by Peter Watson
The end of World War II was the high point of Keynesian economics. People thought of Keynes as ‘a magician.’67 Many wanted to see his principles enshrined in law, and to a limited extent they were. Others took a more Popperian view: if economics had any pretence to science, Keynes’s ideas would be modified as time went by, which is in fact what happened. Keynes had brought about an amazing change in intellectual viewpoint (not just in wartime, but over a lifetime of writings), and although he would be much criticised in later years, and his theories modified, the attitude we have to unemployment now – that it is to an extent under the control of government – is thanks to him. But he was just one individual. The end of the war, and despite Keynes, brought with it a widespread fear of a rapid return to the dismal performance of the 1930s.68 Only economists like W. S. Woytinsky saw that there would be a boom, that people had been starved of consumer goods, that labourers and technicians, who had spent the war working overtime, had had no chance to spend the extra, that massive numbers of soldiers had years of pay saved up, that huge amounts of war bonds had been bought, which would now be redeemed, and that the technological advances made in wartime in regard to military equipment could now be rapidly turned to peacetime products. (Woytinsky calculated that there was $250 billion waiting to be spent.)69 In practice, once the world settled down, the situation would meet no one’s expectations: there was no return to the high unemployment levels of the 1930s, though in America unemployment was never as low as it had been in wartime. Instead, in the United States, it fluctuated between 4 and 7 percent – ‘high enough to be disturbing, but not high enough to alarm the prosperous majority.’70 This split-level society puzzled economists for years, not least because it had not been predicted by Keynes.
In America, although the Keynesian economists of Harvard and Tufts wanted to promote a more equal society after the war, the main problem was not poverty as such, for the country was enjoying more or less full employment. No, in America, the war merely highlighted the United States’ traditional problem when it came to equality: race. Many blacks fought in Europe and the Pacific, and if they were expected to risk their lives equally with whites, why shouldn’t they enjoy equality afterward?
The document that would have as profound an impact on American society as Beveridge’s did on Britain was released just as the war was turning firmly in the Allies’ favour, in January 1944. It was a massive work, six years in preparation, entitled An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy.71 The report’s author, Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987), was a Swede, and he had been chosen in 1937 by Frederick Keppel, president of the Carnegie Foundation, who paid for the study, because Sweden was assumed to have no tradition of imperialism. The report comprised 1,000 pages, 250 pages of notes, and ten appendices. Unlike Beveridge’s one-man band, Myrdal had many assistants from Chicago, Howard, Yale, Fisk, Columbia, and other universities, and in his preface he listed scores of distinguished thinkers he had consulted, among others: Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas, Otto Klineberg, Robert Linton, Ashley Montagu, Robert Park, Edward Shils.72
Since the 1920s of Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, the world of ‘racial science’ and eugenics had shifted predominantly to Europe with the Nazi rise to power in Germany and the campaigns of Trofim Lysenko in Soviet Russia. Britain and America had seen a revulsion against the simpleminded and easy truths of earlier authors, and doubts were even being thrown over race as a scientific concept. In 1939, in The Negro Family in the United States, E. Franklin Frazier, professor of sociology at Howard University, who had started his researches in Chicago in the early 1930s, chronicled the general disorganisation of the Negro family.73 He argued that this went all the way back to slavery, when many couples had been separated at the whim of their owners, and to emancipation, which introduced sudden change, further destroying stability. The drift to the towns hadn’t helped, he said, because it had contributed to the stereotype of the Negro as ‘feckless, promiscuous, prone to crime and delinquency.’ Frazier admitted that there was some truth to these stereotypes but disputed the causes.
