Utama Hiroshima: The World's Bomb

Hiroshima: The World's Bomb

The title of this book is somewhat misleading as it covers far more ground than simply an account of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The book traces the development of the A-bomb (though at a high level, and the reader interested in this subject would be far better off reading "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes). Alongside this the author lays out the parallel development of strategic bombing and the degeneration of morals on all sides as a result of the brutalities of the World War, both of which contributed to the climate in which the decision to use the weapon was made. The actual description of the events at Hiroshima takes up very little space as the author moves on to describe (again at a high level) the subsequent proliferation of nuclear weapons almost to the present day.

The book adopts a clear moral stance as regards the bombing, and while hedging somewhat, it is clear the author does not believe the bombings were a necessary part of winning the war against Japan. The decision to use the bomb is presented as almost inevitable with few of those involved expressing any serious moral reservations at the time. Furthermore, the author appears to believe, the bombings were far more a geopolitical statement to the Soviet Union rather than a military step to defeat Japan.

Unfortunately the book offers little new on the subject other than the idea that the bomb was the "world's bomb". This idea is based on the multi-national nature of the scientists that developed the theory and practical usage of the nuclear weapon and on the moral climate that made its use feasible. These are thin arguments at best. While the theoretical developments in early 20th century physics were certainly spread across the international scientific community, the Manhatten Project, despite critical contributions from the British and European scientists, was very much an American endeavor. More importantly, the decision to use the weapon was entirely an American one. As to the moral climate of the times, few if any, of the leaders of the Allied or Axis powers would have demurred from using the bomb had it been available to them, and a majority of their populations would have supported that decision. But this does not constitute a basis for calling it the "world's bomb". In all honesty the bomb was clearly an American Bomb with all that entails.

As for the history of the bomb and the associated physics this is better described in Rhodes' excellent book, the history of air power and the war in general can be found in specialist works covering those domains, and the arguments for and against the use of the bomb are well known to anyone familiar with 20th century history.

If you are unfamiliar with this subject matter then the book is a good overview. If you are familiar with the subject then this work will likely add little to your knowledge.
Tahun: 2008
Edisi: 1
Penerbit: Oxford University Press, USA
Bahasa: english
Halaman: 384
ISBN 10: 0199569762
ISBN 13: 9780199569762
Series: Making of the Modern World
File: PDF, 3.47 MB
Unduh (pdf, 3.47 MB)
Baca buku online

This group of narrative histories focuses on key moments and events in the
twentieth century to explore their wider signiﬁcance for the
development of the modern world.
The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940, Julian Jackson
A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World, Rana Mitter
The Vietnam Wars: A Global History, Mark Bradley
Algeria: The Undeclared War, Martin Evans
series advisers:
Professor Chris Bayly, University of Cambridge
Professor Richard J. Evans, University of Cambridge
Professor David Reynolds, University of Cambridge

the world’s bomb




Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide in
Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto
With oﬃces in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
© Andrew J. Rotter 2008

The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published 2008
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Rotter, Andrew Jon.
Hiroshima: the world’s bomb / Andrew J. Rotter.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–280437–2
1. Atomic bomb—History. I. Title.
QC773.R67 2008
Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
ISBN 978–0–19–280437–2
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To my daughters, Sophie and Phoebe Rotter.

Praise for Hiroshima

‘An engaging and exceptionally skillful combination of the scientiﬁc, technological, military, diplomatic, political, and cultural history of the atomic
bomb in an international context. By any standard, a terriﬁc book.’
J. Samuel Walker, author of Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use
of Atomic Bombs against Japan
‘In a smart, useful, and beautifully written book, Rotter treats the atomic
bombing of Japan in its multinational context. Synthesizing a huge literature, he concisely shows in how many ways this truly was the world’s
Laura Hein, Northwestern University, and author of Living with the Bomb
‘A profound look at one of mankind’s most signiﬁcant (and tragic)
events . . . diplomats and their politician bosses should read this work for an
understanding of the dire outcomes that diplomacy—and a lack thereof—
can reap.’
Thomas W. Zeiler, University of Colorado, and author of Unconditional


I never intended to write a book on the atomic bomb, but when David
Reynolds emailed out of the blue, as it were, in the summer of 2001
and asked me to write one for a new Oxford series, I could not resist
his invitation. I have appreciated his support and advice throughout the
protracted writing process. Katherine Reeve was my ﬁrst editor and got
me started; Luciana O’Flaherty took over and prodded me to ﬁnish during
my sabbatical leave in London in 2006. Luciana’s able and helpful assistant,
Matthew Cotton, and my Oxford production editor Kate Hind, brought
the book home. Hilary Walford copyedited the manuscript, even as the
water rose around her house in Gloucester during the summer of 2007.
Zoe Spilberg hunted down the photographs and negotiated permission for
their use. Carolyn McAndrew handled the proofreading and eliminated the
last of my sincere but, as it turned out, unnecessary attempts to spell in
I got interested in the atomic bomb because of my Stanford University
graduate adviser Barton J. Bernstein, whose deep research on the subject
I only gloss here. At Colgate University, my home institution, I was
lucky enough to teach a course on the bomb with my colleague from
across the Quad, Charles Holbrow. Since Charlie was responsible for doing
the physics part of the course, I was fortunate that Robin Marshall, a
physicist at the University of Manchester, read the manuscript and saved
me from a number of errors. Laura Hein oﬀered suggestions throughout,
and Sam Walker bravely read the entire manuscript and said nice things
about the writing. Conversations with friends and colleagues, including
Carl Guarneri, David Robinson, Karen Harpp, Walter LaFeber, Frank
Costigliola, and Jeremi Suri, helped to keep me on task, more or less. I am
grateful to them all. I also thank audiences at the University of Minnesota,
the University of Wisconsin, Fitchburg State College, Nanzan University,
Kitakyushu University, and the Hiroshima Peace Institute, for questions,


Ac k now l e dg e m e nt s

comments, and corrections following my lectures at these places. Students
and colleagues at Colgate helped enormously. Thanks especially to my
four terriﬁc research assistants: Sarah Hillick, Alexander Whitehurst, Adam
Florek, and Casey Graziani.
My parents, Roy and Muriel Rotter, and my in-laws, Chandran and
Lorraine Kaimal, supported me unswervingly, which they seem to think
is their job. My daughters, to whom the book is dedicated, have become
young women in the course of my writing it. In the acknowledgements in
my last book I characterized them as “naughty”; they are that no longer,
but smart and beautiful and my proudest work ever. As always, my greatest
debt is to my wife, Padma. Writing about the atomic bomb is not the most
cheerful of pursuits. She kept me going, and much more.


List of Plates


Introduction: The World’s Bomb


1. The World’s Atom


2. Great Britain: Refugees, Air Power, and the Possibility of
the Bomb


3. Japan and Germany: Paths not Taken


4. The United States I: Imagining and Building the Bomb


5. The United States II: Using the Bomb


6. Japan: The Atomic Bombs and War’s End


7. The Soviet Union: The Bomb and the Cold War


8. The World’s Bomb


Epilogue: Nightmares and Hopes


Bibliographical Essay


This page intentionally left blank


1. Ernest Rutherford: A New Zealander who came to the United Kingdom in
1895, Rutherford was one of the pioneers of modern nuclear physics
2. Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn, in their laboratory at the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute outside Berlin, 1938
3. Ernest Lawrence, Enrico Fermi, and Isidor Rabi: Three physicists who played
important roles in the development of the ﬁrst nuclear weapons
4. A US government propaganda poster, “Lookout Monks!”: Throughout the
war, the British and American governments encouraged citizens to imagine
the destruction of Germany and Japan by bombers
5. Johann Strasse, central Dresden, 1945: American and British air forces
bombed the German city of Dresden on the night of 14–15 February, 1945
6. Yoshio Nishina’s cyclotron, built at Tokyo’s Riken Laboratory
7. Leslie Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer: Groves was made a general and
put in charge of the top-secret Manhattan Project in September 1942
8. The Americans destroy a German “uranium burner”
9. The Japanese emperor, Hirohito, walks through Tokyo neighborhoods
wrecked by American bombs
10. Unloading the plutonium core of the Trinity test gadget, July 1945
11. The “Big Three” at Potsdam, July 1945: The Soviet Union’s Josef Stalin, US
President Harry S. Truman, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
came together at Potsdam
12. Ruined Hiroshima: The atomic bomb codenamed “Little Boy” struck near
the heart of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945
13. The bombed, 1: The living in Hiroshima sought shelter where they could
ﬁnd it
14. The bombed, 2: A family at a makeshift hospital ward
15. Standing at attention: A boy stands erect, having done his duty by bringing
his dead brother to a cremation ground
16. No handshake for a hated enemy: The Americans ordered the Japanese to
send a surrender delegation to Manila
17. Yuli Khariton and Igor Kurchatov: The two physicists most responsible for
the creation of the Soviet atomic bomb program in the 1940s
18. The Indian reactor at Trombay: The CIRUS reactor, built with Canadian
help and supplied with moderating heavy water by the United States, came
online in 1960

