Einstein's monster is a real blast
Andrew Crumey
THE BOMB: A LIFE
Gerard DeGroot
Jonathan Cape, £18.99
ON AN August morning in 1945, an 11-year-old Japanese boy was swimming in a river with his schoolmates. He dived down to the riverbed, and when he surfaced, the whole world had changed.
"There were bodies of his friends on the riverbank, and beyond them he saw that all the houses had been knocked down. What had been a beautiful city a moment before was now a wasteland." The city was Nagasaki, where the world’s second atomic bomb had just exploded, killing 40,000 people in a flash.
Gerard DeGroot’s superb ‘biography’ of mankind’s most terrible weapons does something that has rarely, if ever, been attempted. Bringing together the scientific, political, cultural and historical threads, he looks at the Manhattan Project and its rivals in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia; and he widens the net to take in the efforts of Britain, France and other members - official or not - of the nuclear club. Ranging from atomic physics to rock’n’roll, the result is a book that is pacey, readable and enormously wide-ranging.
There is also a good deal of black humour - something that comes naturally to anyone who can remember Protect and Survive, the government pamphlet pushed through every British letterbox in 1980, which advised citizens that in case of impending nuclear war, they should paint their windows white and hide under a table. The same sinister naivety afflicted propaganda films. One, called This Little Ship, is described by DeGroot as being "as if Thomas the Tank Engine had been written by Edward Teller."
Teller, the "high priest" of thermonuclear weapons, looms large in any account of the subject. A brilliant physicist, he fled Hungary for the United States, where he was instrumental in getting Einstein to sign the letter that set the Manhattan Project rolling. Often described as the real-life model for Dr Strangelove, Teller perfectly illustrates the capacity of nuclear weapons to render intelligent, rational people barking mad.
Seeking alternative uses for bombs in a post-war world that had gone off the idea of killing people, Teller was among those who foresaw nuclear locomotives or even bomb-powered spaceships. A big hole in Nevada is all that remains of his scheme to blast out lakes and canals. The obvious drawback - lethal radiation - worried him little. In an interview towards the end of his life, Teller maintained that a little radiation could even be good for you.
The same inverted logic runs through other episodes DeGroot discusses. This was how it all started - Allied physicists such as Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi didn’t want to make bombs, but feared they had to have one before Hitler. At the same time, the German bomb master Werner Heisenberg was saying the same thing (or so he later claimed). Equally, the Soviet bomb programme was made necessary by the US’s position in 1945 as the world’s only nuclear superpower. Andrei Sakharov applied his genius to making a hydrogen bomb, only to plead that it would never be used.
One feels sympathy for the Soviet bomb makers, given that their boss was Lavrenti Beria, a psychopathic murderer who believed in dealing with insubordination using bullets, but who, in handling some of the world’s finest scientists, gave way to Stalin’s advice - "Leave them be, we can always shoot them later." Even so, Sakharov’s own remarks, quoted by DeGroot, show he and his comrades, just like their Western counterparts, positively enjoyed the big bangs they made. It was only when a nuclear test claimed the life of a civilian that Sakharov seems to have had his first qualms. He felt "an irrational yet very strong emotional impact", asking: "How not to start thinking of one’s responsibility at this point?"
Why were these brilliant minds unable to do their thinking a little sooner? In America, Hans Bethe worked on the hydrogen bomb while simultaneously writing articles denouncing the whole idea.
If people of such intelligence could be flummoxed, one can hardly blame politicians for spiralling into similarly self-defeating circles of intellectual sophistry. Indeed, one almost admires Harry Truman, who emerges from DeGroot’s account as a man untouched by any moral doubts. When Oppenheimer came into his office pleading: "I’ve got blood on my hands," Truman told him: "It’ll wash off," and gave him a handkerchief, afterwards insisting the "cry baby" be kept away.
Truman’s justification of the Hiroshima bomb is still repeated to this day: it saved countless American and Japanese lives that would have been lost in a land invasion. Truman also at first described Hiroshima as a "military base", which it evidently was not. The city was only chosen because it was largely untouched by bombing raids because it was of little military significance. Nagasaki got picked because bad weather rendered the first choice unavailable, and the crew didn’t want to take their bomb all the way home again. For this reason, the 11-year-old swimmer saw his world destroyed.
When it comes to nuclear madness, though, it is hard to beat the crassness of the pop-culture spin-offs that DeGroot describes, such as the mushroom-cloud shaped "atomic earrings" that went on sale after Hiroshima. Bars and motels across America took to calling themselves "Atomic", and an unfortunate child was even named Atomic Victory. Four days after the first nuclear test on Bikini Island, a new swimsuit appeared in honour of the event - and is still being worn.
Among many Hollywood examples, the most sobering DeGroot cites is an epic about Genghis Khan, filmed in the Utah desert 150 miles from the test site of a bomb called "Dirty Harry" on account of its high radiation. Of the 220 people working on the film, 91 subsequently developed cancer - the stars John Wayne and Susan Hayward both died of it.
Other causes (such as smoking) no doubt played a role, but as DeGroot says, "it does make you think".
And that, above all, is what his excellent book does, putting the whole nuclear history into a human context, and reminding us of the countless thousands of lives that have been silently damaged by it.
This is a book that really makes you think, as well as being hugely entertaining. I have read many books about different aspects of this enormous subject, but none that brings the diverse pieces together so well, in such an absorbing and truly masterly way.
Andrew Crumey’s latest book is Mobius Dick
This article:
news.scotsman.com |