Myrdal went much further than Frazier. While accepting that America had certain institutions that were an advance on those in Europe, that it was a more rational and optimistic country, he nonetheless concluded that even these advanced institutions were too weak to cope with the special set of circumstances that prevailed in the United States. The dilemma, he said, was entirely the responsibility of the whites.74 The American Negro’s lifestyle, every aspect of his being, was conditioned, a secondary reaction to the white world, the most important result of which was that blacks had been isolated from the law and the various institutions of the Republic, including in particular politics.75
Myrdal’s solution was every bit as contentious as his analysis. Congress, he judged, was unwilling and/or incapable of righting these wrongs.76 Something more was needed, and that ‘something,’ he felt, could be provided only by the courts. These, he said, should be used, and seen to be used, as a way to enforce legislation that had been on the statute books for years, designed to improve the condition of blacks, and to bring home to whites that the times were changing. Like Beveridge and Mannheim, Myrdal realised that after the war there would be no going back. And so the neutral Swede told America – just as it was rescuing democracy from dictatorship across the world – that at home it was unremittingly racist. It was not a popular verdict, at least among whites. Myrdal’s conclusions were even described as ‘sinister.’77 On the other hand, in the long run there were two significant reactions to Myrdal’s thesis. One was the use of the courts in exactly the way that he called for, culminating in what Ivan Hannaford described as ‘the most important single Supreme Court decision in American history,’ Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) in which the Court unanimously ruled that segregated schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing equal protection under the law, and were thus unconstitutional. This played a vital part in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
The other reaction to Myrdal was more personal. It was expressed first by Ralph Ellison, the black musician and novelist, who wrote a review of An American Dilemma that contained these words: ‘It does not occur to Myrdal that many of the [Negro/black] cultural manifestations which he considers merely reflective might also embody a rejection of what he considers “high values.” ’78 In some respects, that rejection of ‘high values’ (and not only by blacks) was the most important intellectual issue of the second half of the twentieth century.
22
LIGHT IN AUGUST
If there was a single moment when an atomic bomb moved out of the realm of theory and became a practical option, then it occurred one night in early 1940, in Birmingham, England. The Blitz was in full spate, there were blackouts every night, when no lights were allowed, and at times Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls must have wondered whether they had made the right decision in emigrating to Britain.
Frisch was Lise Meitner’s nephew, and while she had gone into exile in Sweden in 1938, after the Anschluss, he had remained in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr. As war approached, Frisch grew more and more apprehensive. Should the Nazis invade Denmark, he might well be sent to the camps, however valuable he was as a scientist. Frisch was also an accomplished pianist, and his chief consolation was in being able to play. But then, in the summer of 1939, Mark Oliphant, joint inventor of the cavity magnetometer, who by now had become professor of physics at Birmingham, invited Frisch to Britain, ostensibly for discussions about physics. (After Rutherford’s death in 1937 at the age of fifty-six, from an infection following an operation, many from the Cavendish team had dispersed.) Frisch packed a couple of bags, as one would do for a weekend away. Once in England, however, Oliphant made it clear to Frisch he could stay if he wished; the professor had made no elaborate plans, but he could read the situation as well as anyone, and he realised that physical safety was what counted above all else. While Frisch was in Birmingham, war was declared, so he just stayed. All hi
s possessions, including his beloved piano, were lost.1
Peierls was already in Birmingham, and had been for some time. A wealthy Berliner, he was one of the many brilliant physicists who had trained with Arnold Sommerfeld in Munich. Peierls had been in Britain in 1933, in Cambridge on a Rockefeller fellowship, when the purge of the German universities had begun. He could afford to stay away, so he did. He would become a naturalised citizen in Britain in February 1940, but for five months, from 3 September 1939 onward, he and Frisch were technically enemy aliens. They got round this ‘inconvenience’ in their conversations with Oliphant by pretending that they were only discussing theoretical problems.2
Until Frisch joined Peierls in Birmingham, the chief argument against an atomic bomb had been the amount of uranium needed to ‘go critical,’ start a chain reaction and cause an explosion. Estimates had varied hugely, from thirteen to forty-four tons and even to a hundred tons. Had this been true, it would have made the bomb far too heavy to be transported by aircraft and in any case would have taken as long as six years to assemble, by which time the war would surely have been long over. It was Frisch and Peierls, walking through the blacked-out streets of Birmingham, who first grasped that the previous calculations had been wildly inaccurate.3 Frisch worked out that, in fact, not much more than a kilogram of material was needed. Peierls’s reckoning confirmed how explosive the bomb was: this meant calculating the available time before the expanding material separated enough to stop the chain reaction proceeding. The figure Peierls came up with was about four millionths of a second, during which there would be eighty neutron generations (i.e., I would produce 2 would produce 4→8→16→32 … and so on). Peierls worked out that eighty generations would give temperatures as hot as the interior of the sun and ‘pressures greater than the centre of the earth where iron flows as a liquid.’4 A kilogram of uranium, which is a heavy metal, is about the size of a golf ball – surprisingly little. Frisch and Peierls rechecked their calculations, and did them again, with the same results. And so, as rare as U235 is in nature (in the proportions 1 : 139 of U238), they dared to hope that enough material might be separated out – for a bomb and a trial bomb – in a matter of months rather than years. They took their calculations to Oliphant. He, like them, recognised immediately that a threshold had been crossed. He had them prepare a report – just three pages – and took it personally to Henry Tizard in London.5 Oliphant’s foresight, in offering sanctuary to Frisch, had been repaid more quickly than he could ever have imagined.