This page intentionally left blank

The World’s Bomb

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, on 6 August 1945, seems in
many ways an event characterized by clarity and even simplicity. From a
clear blue sky on a radiantly hot summer morning came a single American
B-29 bomber (warily ﬂanked by two observation planes), carrying a single
bomb. The plane was called the Enola Gay, after its pilot’s mother; the
bomb bore the innocent nickname ‘Little Boy’. There were no Japanese
ﬁghter planes to challenge the Enola Gay, no airbursts of ﬂak in its way.
Japanese civil defense, evidently having been fooled by a lone American
reconnaissance plane over the city an hour before, now did not bother
to sound the alert that would have sent people in Hiroshima to air-raid
shelters. The target of the bomb was the Aioi Bridge, which spanned the
Ōta River at the heart of the city. At 8.15 Hiroshima time the crew of the
Enola Gay released the bomb. Forty-three seconds later, at an altitude of
about 1,900 feet, Little Boy exploded.
One plane, one city, one morning in August, one atomic bomb: simple.
The commander of the Enola Gay, a 29-year-old air-force colonel named
Paul W. Tibbets, had practiced many times during the preceding weeks and
months dropping mock equivalents of atomic bombs, ﬁlled with concrete
and high explosives, on an isolated patch of the Utah desert and in the
Paciﬁc Ocean. The way his plane bounced upwards once the bomb had
been dropped and then detonated was no surprise to him. That the bomb
worked, creating an awesome cloud of ﬁre and smoke and dirt and buﬀeting
the Enola Gay with its shock wave, was testimony to the technological
competence of an American-based team of scientists, who had solved
many (though hardly all) of the scientiﬁc problems the Second World War
had presented. And there seemed to the crew of the plane that bright
morning a moral simplicity to what they had done. The criminality of the
Japanese—all Japanese, without distinction—was to them unquestionable.



The Japanese had treacherously attacked Pearl Harbor. They had murdered
civilians in China and Southeast Asia, tortured and starved their prisoners,
and fought remorselessly for their island conquests in the South Paciﬁc.
If dropping an atomic bomb above the center of Hiroshima would end
the war sooner, the men of the Enola Gay would simply do it, without
hesitation and untroubled by pangs of conscience.
Over sixty years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki,
bombed three days later), we remember the event with much of the same
stark simplicity with which it was regarded at the time. The atomic bomb,
many claim, was an appropriate punishment for a people who had visited
war and misery on the world, a punishment commensurate with Japanese
malfeasance in Asia and throughout the Paciﬁc. The Japanese deserved the
bomb. Moreover, the bomb was essential to end the war. The Japanese
war cabinet, or inﬂuential members of it, had vowed to sacriﬁce multitudes
of their fellow citizens in defending their homeland against an anticipated
invasion by the United States. The devastating ﬁrebombings of Japanese
cities, including Tokyo, had not caused military oﬃcials to waver. Only a
shock as powerful as the one the atomic bombs administered was suﬃcient
to convince Japan’s leaders, including the Emperor Hirohito, to quit the
war on reasonable terms. The bombs thus saved hundreds of thousands of
Japanese and American lives.
Or: The atomic bomb was a weapon so heinous in its composition,
so willfully indiscriminate, so simply and obviously aimed at ordinary
people, that its use was a moral outrage, even if it might in the end have
saved lives. No people, regardless of the behavior of their government,
deserves annihilation by a weapon as terrible as a nuclear bomb. In its very
singularity as an instrument of war the atomic bomb stood condemned.
It was the only known weapon to destroy so much by itself, to create
such a powerful blast, such a devastating ﬁre, and—perhaps above all—
to spread radioactivity throughout its targeted place, with consequences as
fearsome as they were at the time poorly understood. And, critics charged,
the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unnecessary to win
the war. Japan was near defeat by the summer of 1945, and some cabinet
members, and possibly even the Emperor himself, were frantically looking
for a way to surrender to the Americans while saving a measure of face and
preserving the imperial system of rule. Had the Americans modiﬁed even
slightly the terms of surrender, guaranteeing that Hirohito would keep his
life and his position, Tokyo would have conceded. The Americans knew



this. They used the bombs anyway in order to see what their new weapon—
a $2 billion investment—would do to a city, and especially to end the Paciﬁc
War before the Soviet Union could enter it fully, and thereby demand
a prominent role in the reconstruction of postwar Japan. The use of the
bombs would in addition intimidate potential adversaries, serving notice,
particularly in Moscow, that the United States had harnessed the power of
the nucleus and would not scruple to use it.
But, of course, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was not so simple,
neither in 1945 nor today. That the dispute about its use remains bitter is
evidence of that. The questions linger. Were the Japanese on their last legs
by the summer of 1945? Did their leaders know it? Did the Americans think
the Japanese leaders knew it? Was the bomb necessary to end the war? Were
both bombs needed? In their absence, or with a decision not to use them,
would it have taken a bloody American invasion of Japan itself to achieve
surrender? Or would the war have ended, as the US Strategic Bombing
Survey concluded in July 1946, ‘certainly’ before the end of 1945 ‘and in
all probability prior to 1 November 1945 . . . even if the atomic bombs had
invasion had been planned or contemplated’?1 Would it have been enough
for the United States to have modiﬁed its demand that Japan surrender
unconditionally, perhaps by signaling that the imperial system, the kokutai,
could be retained? Was the bomb used chieﬂy not for military reasons but
to intimidate the Soviet Union?
And yet, even these diﬃcult and complex questions, along with their
fraught and complicated and necessarily qualiﬁed answers, frame the argument too simply. For the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was not merely
a decision made by US policymakers in order to punish the Japanese, not
just an issue in Japan–US relations, but instead the product of years of
scientiﬁc experimentation, ethical debate within the scientiﬁc community,
and signiﬁcant changes in the conduct of war—all undertaken globally.
Americans alone did not decide to build the bomb, and neither did they
alone actually build it. The science that enabled the bomb was conducted
internationally; Hungarian, British, and German scientists and mathematicians, for example, were among the bomb’s most important theoretical
pioneers. Even after many of the world’s leading mathematicians, physicists,
and chemists had gathered in the United States and had combined their
talents in the top-secret Manhattan Project, other scientists remained in
their home countries, contributing to ﬂedgling atomic bomb programs.



Limited by doubting governments and scarce resources, these programs
nevertheless sustained the international scope of the pursuit of nuclear
power, and internationalized as well the scientiﬁc and ethical debates over
the atomic bomb that emerged with new intensity after August 1945.
If the making of the atomic bomb and the discussion that surrounded
it had international sources, so too did the bomb have implications that
stretched beyond the territories of the United States and Japan and well
beyond the sensibilities of Americans and Japanese. News of the Hiroshima
bombing was greeted with profound shock everywhere. A Mexican newspaper likened it to an earthquake, while a Trinidadian paper chose a comparison to a volcano—both familiar yet potentially catastrophic occurrences
that were beyond human responsibility or control. The bomb killed mostly
Japanese, of course, but also many Koreans and Chinese, and (indirectly)
a few Americans, none of whom was in Hiroshima that dreadful morning
by choice. Otto Hahn, one of the Germans who had discovered ﬁssion
in 1938, was badly shaken by news of Hiroshima and blamed himself for
the hundreds of thousands of deaths, while Werner Heisenberg, head of
the German atomic-bomb project throughout much of the war, would
not believe that the news was true.2 When the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin
heard about Hiroshima, he called in his scientists and declared himself
fully for a crash program to build a Soviet atomic bomb. The British,
proud of their contribution to the Manhattan Project—there were nineteen
British scientists at the laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where
the bomb was designed—decided nonetheless to build their own bombs.
So, ultimately, did the governments of France, Israel, China, South Africa,
India, Pakistan, North Korea, and possibly Iran.
The atomic-bomb tests that followed the Hiroshima and Nagasaki
bombings put into the air radiation that no human-made boundary could
contain. The waste products of nuclear reactors, on line for peaceful or
warlike purposes, threatened to poison ground water as well. Fear of a
nuclear nightmare also transcended nations. The creation of Soviet or
(mostly) US military bases that held, or were reputed to hold, nuclear
weapons within their gates—bases in the Philippines, Okinawa, Cuba,
Turkey, and England—brought home to nearby residents the possibility that
they might be the targets of a nuclear attack or victims of a nuclear accident.
Resistance to the testing and deployment of nuclear weapons ranged far and
wide, from Japan and Oceania to Europe and the United States. Popular
culture, including literature, art, music, and even humor, reﬂected global



