by P. D. Smith
Szilard told Otto Mandl that his idea was ‘somewhat new to me’ and that he ‘really didn’t know whether I would agree with him’. However, he added,
if I came to the conclusion that this was what mankind needed, if I wanted to contribute something to save mankind, then I would probably go into nuclear physics, because only through the liberation of atomic energy could we obtain the means which would enable man not only to leave the earth but to leave the solar system.52
For the man who had tried for the last five or so years to promote a utopian order inspired by science, the grandeur of Mandl’s idea must have impressed Leo Szilard, even if it seemed (to put it mildly) rather ahead of its time.
At about the same time as this futuristic conversation, and probably on Mandl’s recommendation, Szilard began reading a scientific novel by H. G. Wells written almost twenty years earlier – The World Set Free. Later, Szilard admitted that ‘the impression which this book made on me was deeper than I knew’.53 In fact, its vision of the future bowled him over.
‘At different times,’ said Leo Szilard during the height of the cold war, ‘different physicists have been given the dubious honor of being called the “father of the atomic bomb.” But in truth, the father of the atomic bomb was no physicist – he was a dreamer and a writer.’54 His name was H. G. Wells.
No one describes the end of the world quite like Wells. He is a master of the doomsday moment, when people stare into the abyss. That is quite an achievement for a writer who lived before the age of nuclear warfare. In his most famous apocalyptic novel, The War of the Worlds, doomsday came from Mars, a planet named appropriately enough after the god of war. But in the novel Leo Szilard read in 1932, The World Set Free, the means of annihilation were manufactured on the earth. In this as in so much else, Wells was a trendsetter. His novel was written in 1913. Before then, two out of three fictional apocalypses were caused by nature. But after 1914, it is humankind that causes the end of the world, and usually with weapons of mass destruction.55
In previous works, Wells had invented tanks, fantastic heat rays and gas-filled missiles. Now, in The World Set Free, he imagined a weapon that would transform warfare and the history of the world – the atomic bomb. Wells was the first to use the phrase. It was inspired by the fascination with radioactivity in the early years of the twentieth century. What one reviewer called Wells’s ‘fiendish “atomic bombs” ’ had at their heart a new, explosive radioactive element, like plutonium.56 Wells called it Carolinum.
Writing before World War I, Wells describes how a solitary French aircraft, with a crew of just two, is all that is needed to deliver the new atomic superweapon onto the German capital. It was a glimpse of a new age of warfare – one that would not be fully realized until World War II – in which weapons of mass destruction were used on civilians:
He had in his hands the black complement to all those other gifts science was urging upon unregenerate mankind, the gift of destruction…
The sky below grew clearer as the Central European capital was approached… Away to the north-eastward, in a cloudless pool of gathering light and with all its nocturnal illuminations still blazing, was Berlin. The left finger of the steersman verified roads and open spaces below upon the mica-covered square of map that was fastened by his wheel. There, in a series of lake-like expansions, was the Havel away to the right, over by those forests must be Spandau; there the river split about the Potsdam island, and right ahead was Charlottenburg, cleft by a great thoroughfare that fell like an indicating beam of light straight to the imperial headquarters. There, plain enough, was the Thiergarten; beyond rose the imperial palace, and to the right those tall buildings, those clustering, be-flagged, be-masted roofs, must be the offices in which the Central European staff was housed. It was all coldly clear and colourless in the dawn…
‘Ready!’ said the steersman.
The gaunt face hardened to grimness, and with both hands the bomb-thrower lifted the big atomic bomb from the box and steadied it against the side…
The bomb flashed blinding scarlet in mid-air and fell, a descending column of blaze eddying spirally in the midst of a whirlwind… When he could look down again it was like looking down upon the crater of a small volcano. In the open garden before the Imperial castle a shuddering star of evil splendour spurted and poured up smoke and flame towards them like an accusation.57
Leo Szilard first read this in Berlin in 1932, the year the neutron was discovered and a machine was used to split the atom. Hitler was poised to seize power in Germany, and an uncertain future awaited Europe. They must have been chilling words indeed. There had already been one world war since Wells wrote his novel, a war in which science had proved its military value beyond doubt and in which for the first time aeroplanes had played a key role.
The German air raids on London that began in 1915 had shocked the government in London. From that moment, the British military decided that long-range strategic bombing would be a decisive weapon in any future war. Unlike the German Luftwaffe, the Royal Air Force was equipped and organized long before World War II with a view to bombing an enemy into submission. As Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin told Parliament in November 1932, aircraft had transformed warfare:
I think it is well for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through… The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.58
Thanks to General William (‘Billy’) Mitchell, America too had woken up to the new threat from the air. In 1921 Mitchell had organized military exercises to demonstrate to the American public the effectiveness of aerial bombing. On 29 July his bombers conducted a mock air raid on New York. The next day, the New York Herald described an apocalyptic scene for its readers:
The sun rose today on a city whose tallest tower lay scattered in crumbled bits of stone… Bridges did not exist… The sun saw, when its light penetrated the ruins, hordes of people on foot, working their way slowly and painfully up the island… Rich and poor alike, welded together in a real democracy of misery, headed northward… Always they looked fearfully upward at the sky…59
In 1932, as Leo Szilard was reading The World Set Free, Billy Mitchell hit the headlines again. He advocated the use of fire-bombing in any future war with Japan. As he put it, their towns were ‘built largely of wood and paper’, making them ‘the greatest aerial targets the world has ever seen’.60 His advice was heeded by the American military and, well before Pearl Harbor, plans for fire-bombing Japanese cities were drawn up. In World War II, hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians would be incinerated in US air raids.