Since 1932, when James Chadwick identified the neutron, atomic physics had been primarily devoted to obtaining two things: a deeper understanding of radioactivity, and a clearer picture of the structure of the atomic nucleus. In 1933 the Joliot-Curies, in France, had finally produced important work that won them the Nobel Prize. By bombarding medium-weight elements with alpha particles from polonium, they had found a way of making matter artificially radioactive. In other words, they could now transmute elements into other elements almost at will. As Rutherford had foreseen, the crucial particle here was the neutron, which interacted with the nucleus, forcing it to give up some of its energy in radioactive decay.
Also in 1933 the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi had burst on the scene with his theory of beta decay (despite Nature turning down one of his papers).6 This too related to the way the nucleus gave up energy in the form of electrons, and it was in this theory that Fermi introduced the idea of the ‘weak interaction.’ This was a new type of force, bringing the number of basic forces known in nature to four: gravity and electromagnetism, operating at great distances, and the strong and weak forces, operating at the subatomic level. Although theoretical, Fermi’s paper was based on extensive research, which led him to show that although lighter elements, when bombarded, were transmuted to still lighter elements by the emission of either a proton or an alpha particle, heavier elements acted in the opposite way. That is to say, their stronger electrical barriers captured the incoming neutron, making them heavier. However, being now unstable, they decayed to an element with one more unit of atomic number. This raised a fascinating possibility. Uranium was the heaviest element known in nature, the top of the periodic table, with an atomic number of 92. If it was bombarded with neutrons and captured one, it should produce a heavier isotope: U238 should become U239. This should then decay to an element that was entirely new, never before seen on earth, with the atomic number 93.7
It would take a while to produce what would be called ‘transuranic’ elements, but when they did arrive, Fermi was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize. The day that Fermi heard he had been awarded the ultimate honour was exciting in more ways than one. First there was a telephone call early in the morning; it was the local operator, to say they had been told to expect a call that evening at six o’clock, from Stockholm. Suspecting he had won the coveted award, Fermi and his family spent the day barely able to concentrate, and when the phone rang promptly at six, Fermi rushed to answer it. But it wasn’t Stockholm; it was a friend, asking them what they thought of the news.8 The Fermis had been so anxious about the phone call that they had forgotten to switch on the radio. Now they did. A friend later described what they heard: ‘Hard, emphatic, pitiless, the commentator’s voice read the … set of racial laws. The laws issued that day limited the activities and the civil status of the Jews [in Italy]. Their children were excluded from the public schools. Jewish teachers were dismissed. Jewish lawyers, physicians and other professionals could practise for Jewish clients only. Many Jewish firms were dissolved…. Jews were to be deprived of full citizenship rights, and their passports would be withdrawn.’9
Laura Fermi was Jewish.
That was not the only news. The evening before, in Germany itself, anti-Semitism had boiled over: mobs had torched synagogues across the country, pulled Jewish families into the streets, and beaten them. Jewish businesses and stores had been destroyed in their thousands, and so much glass had been shattered that the evening became infamous as Kristallnacht.