fears of nuclear war, and just as often a heady deﬁance of those apparently
willing to wage or countenance it.
The uranium-based bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima was thus the
world’s bomb. While it was an American’s hand that released the bomb
from the belly of the Enola Gay, and while Japanese died in droves that
morning as a result, the atomic bomb was in a meaningful sense everyone’s
oﬀspring and certainly thereafter everyone’s problem. Had the Japanese,
or the Germans, the British, or the Soviets made the bomb ﬁrst, they
surely would have used it against their enemies; that they did not get the
bomb ﬁrst had nothing to do with any moral qualms about producing it.
No one’s hands were entirely clean. Otto Frisch, the Austrian who came
to Los Alamos and worked on assembling the critical mass essential for a
nuclear chain reaction, felt nauseated when his fellow scientists celebrated
the destruction of Hiroshima, while the Hungarian scientist Leo Szilard
told a correspondent that the bombing was ‘one of the greatest blunders in
history’, eroding as it did ‘our own moral position’. Robert Oppenheimer,
scientiﬁc head of the Manhattan Project, lamented to President Harry
S. Truman that he had ‘blood on his hands’ because of his contribution
to the bomb. (According to some accounts, Truman caustically oﬀered
Oppenheimer a handkerchief to wipe the blood oﬀ.) ‘As far as I can
see,’ said Mahatma Gandhi, ‘the atomic bomb has deadened the ﬁnest
feelings which have sustained mankind for ages’—meaning that everyone, not just the immediate perpetrators of the bomb, had been morally
This book tells the story of the Hiroshima bomb. It will explore, in
layperson’s terms, the physics of the bomb, the international crises that
led to the Second World War, the creation of a community of scientists,
throughout the world and especially in the United States during the 1930s
and 1940s, dedicated to developing a weapon that could undo the evil that
resided in Nazi Germany, the harnessing of their eﬀorts by the wartime
state, the political and strategic decisions that led to the bombing itself, the
impact of the bomb on Hiroshima and the endgame of the Paciﬁc War,
the largely unavailing attempts to control the spread of nuclear weapons
in the war’s aftermath and the evolution of the nuclear arms race, the eﬀects
of the bombing and the bomb on society and culture, and the state of things
nuclear in the early twenty-ﬁrst-century world. Throughout, the account
will contextualize the event—too seldom regarded as the place—we call
Hiroshima as an episode in international history, not solely the consequence



of wartime hatreds that marked the American–Japanese relationship in
1941–5. The result, I hope, is a serious, readable overview of one of the
truly critical moments in the history of the twentieth-century world and
all human history. ‘The scientists, helped by the engineers, had drawn a
line across history so that the centuries before August 6, 1945, were sharply
separated from the years to come,’ wrote the historian Margaret Gowing.
‘And though perhaps they did not contemplate the technical “escalation”
of the next ﬁfteen years nor think in terms of megatons and megadeaths,
of weapons that could obliterate not a single town but half a country,
they knew that the atomic age had only begun.’4 More than sixty years
later, the Cold War is past, the danger of a nation-to-nation exchange
of nuclear bombs or warheads seemingly diminished. Yet in an age of
stateless terrorism and great power arrogance, where international norms
and institutions appear helpless to prevent violence and nuclear materials go
ominously missing, where there are no longer one or two nuclear nations
but perhaps ten, we may wonder whether the world is safer from nuclear
holocaust than it was in the bewildering days following that clear August
morning in 1945.

The World’s Atom


ever believe’, wrote the British physicist Jacob Bronowski, ‘that
the atom is a complex mystery—it is not. The atom is what
we ﬁnd when we look for the underlying architecture in nature, whose
bricks are as few, as simple and as orderly as possible.’ Reassuring words,
perhaps, to a beginning student of physics, and logical too, for humans
naturally seek to reduce large and complex matters to their essences. But the
presence of atoms was neither demonstrated nor universally assumed until
relatively recently. It is commonly said that the ancient Greeks postulated
the existence of the atom, and it is true that the word atomos is Greek
for ‘indivisible’, a coinage made by the philosopher Democritus around
430 bce. Both Plato and Aristotle, however, disparaged the notion of the
atom, Plato contending that the highest forms of human society, including
truth and beauty, could not be explained with reference to unseen bits of
apparently inert matter. The Platonic–Aristotelean view largely held the
ﬁeld for centuries. In 1704, Sir Isaac Newton wrote (in Optics): ‘It seems
hard, impenetrable moveable Particles,’ which made the case for something
like atoms, however ‘massy’ they might prove. A century later, the English
chemist John Dalton posited the existence of atoms as hard and round as
billiard balls, though these were particular to chemical elements and not, as
Democritus had claimed, all like each other in composition.1

1. Dissecting the atom
Undoing the atom was fundamentally the atomic inheritance of Ernest
Rutherford, a New Zealander who came to study physics at Newton’s
university, Cambridge, and its Cavendish laboratory, in 1895. ‘I was brought



up to look at the atom as a nice hard fellow, red or gray in colour, according
to taste,’ he would write. For a time, Rutherford found no cause to change
his mind. He worked on radio waves at the Cavendish, then spent nine
years at McGill University in Montreal, tracing atomic ‘emanations’ but
not yet investigating the atomic structure itself. In the meantime, however,
J. J. Thomson, one of Rutherford’s mentors, found in a closed glass tube
evidence of particles with negative electrical charges that were themselves
tinier than atoms; these would be called electrons, a name already long
devised by the Irish physicist George Johnstone Stoney, who had posited
though not demonstrated their existence. Using a similar tube, W. C.
Röntgen, working at the University of Würzburg in Germany, produced
an electrical discharge that yielded an odd glow. When he covered the
tube with black paper and placed his hand between the tube and a screen,
he could see faintly projected the bones of his hand. Röntgen called the
phenomenon ‘X-rays’. (A startled and righteous assemblyman in New
Jersey, apprised of the discovery, introduced legislation ‘prohibiting the use
of X-rays in opera glasses’.) In 1896, the French physicist Henri Becquerel,
inspired by Röntgen’s ﬁnding, decided to look for X-rays in materials
that ﬂuoresced—that is, absorbed light from one part of the spectrum and
emitted light from another part. He wrapped a photographic plate in black
paper, dusted it with a uranium compound, then left the plate in the sun.
After a few hours, he wrote: ‘I saw the silhouette of the phosphorescent
substance in black on the negative.’ Becquerel tried the experiment again,
but, discouraged by a succession of cloudy days in Paris, and assuming the
sun had caused the tracing on the negative, he closed the plate in a drawer.
He was surprised, several days later, when he looked at the plate, to ﬁnd
that the silhouette eﬀect had occurred even in the dark. It was not the sun,
but something in the uranium, that had penetrated the black paper and left
its ghostly image. Two years later, the French wife–husband team Marie
and Pierre Curie discovered two new elements, polonium and radium, that
gave oﬀ Becquerel’s mysterious discharge. They dubbed it ‘radioactivity’.2
Something was coming oﬀ, or out of, atoms. They were not themselves
the smallest things, nor were they as solid and ‘massy’ as billiard balls.
Thomson’s tiny electrons and the presence of radioactive emission demonstrated that. (Scientists would ultimately identify three types of radiations—
alpha, beta, and gamma rays—with the betas being streams of electrons.)
Over the ﬁrst two decades of the twentieth century, Rutherford, who
moved from Montreal to Manchester in 1910, ‘systematically dissected the