Written in 1913, Wells’s novel about atomic warfare was indebted to the science of its day. His radioactive Carolinum is an unstable element. It can be provoked into a ‘degenerative process’ which produces a ‘furious radiation of energy’ – what Wells calls a ‘continuing explosive’.61 The energy from the exploding element melts everything it touches, spreading radioactivity and creating an artificial volcano in the ground that erupts for years. It creates a scene of utter devastation. As one reviewer noted, ‘the new bomb pours out destruction, radium-born, for years and years’.62 Today, Wells’s account of an atomic explosion resembles a nuclear reactor in catastrophic meltdown – an out-of-control Chernobyl.
Wells’s descriptions of the bomb sites are visions of hell. But this is a hell of human devising. Where the atomic bomb has exploded there is ‘a zone of uproar, a zone of perpetual thunderings, lit by a strange purplish-red light, and quivering and swaying with the incessant explosion of the radio-active substance….’ Clouds of ‘luminous, radio-active vapour drift sometimes scores of miles from the bomb centre… killing and scorching all they overtook.’ The air has ‘a peculiar dryness and a blistering quality’ that scars the skin and lungs, which refuse to heal.63
The atomi
c war Wells describes takes place in 1956, in a decade he did not live to see, but one which did indeed face a real threat of atomic doomsday. The fictional war ravages the earth. In the end, over two hundred cities across the world, from Chicago to Tokyo, are reduced to radioactive wastelands, dead zones, even more hellish than the radioactive landscapes Wells first described in Tono-Bungay. The earth has been devastated by a global atomic holocaust. It is, as Wells says, the Last War.
As one contemporary reviewer observed, The World Set Free showed H. G. Wells in his ‘scientific, world-reforming mood’.64 After the success of his scientific romances, Wells came to see himself not just as an artist, but as the ‘prophet of an efficient future’.65 Creating characters and stories was not enough, he decided. The writer had to change the world. The World Set Free does not, in fact, describe the end of life on earth. Rather, it is a true apocalypse, in the Biblical sense of the word, in that it describes a moment of revelation and an end that is also a beginning. For Wells’s true purpose is to show us the origins of a utopia built on the power of the atom.
The invention of the atomic bomb, predicts Wells, would make war redundant. Previously, war had been viewed as the continuation of politics by other means, an idea first expounded in the nineteenth century by the Prussian general and war theorist Carl von Clausewitz. This notion had made war socially acceptable, even useful.66 But the atomic bomb would change that. War in an age of superweapons – as Bulwer-Lytton and Frank Stockton had realized – became mutual suicide. Clearly, a war which ends in annihilation for all participants is very bad politics.
As well as this revolution in global politics, H. G. Wells anticipated today’s threat of stateless groups and terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction. He shows how proliferation leads to nuclear anarchy:
Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it; it was revolutionizing the problems of police and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city.67
In another story, ‘The Stolen Bacillus’ (1895), Wells even describes how a suicidal terrorist infects himself with a deadly virus so that he can spread disease in a city, a possibility which today no longer seems like fiction.68
In The World Set Free, military and political leaders do not comprehend the lethal power that they hold in their hands. Instead, the world has to learn this lesson through bloody experience. Only then will it be ‘set free’, only then will humankind see the error of its ways and establish a system of world government committed to peace and human dignity. The story Wells tells is about humanity being reborn in the elemental fires of the atomic bombs. It is a story which is almost alchemistic in its symbolism of a journey through fire to wisdom. The spokesman of Wells’s utopia is the character Marcus Karenin, who, as one reviewer commented rather archly, is ‘an educationalist with the appearance of a member of the Labour Party’.69 According to Karenin, before the atomic war the world was ‘ailing’: ‘It was in sore need of release, and I suppose that nothing less than the violence of those bombs could have released it and made it a healthy world again. I suppose they were necessary.’70 The world is set free by war, reborn like a phoenix emerging from the atomic fires into a new world.
The Russian writer and engineer Yevgeny Zamyatin was a great fan of Wells’s utopian idealism and helped to popularize his works in the Soviet Union. Zamyatin’s own remarkable futuristic novel, We (1924), describes how a utopia arises from the ashes of just such a war: ‘True, only 0.2 of the population of the terrestrial globe survived; but then, cleansed of its millennial filth, how glowing the face of the earth became! Then, too, the surviving two tenths certainly came to know bliss in the many mansions of The One State.’71 But all that glitters is not gold, and Zamyatin’s utopia turns out to be an oppressive dictatorship, a scientific dystopia.