Eventually the call from Stockholm came through. Enrico had been awarded the Nobel Prize, ‘for your discovery of new radioactive substances belonging to the entire race of elements and for the discovery you made in the course of this work of the selective power of slow neutrons.’ Was that reference fortuitous? Or was it Swedish irony?
Until that moment, although some physicists talked about ‘nuclear energy,’ most of them didn’t really think it would ever happen. Physics was endlessly fascinating, but as a fundamental explanation of nature rather than anything else. Ernest Rutherford gave a public lecture in 1933 in which he specifically said that, exciting as the recent discoveries were, ‘the world was not to expect practical application, nothing like a new source of energy, such as once had been hoped for from the forces in the atom.’10
But in Berlin Otto Hahn spotted something available to any physicist but missed. The more common isotope of uranium, U238, is made up of 92 protons and 146 neutrons in its nucleus. If neutron bombardment were to create new, transuranic elements, they would have not only different weights but different chemical properties.11 He therefore set out to look for these new properties, always keeping in mind that if the neutrons were not being captured, but were chipping particles out of the nucleus, he ought to find radium. A uranium atom that lost two alpha particles (helium nuclei, atomic weight four for each) would become radium, R230. He didn’t find radium, and he didn’t find any new elements, either. What he did find, time and again when he repeated the experiments, was barium. Barium was much lighter: 56 protons and 82 neutrons, giving a total of 138, well below uranium’s 238. It made no sense. Puzzled, Hahn shared his results with Lise Meitner. Hahn and Meitner had always been very close, and he had helped protect her throughout the 1930s, because she was Jewish. She was kept employed because, technically speaking, she was Austrian, and therefore, technically speaking, the racial laws didn’t apply to her. After the Anschluss, however, in March 1938, when Austria became part of Germany, Meitner could n
o longer be protected, and she was forced to escape to Göteborg in Sweden. Hahn wrote to her just before Christmas 1938 describing his unusual results.12
As luck would have it, Meitner was visited that Christmas by her nephew Otto Frisch, then with Bohr in Copenhagen. The pair were very pleased to see each other – both were in exile – and they went lang-laufing in the nearby woods, which were covered in snow. Meitner told her nephew about Hahn’s letter, and they turned the barium problem over in their minds as they walked between the trees.13 They began to consider radical explanations for Hahn’s puzzling observation, in particular a theory of Bohr’s that the nucleus of an atom was like a drop of water, which is held together by the attraction that the molecules have for each other, just as the nucleus is held together by the nuclear force of its constituents. Until then, as mentioned earlier, physicists had considered that when the nucleus was bombarded, it was so stable that at most the odd particle could be chipped off.14 Now, huddled on a fallen tree in the Göteborg woods, Meitner and Frisch began to wonder whether the nucleus of uranium was like a drop of water in other ways, too.15 In particular they allowed the possibility that instead of being chipped away at by neutrons, a nucleus could in certain circumstances be cleaved in two. They had been in the woods, skiing and talking, for three hours. They were cold. Nonetheless, they did the calculations there and then before turning for home. What the arithmetic showed was that if the uranium atom did split, as they thought it might, it could produce barium (56 protons) and krypton (36) – 56+36=92. They were right, and when Frisch told Bohr, he saw it straight away. ‘Oh, what idiots we have all been,’ he cried. ‘This is just as it must be.’16 But that wasn’t all. As the news sank in around the world, people realised that, as the nucleus split apart, it released energy, as heat. If that energy was in the form of neutrons, and in sufficient quantity, then a chain reaction, and a bomb, might indeed be possible. Possible, but not easy. Uranium is very stable, with a half-life of 4.5 billion years; as Richard Rorty dryly remarks, if it was apt to give off energy that sparked chain reactions, few physics labs would have been around to tell the tale. It was Bohr who grasped the essential truth – that U238, the common isotope, was stable, but U235, the much less common form, was susceptible to nuclear fission (the brand-new term for what Hahn had observed and Meitner and Frisch had been the first to understand). Bring two quantities of U235 together to form a critical mass, and you had a bomb. But how much U235 was needed?