the world’s atom


atom’, as Richard Rhodes has written. He found that atoms, far from
stable, might change themselves into another form of the same element
they comprised (called an isotope) or another element altogether. He
calculated that an enormous amount of energy came with radiation; if
things went badly wrong, he said, ‘some fool in a laboratory might blow up
the universe unawares’. And, on 7 March 1911, speaking before a general
audience in Manchester, Rutherford announced that he had revised his
notion of the atom’s structure: it had a central mass, or nucleus, around
which spun electrons. Since electrons carried negative electric charges, the
atomic nucleus must be charged positive. The force exerted by the electrons
must be equal to that of the nucleus for the atom to remain stable.3
Rutherford did not work alone. At McGill he had teamed with Frederick
Soddy, a chemist who, like Rutherford, would win a Nobel Prize, and also
with the German Otto Hahn, who conjured with isotopes and would go
on to do revolutionary experiments with the nucleus during the 1930s.
In Manchester there was another German, Hans Geiger, builder of an
electrical machine that detected radiation and clicked in its presence. He
helped train James Chadwick, the Australian Marcus Oliphant, the Russian
Peter Kapitsa, and the Japanese Yoshio Nishina—the latter two of whom
would play leading roles in their nations’ nuclear-weapons programs. The
great Danish physicist Niels Bohr considered himself Rutherford’s student,
though he was Rutherford’s equal at reﬁning ideas about the structure of the
atom. (Curiously, a Japanese scientist named Hantarō Nagaoka suggested in
1903 that an atom resembled the planet Saturn, with the planet itself as a
nucleus and the rings representing electrons orbiting it. Rutherford seems
not too have known of Nagaoka’s vision, despite the two men having met
in Manchester.)4
Rutherford concluded in 1919 that the nucleus of hydrogen, the ﬁrst
element in the periodic table, was a single, positively charged particle he
called a proton. More complicated elements had more protons, and every
nucleus of a single element had the same number of protons, which ﬁgure
gives the element its atomic number. Rutherford and others, however,
suspected that there was something more to the nucleus, for nuclei were
evidently too heavy to consist only of protons. Suspicion was one thing,
detection another. The other nuclear particles (to be called neutrons) were
hard to ﬁnd, as Laura Fermi wrote, because, unlike protons and electrons,
they lack electrical charge, and because they ‘stay very much at home inside
atomic nuclei, and it is very diﬃcult to get them to leave’. It was James



Chadwick who found the neutron, in experiments at the Cavendish in
1932. He reported his discovery before a group of physicists on 17 February,
then said: ‘Now I want to be chloroformed and put to bed for a
While a neutron likes to stay put, it is, as a result of its electrical neutrality,
an ideal projectile with which to enter and explore the nucleus. Probing the
nucleus with a neutron, especially the large nucleus of one of the heavier
and less stable elements, instantly destabilizes it. This nucleus busting, this
breaking of atoms, is called ﬁssion. It was ﬁrst observed by Otto Hahn
and Fritz Strassmann in a laboratory in suburban Berlin in late 1938,
properly interpreted by Lise Meitner and her physicist nephew Otto Frisch
at the year’s end (Hahn was inclined to resist the implications of his own
experiment), conﬁrmed experimentally by Frisch, then published in the
February 1939 issue of the journal Nature, and even before that disclosed
by Bohr at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington—
from which excited physicists departed early in order to try the experiment
themselves, and on which more later.
Holding together the protons and neutrons (the nucleons) is the strong
nuclear force, which means that large amounts of energy are locked up
inside the atom’s nucleus. When a projectile neutron strikes a target
nucleus, the nucleus breaks apart, yielding two nearly equal halves, a
burst of energy, and some its own neutrons. ‘These ﬂy through the rest
of the material,’ Bronowski explains, ‘and if the piece is large enough
each neutron is certain to strike another nucleus and thus set oﬀ another
burst of energy—and ﬁre oﬀ still other neutrons to carry on the reaction.’
The materials most likely to sustain such a chain reaction (as it is called)
are those with heavy, unstable, neutron-rich nuclei, particularly uranium
and human-made plutonium. A gram of uranium, fully ﬁssioned through
such a chain reaction, produces enough energy to light 20,000 light bulbs
for ten hours. A similarly ﬁssioned pound of uranium makes as much
energy as millions of pounds of coal. Near the culmination of this process
comes the release of radiation in the form of beta particles and gamma
Certainly Ernest Rutherford, the nucleus around whom buzzed an electron cloud of other scientists, had not, despite his puckish comment about
a fool in a laboratory blowing up the universe, set out to make a powerful
explosive. Anyone claiming that the day of atomic power was dawning
was ‘talking moonshine’, he wrote dismissively in 1933. The excitement

the world’s atom


of discovery was thus not tied to some cataclysmic result, and for this
reason not circumscribed by the nation. Even during the First World
War, Rutherford had stayed in touch with scientists throughout Europe,
including those in Germany. When the war ended, cooperation redoubled;
what the American J. Robert Oppenheimer called the ‘heroic’ days of
atomic physics, the time of ‘great synthesis and resolutions’, occurred
during the 1920s, when the world was at peace. In the great centers
of interwar physics—Cambridge, Paris, Copenhagen, Göttingen—there
was excitement about theory, tiny particles of matter and their puzzling
behavior, and how to reconcile the evidence recorded on machines and
with the eyes with what one knew, or thought one knew, about the way
atoms worked. In 1914, the writer H. G. Wells published a novel called
The World Set Free, in which the earth, forty years hence, was a place of
atomic-powered cars and radioactive bombs made of an element Wells
called ‘Carolinum’, which bored deep into the soil and ﬁred oﬀ ‘puﬀs
of heavy incandescent vapour and fragments of viciously punitive rock
and mud, saturated with Carolinum, and even a center of scorching and
blistering energy’. Leo Szilard, the Hungarian scientist who would become
the Cassandra of the nuclear physics community during the 1930s and
1940s, at ﬁrst regarded the book as entertaining ﬁction.7

2. The republic of science
The scientists had faith that, whatever they were conjuring with, whatever
danger inhered in the explosive potential of the nucleus, they would, as
a group, never allow their discoveries to be used by nation states against
humanity. For they had their higher allegiances, whose purposes transcended those of petty polities shaped by the whims of nationalism or
politics and susceptible to abuse by despots. They were part of what the
philosopher of science Michael Polanyi would call ‘the republic of science’.
The republic had its own rules, cultures, practices. New initiates served as
apprentices to elder masters, were taught how to do their work and evaluate
the work of their colleagues. The point was, as Rhodes describes it, to create
a ‘political network among men and women of diﬀering backgrounds and
diﬀering values’, by establishing conventions of judgment and trust. The
scientiﬁc republic did not replace the nation state but rested in consolidating
fashion atop all such states.8



Above all, the republic must allow its constituents to work alongside each
other, if not literally then with full knowledge of what all its other members
are doing. Polanyi likened the process to assembling a jigsaw puzzle: while
each person involved in the assembly contributes his or her skills to matching colors and shapes to make the pieces ﬁt, in the end the puzzle must
be a group enterprise, wherein skills, and puzzle components, are merged
to form a whole. Each scientist (to depart from the metaphor) must see
the entire problem laid out, and must contribute to its solution. There
was no real hierarchy among scientists: ‘The authority of scientiﬁc opinion
remains essentially mutual; it is established between scientists, not above them.’
That discoveries concerning the atom would be shared, through journal
articles, at conferences, in coﬀee houses and taverns and labs, was a matter
of faith among the world’s physicists before the Second World War. One
could not patent or nationalize the atom.9
James Chadwick was caught in Germany at the onset of the First World
War and interned at a prison camp outside Berlin. A number of German
scientists supplied him with enough equipment to set up a small laboratory,
in which he worked with other scientist prisoners. In the midst of the
war’s carnage in May 1918, Chadwick wrote reassuringly to Rutherford
that he was about to start work ‘on the formation of carbonyl chloride in
light’—scientist language for phosgene gas. The pace of scientiﬁc exchange
quickened considerably with the end of the war, during Oppenheimer’s
‘heroic time’. (‘It involved’, Oppenheimer wrote, ‘the collaboration of
scores of scientists from many diﬀerent lands . . . It was a time of earnest
correspondence and hurried conferences, of debate, criticism and brilliant
mathematical improvisation.’) In Munich’s cafés, students of the physicist
Arnold Sommerfeld scrawled formulas on the marble tabletops; waiters
at the Café Lutz were told never to wipe the tables without permission.
Oppenheimer was one of many young American scientists who came
to Göttingen during the 1920s (he was there nicknamed ‘Oppie’, or
‘Opje’, which he had diﬃculty getting used to). A group of remarkable
Hungarian Jews—Polanyi, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, Theodor von Kármán, Leo Szilard—left their home country during
the 1920s and 1930s, driven out by political instability, state violence, and
a rising tide of anti-Semitism. The Japanese physicist Nishina, who would
be the ﬁrst scientist contacted by the Japanese government to explain what
had happened at Hiroshima, worked with Rutherford and Bohr, and in
1927 hosted Albert Einstein in Tokyo.10

