excitedly,

  contains about the same amount of energy that could be produced by the combustion of ten tons of coal – but it won’t let the energy go. Instead it holds on to it, and the energy leaks slowly, almost imperceptibly, away, like water from a big reservoir tapped only by a tiny pipe… If, instead of that energy just oozing away and the uranium disintegrating infinitesimally each year, it could be exploded at a given moment you could drive an ocean liner with a handful of it.17

  Hooker demonstrates to a colleague how to induce an atomic reaction in a piece of uranium. He describes how the atoms ‘disintegrate, their products being driven off by the atomic explosions with a velocity about equal to that of light… The amount of uranium decomposed in this experiment couldn’t be detected by the most delicate balance – small mass, but enormous velocity.’

  His friend comments that this is ‘momentum equals mass times velocity’. It’s tempting to replace momentum with energy and to see in this explanation an allusion to the most famous equation of all, E = mc2. For Einstein’s equation explains what Hooker is trying to describe – the vast amount of energy in the invisibly small atomic reaction: energy equals mass times the velocity of light squared. Is that to read too much into this passage? Perhaps. But, as we have seen, Frederick Soddy had already discussed matter as energy in 1903.