Karenin’s belief that a global nuclear holocaust was necessary to prepare the way for utopia re-emerged in the cold war. It is caricatured in Dr Strangelove’s excitement at the prospect of surviving a nuclear holocaust down a mineshaft (‘ten women to each man’).72 American survivalist fiction gloried in the prospect of urban society being wiped out and returning to the frontier life. Even today, such attitudes seem to have a powerful, millennial attraction. Fictional eco-catastrophes, such as The Day After Tomorrow (2004), carry a moralistic subtext that welcomes the end of civilization as deserved punishment for humankind’s environmental sins.
In 1932, the year the atom seemed to be revealing its secrets, H. G. Wells’s vision of an atomic utopia struck a chord with Leo Szilard. Wells, one of the first British novelists to have had a formal scientific education, describes science in the novel as ‘the awakening mind of the race’.73 This is typical of his later, almost mystical, view of science. The World Set Free is a paean to the Faustian spirit of scientific progress – from the prehistoric discovery of fire to the atomic age, and onwards to the stars. Like Szilard, Wells believed that a technoscientific elite should govern society. As one Wells scholar has said, he came to see in science ‘the only hope for the survival of the human race which was otherwise doomed to destruction by its selfish individualistic strivings and vast, amoral technology’.74 It was the atom and the faith in its limitless energy that inspired this beguiling dream of science as the saviour of humankind.
The down-to-earth Ernest Rutherford had no time for science fiction fantasies of atom-powered utopias. In the year that H. G. Wells’s novel appeared, he admitted during a lecture given in America that the power in the atom was ‘many million times greater than for an equal weight of the most powerful known explosive’. But, he added quickly, this power would become available only if we could ‘cause a substance like uranium or thorium to give out its energy in the course of a few hours or days, instead of over a period of many thousands or millions of years’. Referring directly to Wells’s novel, which was provoking a wave of press speculation about atomic energy, he said that this prospect was not ‘at all promising’.75
Like Einstein, Rutherford was a killjoy when it came to the possibility of exploiting the energy of the atom. But ironically it was Rutherford’s co-worker on radioactivity who inspired ‘the Shakespeare of science fiction’ with the atomic dream.76 Unlike Rutherford, Frederick Soddy was a man of bold vision and keenly aware of science’s potential to change the world. Indeed, he has been credited with originating the idea of the social responsibility of science.77 It was Soddy’s idealistic vision of the future of atomic energy in his best-selling work of popular science, The Interpretation of Radium (1909), that captured the imagination of first Wells and then, in 1932, Leo Szilard. Soddy sparked an extraordinary human chain reaction, from science to fiction and then back again to science, with his utopian promise of cheap, clean, limitless energy:
A race which could transmute matter would have little need to earn its bread by the sweat of its brow. If we can judge from what our engineers accomplish with their comparatively restricted supplies of energy, such a race could transform a desert continent, thaw the frozen poles, and make the whole world one smiling Garden of Eden. Possibly they could explore the outer realms of space, emigrating to more favourable worlds as the superfluous to-day emigrate to more favourable continents.78
Early on in Wells’s novel, Professor Rufus at Edinburgh University gives an inspiring lecture. Rufus is a thinly disguised portrait of Soddy, whose Interpretation of Radium was based on his lectures at Glasgow University. In his book Soddy had compared the energy in uranium with the fuel that had powered the nineteenth century – coal:
This bottle contains about one pound of uranium oxide, and therefore about fourteen ounces of uranium. Its value is about £1. Is it not wonderful to reflect that in this little bottle there lies asleep and waiting to be evolved the energy of at least one hundred and sixty tons of coal? The energy in a ton of uranium would be sufficient to light London for a year. The store
of energy in uranium would be worth a thousand times as much as the uranium itself, if only it were under our control and could be harnessed to do the world’s work in the same way as the energy in coal has been harnessed and controlled.79
Parts of Rufus’s lecture are lifted virtually word for word from Soddy’s book:
[W]e know now that the atom, that once we thought hard and impenetrable, and indivisible and final and – lifeless – lifeless, is really a reservoir of immense energy… This little bottle contains about a pint of uranium oxide; that is to say about fourteen ounces of the element uranium. It is worth about a pound. And in this bottle, ladies and gentlemen, in the atoms in this bottle there slumbers at least as much energy as we could get by burning a hundred and sixty tons of coal. If at a word in one instant I could suddenly release that energy here and now, it would blow us and everything about us to fragments; if I could turn it into the machinery that lights this city, it could keep Edinburgh brightly lit for a week.80
Like Frederick Soddy, Rufus sees in radioactivity ‘the dawn of a new day in human living’. The atom represents not only a utopian future, but human destiny: ‘I see the desert continents transformed, the poles no longer wildernesses of ice, the whole world once more Eden. I see the power of man reach out among the stars’.81 According to Rufus – and H. G. Wells – the fruit of the tree of atomic knowledge will eventually take us back to the Eden from which humankind was once banished. This is the atom presented as the promised land, and its discovery as humankind’s destiny. It was a powerful dream, more mythical than scientific, and it inspired Soddy, Wells and Szilard alike.