the world’s atom


Like Nishina, many came to study with Bohr in Copenhagen, and Bohr
himself frequently seemed to be in several places at once. He consulted
men who would stay and work in Nazi Germany, most famously Carl
Friedrich von Weizsäcker and Werner Heisenberg. He also welcomed those
escaping the oppressions of dictators and helped hundreds get safely oﬀ
the Continent as Hitler’s darkness fell. (He himself would escape, ﬁrst to
Sweden, then to Britain and the United States, in late 1943.) In Polanyi’s
scientiﬁc republic, Bohr was primus inter pares. He embodied the ideal of a
scientiﬁc community, oﬀering by example a model of integrity and probity,
encouraging others in their work, sharing, with his wife, Margrethe, his
hospitality, and most of all failing, in the most admirable ways, to respect
political and national boundaries that stood in the way of scientiﬁc progress.
Bohr’s supreme cosmopolitanism would bring him to understand that a
terrible explosive based on the energy of the atom was no more susceptible
to monopoly than the atom itself. More than anyone else, Bohr would
grasp the ultimate unity of the world’s scientiﬁc community. The secret
of the atomic bomb was in his judgment no secret at all, since intelligent
men and women across the globe had come together to understand the
forces that made it work. Borders between nations, hardened by mistrust
and war, were ﬁnally ineﬀective against the spread of scientiﬁc knowledge.
‘The chain of scientiﬁc events that led to the threshold of the bomb’,
wrote Laura Fermi, had gone ‘zigzagging without interruption from one
country to another’. In 1943, Bohr felt that the republic of science, looming
transcendently over the artiﬁcial collection of nation states, would be the
ﬁnal arbiter of the bomb. He knew the Russian scientists, including Peter
Kapitsa, and he knew that they would ﬁgure out how to build a bomb. Why
not admit that secrets were impossible to keep in a polity based on sharing,
and acknowledge the scientiﬁc republic by letting the Soviets know that an
international group of scientists was making a bomb in the United States?11
Bohr’s teacher, colleague, and friend Ernest Rutherford was gone by
then; he would never see his ‘moonshine’ made horribly manifest at
Hiroshima. Rutherford apparently once claimed that he could do his
research at the North Pole, provided he had a lab and the right equipment.
Rudolf Peierls, a German who came to work in England in 1933 and later
helped to develop the bomb in Los Alamos, knew Rutherford (and Bohr)
well, and doubted either could have worked successfully in isolation. ‘The
Rutherford and Bohr types thrive on contacts,’ he wrote. ‘They are kept
going by their own initiative, but they must share their knowledge and their



discoveries with friends and colleagues.’ Both men were too much part of
the scientiﬁc republic to have left it for a smaller, more parochial place.12

3. The republic threatened: the advent
of poisonous gas
Despite the creation of Chadwick’s prison camp lab, despite the determination of Bohr and Rutherford to maintain the ﬂow of scientiﬁc information
across national boundaries, the First World War challenged international
cooperation and threatened republican scientiﬁc loyalties. It did so in part
because many scientists in the belligerent nations went to work for their
governments and helped develop weapons that destroyed men in the name
of national honor, security, or purpose. Probably the most notorious of
these, and a sobering harbinger of nuclear arms, were chemical weapons,
often (though not always) dispensed in the form of poisonous gas. Near
the Belgian town of Ypres, at 5.00 in the afternoon on 22 April 1915,
the air was suddenly ﬁlled with ‘thick yellow smoke . . . issuing from the
German trenches’. ‘What follows’, reported the British Field Marshall Sir
John French, ‘almost deﬁes description. The eﬀect of these poisonous
gases was so virulent as to render the whole of the line held by the
French . . . practically incapable of any action at all . . . Hundreds of men
were thrown into a comatose or dying condition, and within an hour
the whole position had to be abandoned, together with about ﬁfty guns.’
There were estimates that 5,000 soldiers died in the attack, and twice that
number were injured, their throats and eyes and lungs left burning and their
memories haunted. ‘It was’, wrote a British clergyman who observed the
retreat, ‘the most ﬁendish, wicked thing I have ever seen.’13
The Germans had been thinking about chemical weapons since at least
the previous year. From the ﬁrst, German military oﬃcials had involved
academic and industry chemists in the quest for an agent that would
disorient and damage enemies dug into trenches on both fronts. They
experimented in the fall of 1914 with a compound that caused violent
ﬁts of sneezing, pouring it into howitzer shells and launching them at the
French at Neuve Chapelle in October. The compound dispersed poorly
and had no apparent eﬀect on the battle, and the shortage of shells and
launchers made continued experiments unattractive. The eminent chemist

the world’s atom


Fritz Haber found a solution: disperse chlorine gas from metal cylinders,
creating a toxic cloud that would settle over enemy positions. The German
command agreed to try this. The generals recruited scientists and soldiers
to serve as forward observers—that is, to ﬁnd the most favorable positions
from which to launch the gas cloud. Six thousand cylinders were opened
simultaneously that April afternoon. The cloud at ﬁrst looked white, then
intensiﬁed to yellow and green as the amount of chlorine in it rose, drifting
higher and moving south and west over French and Algerian posts. The
aﬀected soldiers broke and ran.14
Among those Germans sent to plan the attack was Otto Hahn, already
well known for his work on radiation with Ernest Rutherford in Montreal.
Haber pressed Hahn into service in the name of science and loyalty to the
German state. By his own account, Hahn was not so sure, objecting that the
use of gas would violate the Hague Convention of 1899, which proscribed
the use of projectiles to diﬀuse ‘asphyxiating or deleterious gas’. Haber
responded, ﬁrst, that the French had already started it, having ﬁlled riﬂe
cartridges with tear gas (a dubious claim when Haber made it, in January
1915), and, more important, that the use of gas would ultimately save lives
on all sides because it would end the war sooner. It was also technically true
that the release of a gas cloud did not involve launching projectiles. Hahn
evidently accepted this logic. ‘I let myself be converted’, he remembered,
‘and threw myself into the work wholeheartedly.’ He remained involved in
chemical warfare, and was called a ‘gas pioneer’, until the armistice—even
after Haber had conﬁded to him that he thought the war was lost.15
The Germans continued to develop new chemical compounds and new
ways to deliver them. Shells came largely to replace clouds released from
cylinders; chlorine was succeeded by phosgene and chloropicrin, harder
than chlorine to detect and more destructive. In the summer of 1917 they
ﬁred at Ypres shells marked with a yellow cross and ﬁlled with mustard gas,
which smelled like horseradish and was, according to one commentator,
‘the war gas par excellence for the purpose of causing casualties’. Men were
blinded, in some cases permanently, about seven hours after exposure to
it. German use of gas increased especially on the Eastern Front, where
prevailing winds favored the emissions and where the Russians were slower
than the Western Entente combatants to develop eﬀective gas masks. Hahn
helped to coordinate a chlorine and phosgene attack against Russians in
Galicia in June 1915. The Russians were taken by surprise, and, as Hahn
advanced with German troops, he found their enemies in extremis. ‘We tried



to use our own respirators to help some of them, to ease their breathing,
but they were past saving,’ Hahn wrote. His conscience prickled. But he
and Haber were hardly alone in the work: they were joined by several
noted chemists and the physicist James Franck, who would later join the
Manhattan Project and urge that atomic bombs not be dropped on Japan.
Some 2,000 German scientists all told were involved in chemical warfare in
Neither were the Germans alone in the work. The French, as Haber
seems to have anticipated, were at the time of the chlorine cloud attack
at Ypres at work on tear-gas bullets and grenades. Prominent Britons
condemned the use of gas—Arthur Conan Doyle charged that the Germans
had ‘sold their souls as soldiers’, and Lord Kitchener insisted that ‘these
methods show to what depths of infamy our enemies will go’—but the
British quickly set to the task of manufacturing chemical weapons and
masks to protect their solders against their use. The Allied response-in-kind
to the German attacks was uncoordinated and ﬁtful. The British worked
hard at developing chemicals, but their way to success was slowed by
bureaucratic competition, panic-induced haste, and an oﬃcial willingness
to entertain, at least, crackpot suggestions by amateurs that the British
set ﬁre to the atmosphere or spray German lines with amyl nitrate, an
inﬂammable liquid. Hand grenades ﬁlled with what were described as
‘annoyers’ were rushed to France in May 1915, and the Scottish physiologist J. S. Haldane devised defenses against gas that involved breathing through a bottle loosely ﬁlled with dirt or a urine-soaked sock.
French military headquarters, as L. F. Haber (Fritz Haber’s son) has
described it, ‘was all energy and valorous sentiments’, but was unable
to produce much: the French lacked chlorine to make that gas, and
plans to retaliate against the Germans with gas-cloud attacks foundered
on command’s decisions to build gas squads largely from wounded soldiers. The French did manage to ﬁll some 50,000 shells with a tear
gas that dispersed so rapidly that the targeted Germans appeared not to
notice they had been gassed. Even the Russians blustered about making
gas clouds—threats, as Haber notes, that were never taken seriously by
The US president Woodrow Wilson entreated the European belligerents
not to use chemical weapons in May 1915. But the United States itself
had not signed the 1899 Hague Convention; its delegate, Admiral Alfred
Thayer Mahan, said then that he could see no distinction between killing

the world’s atom


unsuspecting men by explosive or gas. The United States did ultimately
agree to an international ban on the use of poison (codiﬁed in Hague
II, 1907, and signed by the United States soon after), but, like the other
signatories, the Americans found ways to evade the ban, and, once the
United States had entered the war in April 1917, the Wilson administration, as Haber writes, ‘took gas very seriously indeed’. Responsibility
for developing chemical weapons and protection against them was at ﬁrst
given to the US Bureau of Mines, though in June 1918 it was taken on by
the Chemical Warfare Service, which undertook both research into and
the production of chemicals. American University in Washington DC
became in mid-1917 the center of chemical investigation, absorbing work
done previously at other universities, though retaining branch laboratories at several. In marshland 20 miles east of Baltimore, the Americans
built an enormous chemical manufacturing complex called ‘Gunpowder
Reservation’, later the Edgewood Arsenal. The plant employed thousands
of men and women, and produced chlorine, phosgene, chloropicrin (which
caused weeping and vomiting and which defeated then-existing gas masks),
mustard, and several others. By the summer of 1918, Edgewood was contributing heavily to gas warfare on the Western Front. As the Armistice
neared that fall, an American observer could not conceal his dismay: ‘Here
is a mammoth plant’, he wrote of Edgewood, ‘constructed in record time,
eﬃciently manned, capable of an enormous output of toxic material, and
just reaching its full possibilities of death-dealing at the moment when news
is hourly expected of the signing of the Armistice. What a pity we did not
possess this great engine of war from the day American troops ﬁrst sailed for
Casualty ﬁgures for those gassed during the First World War are elusive.
Estimates made during the two decades following the war ranged from
560,000 to nearly 1.3 million dead or injured. L. F. Haber refuses to try
to count Russian casualties—the ﬁgures are wholly unreliable, he says—
and estimates about half a million gas casualties. While many more men
were killed or wounded by explosives or bullets, these are nevertheless
substantial numbers, and use of gas later caused reﬂection and remorse
among some of the chemists who had participated in its manufacture. Otto
Hahn struggled to absorb the sight of Russians killed by his chlorine cloud
in Galicia in 1915. One of Hahn’s contemporaries, Hermann Staudinger,
argued that scientists ought to renounce the use of chemical weapons
and work to educate their fellow citizens about the special horrors of



gas. (Staudinger’s suggestion brought a sharp rebuke from Fritz Haber.)
Some American scientists expressed disgust with gas; in France, an eminent
chemist urged that chemistry not be used for destructive purposes. Two
weeks after the Armistice, a group of British medical researchers, in a
letter to The Times of London, criticized the use of gas because (they
said) it could not be contained to military targets and because it killed
in a particularly heinous way. Sir Edward Thorpe decried ‘the degradation
of science’ that resulted from the battleﬁeld use of gas. For scientists to
contribute to the death of innocents at the behest of the state was wrong.
The critics of gas were to some extent vindicated by future decisions:
chemical weapons were evidently not used in the Second World War, and
only in a few other instances—by the British against Bolsheviks in 1919, by
the Italians against Abyssians in 1935, and by the government of Iraq, against
Iran and its own citizens, in the 1980s and 1990s—during the twentieth

4. The ethics of battleﬁeld gas
What was it about chemical weapons, and gas in particular, that made
it the subject of special opprobrium by scientists and others after the
war? It was not that gas killed more men more eﬃciently than other
weapons, as the First World War casualty ﬁgures indicate. Gas-protection
technology advanced quickly beyond Haldane’s urine-soaked sock, so that
with enough warning and proper discipline soldiers in gassed trenches
could remain undamaged. But there lingered what was called the ‘subjective
eﬀect’ of gas. In an English test of a lachrymator abbreviated SK in early
1915, an oﬃcer standing well upwind of a burst shell later complained of
weakness and illness, despite his having done no more than observe the
explosion. Haber explains the man’s fear as the product of an overactive
imagination. That is precisely the problem with gas, or part of the problem:
it insinuates itself into the atmosphere that people must breathe to live,
thus destroying any idea of a boundary between what brings death and
what sustains life. Unlike a bullet or a bomb, it kills quietly, insidiously,
masquerading as something innocuous or even pleasant. ‘The English gas
is almost odorless and can only be seen by the practised eye on escaping
from the shell,’ recalled a German infantry oﬃcer. ‘The gas steals slowly
over the ground in a blueish haze and kills anyone who does not draw his

the world’s atom


mask over his face as quick as lightning before taking a breath.’ Mustard
gas smells like horseradish, though the Germans would later mask it with
the scent of lilac. Phosgene bears a faint odor of cut grass and may not
immediately aﬀect those who breathe it; twelve hours later its victims’ lungs
Not only does gas refuse to acknowledge the elemental boundary
between life and death: it also resists containment, and it is thus inherently
indiscriminate. Infantry soldiers hated it when their own side attacked with
gas, since a change in wind direction could reverse the direction of the
cloud and envelop them. (A few of their oﬃcers thought the use of gas
unsporting.) Civilians near the Western Front were increasingly subject
to the vagaries of gas during 1916–18. Distribution of gas protection and
information to local residents was haphazard in Belgium and France; during
one particularly heavy German attack with mustard near Armentières in
July 1917, 86 civilians died and nearly 600 others were injured. Haber estimates conservatively—his ﬁgures include no Germans—that 5,200 civilians
were poison-gas casualties during the First World War. By the war’s end,
technicians were experimenting with a variety of ways to deliver gas so
as to achieve the greatest and quickest eﬀect, including the use of longrange artillery shells ﬁlled with gas and chemicals disbursed from airplanes.
That the latter innovation was a likely feature of the next war was little
disputed by scientists, novelists, and strategists of battle. American planners
imagined attaching gas sprayers to the wings of aircraft. Others pictured gas
bombs. Amos A. Fries, head of the US Chemical Warfare Service during
and after the war, meant to reassure when he wrote (with Major C. J. West)
in 1921: ‘As to noncombatants, certainly we do not contemplate using
poisonous gas against them, no more at least than we propose to use high
explosives in long range guns or aeroplanes against them.’ The nature of gas
as a substance able to drift over distance and penetrate standard defenses of
populations made it a terrible, logical weapon to envision as useful against
There is also the matter of how gas kills. While burning and blinding
are common injuries resulting from gas attacks, death from gas is most
often caused by suﬀocation. Chlorine and phosgene are lung irritants.
They inﬂame respiratory tissue, causing in it lesions and drawing ﬂuid
from elsewhere in the bloodstream, thus overwhelming the lungs with
congestion. ‘In severe cases,’ writes Edward Spiers, ‘the victims die from
asphyxiation, drowning in the plasma of their own blood.’ A British



sergeant recalled seeing a dozen men gassed with chlorine in May 1915:
‘Their colour was black, green, and blue, tongues hanging out and eyes
staring—one or two were dead, and others beyond human aid, some were
coughing up green froth from their lungs. It is a hateful and terrible
sensation to be choked and suﬀocated and unable to get breath: a casualty
from gun ﬁre may be dying from his wounds, but they don’t give him
the sensation that his life is being strangled out of him.’ To be sure,
dismemberment by explosive, multiple gunshot wounds, or burns from
incendiary bombs are awful too, and horribly painful. But the thought of
suﬀocation, slow and uncontrollable, touches the deepest place of human
fear. It is a primal, helpless death, one of betrayal by the silent unbreathable
air; it is slow, unheroic, panic-inducing, ugly. It is not unlike death by
The scientists and soldiers who developed chemical weapons for their
belligerent nations during the First World War seemed to establish a
camaraderie one ﬁnds in those who come together for a noble cause. An
interviewer once told Otto Hahn that he was surprised so many noted
German chemists had joined the war eﬀort in such dangerous work as gas
provided. ‘Why?’, asked Hahn. ‘We volunteered, we oﬀered our services.’
A British chemist recalled that ‘we were, with one or two exceptions,
a band of brothers’, and French planners met frequently, if not always
eﬀectively, to coordinate oﬀensive and defensive chemical strategy. They
were professionals, called upon by their government to help protect soldiers
and civilians. They were doing patriotic service, an argument that may have
been especially meaningful to Fritz Haber, a Jew who was, according to
his son, ‘well aware that his Jewish origin was both obstacle and spur’
to his loyalty. They could tell themselves—some did—that gas was far
more likely to disable enemies than kill them, so it was an oddly humane
What the chemists and users of gas told themselves above all was that
their weapon worked best if men and women perceived it to be horrible,
because the graver the apparent threat from the weapon, the more likely an
early concession by its victims. Leaders of warring nations, behaving rationally, like scientists, would seek to avoid national annihilation. Great danger
of annihilation meant a shorter war. Amos Fries told a Senate committee
just after the war that, the more ‘deadly’ the weapons, ‘the sooner . . . we
will quit all ﬁghting’. Make war terrible enough, and men would never start
it. Haber had persuaded Hahn to work on gas—indeed, to throw himself

the world’s atom


‘wholeheartedly’ into the work—by insisting that chemical weapons would
end the war quickly. The use of gas would ﬁnally save lives.24
This was bold justiﬁcation of weapons’ work, and probably believable on
some level to those who advanced it. But most men cannot read about the
results of their research crippling and killing other men without feeling
remorse. Otto Hahn, who, unusually for a scientist, came face to face
with Russian victims of a gas attack, confessed to feeling shame for his
role in their deaths, but in the end ascribed them to ‘the senselessness of
war’, not to human agency (and certainly not to his own). His boss, Fritz
Haber, was confronted by his chemist wife, Clara, about the ‘barbarism’
of poison gas; it was, she insisted, ‘a perversion of science’. Not so, Haber
remonstrated, rehashing arguments he had used earlier with Hahn. The
night after their argument, Clara Haber took her life. After the war, Hahn
related, Haber feared trial as a war criminal. He dropped out of sight for
awhile, then reappeared having grown a beard, in the hope of avoiding
There are many ways in which the development of chemical weapons
diﬀered signiﬁcantly from the manufacture of an atomic bomb. The chemistry of gas was easier to master than the physics of the nucleus. Gas
carries no powerful blast or searing ﬁre, it is ﬁckle when it is blown or
burst into the air, and most of all it can be protected against, provided
a targeted group has adequate notice and equipment. But the similarities
between chemicals and nuclear weapons are suﬃciently arresting to justify
the lengthy consideration of gas oﬀered here. Chemicals and atom bombs
were in their times new weapons, understood by those who made them
as things unprecedented and possibly decisive in war. Both chemicals and
chain-reacting neutrons put weapons into a sinister dimension virtually
beyond sight and sound: in trenches men blundered into undetectable
pockets of gas, while radiation (following a blast that Hiroshimans, of
course, saw and heard) worked its deadly way undetected into people who
had apparently escaped harm. And both weapons, even in their preparation,
killed scientists hideously, much as they would kill many others with their
use on battleﬁelds and over cities. In December 1914, Dr Otto Sackur, an
associate of Fritz Haber, died when a tear-gas compound he was working
on exploded. Marie Sklowdowska Curie, discoverer of the radioactive
elements polonium and radium, died in 1934 of leukemia. She was by then
nearly blind, and her ﬁngers were twisted and burned from the radiation
to which she had exposed herself in the laboratory. Sackur and Curie were



early casualties of weapons once fanciful, then dreadful, and harbingers of
far greater harm that would be visited on the world.26

5. Scientists and states: the Soviet Union and
the United States
There is one more way in which gas production resembled the making of
the atomic bomb: both enterprises called academic science into wartime
service to the state, on an enormous scale and in several countries at once.
This observation raises the important question of how, or whether, the scientiﬁc republic can survive the harnessing of science to a nation’s foray into
war. Scientists need cooperation to do their work. They also need the freedom to pursue mysteries, wherever they might reside, and without regard
for the possible political consequences of their discoveries. The mythical
scientist is both sustained by colleagues and freed by the beneﬁcence of
the scientiﬁc republic. In the lab he seeks only truth. Values, in theory, do
not interest the scientist, nor do political agendas, righteous or unrighteous
causes, or the concerns of statesmen and -women. The mythical scientist
is not, of course, without political feeling or ambition; it is simply that she
would separate these things from the pursuit of results in the lab.
In reality, though, scientists at nearly all times and in all places have
depended not only on colleagues but on support from the institutions they
serve, including governments. The scientiﬁc republic is necessarily circumscribed by the requirement that scientists live in one or another country,
whatever their feeling about nationalism. One can claim to practice valuefree science and to serve no political master. But, whatever the scientist’s
indiﬀerence to the state, the state is likely to be interested in him, especially
if he is a chemist or physicist working on some form of military apparatus.
The level of state interest and the degree to which the state might act on it
depend on the state’s institutions and relations between political, economic,
and scientiﬁc elites. Etel Solingen has proposed what she terms ‘a crude
fourfold typology’ to describe twentieth-century states and predict how
they would treat their scientists. Her political axis includes ‘pluralist’ and
‘noncompetitive’ (that is, ‘autocratic’), her economic axis ‘market-oriented’
and ‘centrally planned.’ Let us choose one pre-Second World War example

the world’s atom


from the two opposite ends of Solingen’s four categories and in this way
examine the inﬂuence of state form on scientiﬁc communities.27
We can begin with the Soviet Union, a ‘noncompetitive centrally
planned’ state. The Russian tsars mistrusted science, discerning in it the
impulse toward free enquiry, modernization, and democracy, all of which
they regarded with suspicion. The Bolsheviks, who took power in 1917,
had a diﬀerent view. Marxism itself purported to be scientiﬁc, and the
Bolsheviks’ tenuous hold on authority through the early 1920s made pragmatists of them—after signing the humiliating Treaty of Brest–Litovsk with
the Germans in 1918, Lenin said grimly that ‘it is necessary to master the
highest technology or be crushed’. That did not mean that the new government had a policy toward science in mind. And, despite their ideological
and practical embrace of science, the Bolsheviks were wary of ‘bourgeois’
scientists themselves, which feeling was mutual. Through the 1920s, with
the Communists preoccupied with fending oﬀ their enemies and building
the economy, scientists enjoyed reasonable autonomy, and their numbers
and organizations and status grew.28
This began to change at the end of Bolshevism’s ﬁrst decade in power,
as Josef Stalin solidiﬁed his control of the Soviet state. Scientists were
told to submit ﬁve-year research plans that could grow to hundreds of
anxious pages of self-explanation. Scientiﬁc professional societies, which
had proliferated during the 1920s, were now increasingly absorbed by the
scientiﬁc apparatus of the state and subsequently eliminated altogether. The
Party insisted that scientiﬁc research have as its object the improvement
of industry. Basic research was starved out, or at least left hungry, leaving
only ‘applied science’ as having some obvious beneﬁt to the nation’s
political economy. The Party also reined in scientists’ travel to international
conferences, prevented to some extent their receipt of scientiﬁc journals
published abroad, and impeded generally contacts between Soviet scientists
and their counterparts elsewhere. Those with foreign training or monied
backgrounds were isolated, harried from their posts, or shunted oﬀ to
Stalin’s Gulag. Certain kinds of science were condemned as anti-proletariat;
‘pure science’ was deemed eﬀete, and thus useless, or worse, to the purposes
of the revolution. (This ‘Proletkultist’ movement would win its greatest
victory after the Second World War, when the pseudoscientist Troﬁm
Lysenko eliminated the serious study of genetics in the Soviet Union.
This ‘rejection of the gene’, as Paul R. Josephson has called it, lasted
until 1965.)29



The development of the ‘noncompetitive centrally planned’ state in the
Soviet Union had particular impact on the physics community. During the
First World War the physicist Abram Ioﬀe created, in Petrograd (soon to
be renamed Leningrad), the State Physiotechnical X-Ray Institute. Ioﬀe’s
institute would become the ‘forge’ of Soviet nuclear physics. The ﬁrst chair
of its nuclear department was Igor Kurchatov, a bearish and humorous
scientist who in the early 1930s immersed himself in the growing scholarship on nuclear physics and thereafter built a proton accelerator at the
institute—though he changed course when he read about the Italian Enrico
Fermi’s revolutionary work with neutrons. By the middle of the decade, a
British physicist pointed to four international centers for nuclear research:
the Cavendish, Fermi’s lab in Rome, Paris (wherein worked Marie Curie’s
daughter Irène and her husband, Frédéric Joliot), and ‘Kurchatov and his
people’, who were ‘not far behind us considering the time diﬀerence in
receiving journals’. The institute physicists would eventually be awarded
by the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry a cyclotron, a magnetic,
circular accelerator of subatomic particles.30
How much faster Kurchatov and his colleagues might have gone had they
not been restricted by their government’s rigidity and suspicion is diﬃcult
to say. Travel to the West was curtailed: Peter Kapitsa was prevented from
returning to the Cavendish in 1934, and Kurchatov was not allowed to
accept an invitation to Berkeley, where Ernest Lawrence was pioneering
particle acceleration techniques, in the winter of 1934–5. Soviet travel
restrictions worked in the other direction, too. David Holloway has noted
that, at the annual Soviet nuclear conference in 1933, half the papers were
presented by non-Soviet scientists. Four years later, just ﬁve of the twentyeight papers were given by non-Soviets, and by 1938 no one from abroad
participated in the meeting at all. The extraordinary sensitivity of nuclear
physics saved the physics community from the utter devastation that would
be suﬀered by the biologists under Lysenko. But these conditions were
not enough to keep scores of the most talented physicists from being
arrested, sent to the Gulag, or shot. Research nevertheless went on. In
David Holloway’s judgment, ‘Soviet physics reached a high standard in the
1930s’—testament to the intelligence and determination of people working
under a government both authoritarian and capricious.31
The United States during the interwar period represents, following
Solingen’s typology, a pluralist state with a market-oriented economy—the
opposite, in other words, of the Soviet Union. Daniel Kevles has traced the

the world’s atom


developing relationship between American physicists and the state, and in
particular the association made between the scientists’ work and national
security, beginning during the First World War. This aﬃliation was by
no means inevitable. Like all scientists, American physicists cherish their
independence and do not lack for ego. ‘The vehemence of conviction, the
pride of authorship burn as ﬁercely among scientists as among any creative
workers,’ noted the eminent chemist and scientiﬁc administrator James
Conant. There existed a tension between the physicists’ view that, in a free
society, they ought to be able to follow whatever scientiﬁc paths they chose,
and the government’s view that resources must go ﬁrst to those engaged in
what it considered to be useful work for the state. In times of national
emergency, when US security is threatened, these visions may coincide.
In June 1916, prodded by President Woodrow Wilson and its own foreign
secretary, the astronomer George Ellery Hale, the National Academy of
Sciences formed the National Research Council (NRC), which promised
to support scientiﬁc research aimed at ‘the national security and welfare’.
Some scientists objected; one, a paciﬁst, branded the NRC ‘militaristic’.
But, when the United States went to war with Germany in April 1917, most
physicists resolved to help in the eﬀort. American scientists devised new
and more eﬀective ways to detect German submarines, worked with allies’
models to develop a system to pinpoint the location of enemy artillery,
and, as noted, explored a new generation of chemical weapons, including
how to deliver and protect against them. Thomas Edison, notes Kevles,
‘fashioned some forty-ﬁve devices for the military’, all, in Edison’s view,
‘perfectly good’, though none was used. The war, as Hale put it, had ‘forced
science to the front’.32
Not for all time. Democracies are generally quick to demobilize after
wars end, their citizens returning to peacetime pursuits and frequently with
expressions of regret for time lost to militancy. Scientists determined to do
their duty in wartime (and no doubt excited by the quick application of
their work) balked after the Armistice at the discipline and secrecy imposed
on them by military authorities. American scientists were not shot for
alleged ideological crimes, but they had sometimes felt themselves bullied
and disrespected by high-handed oﬃcers. The generals, for their part, had
tired of civilian independence, insubordination, and impracticality. In the
military’s parlance, the scientists were ‘damn professors’, useful if paying
attention to realities, but too often inclined to loose gossip and head in the
clouds theorizing.33



Science, including physics, nevertheless proved popular in America during the 1920s. George Hale persuaded philanthropists to ﬁnance a science school in Pasadena called the California Institute of Technology. It
quickly attracted top physicists—it would share Robert Oppenheimer with
Berkeley—and drove other universities to expand their physics programs
in response. Exciting discoveries inside the atom raised the visibility and
glamor level of the physicists, even if most laypersons failed to grasp the
essence of atomic science. The federal government funded research, and
state legislatures boosted the budgets of their home universities. Most of
all, the market worked to the considerable advantage of scientists generally.
‘Science is not a thing apart,’ insisted the Saturday Evening Post in 1922. ‘It
is the bedrock of business.’ By the latter part of the 1920s, the United States
was spending $200 million each year on scientiﬁc research, with industry
spending three times as much as the government. A cult of admiration,
even aﬀection, emerged around Albert Einstein, the exponent of the theory
of relativity and German emigré who settled permanently at the Institute
for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1933. Einstein was more rumpled
than glamorous, but that proved no obstacle to the chemist and scientiﬁc
popularizer Edwin Slosson, who wrote in 1925 (and apparently not about
Einstein) that scientists were as ‘cleanshaven, as youthful, and as jazzy as a
foregathering of Rotarians’.34
What the market provided for American scientists during the 1920s it
took away during the 1930s. With the onset of the Great Depression in
1929, funding for physics research, both government and private, dried up.
Kevles summarizes the damage: federal government scientists were ﬁred in
droves, AT and T sacked 40 percent and General Electric 50 percent of their
lab workers; untenured university faculty feared for their jobs and senior
faculty had diﬃculty ﬁnding positions for their students; NRC fellowships
grew scarce. Along with that, many Americans bizarrely blamed scientists
for plunging the nation into penury. Humanist critics decried the nation’s
over-reliance on science and technology; with eﬃcient machines had come
less work for men and women. Religious critics saw in the disaster evidence
that science, not God, had gained control of the American mind, with
predictably awful results. Across the country rolled a wave of recrimination
directed at scientists, in whose hands so many had recently and gratefully
placed their fate.35
The situation for scientists in the United States would improve dramatically, of course, with the arrival of the Second World War and the

the world’s atom


end of the depression in the early 1940s. Public esteem for physicists in
particular would grow once more, while federal funding would increase
with the demand for new weapons and military countermeasures. In Stalin’s
Soviet Union scientists served at the pleasure of the state, especially after
the mid-1930s. In the United States scientists negotiated a system that
was at once more benign and complex. They could do whatever research
pleased them, as long as they could interest the government, a university,
or industry suﬃciently to fund their projects. Failure to achieve signiﬁcant
results was disappointing, but it was unlikely to mean arrest. In times of
national emergency, and war in particular, scientists’ value to the state made
their status skyrocket—until such time as their own scruples, or the end of
the war, or the generals’ suspicion of them, highlighted their desire for
independent research and thus their long-term unreliability as agents of a
speciﬁc national cause. American scientists were subject to the market, the
state, and their own ambitions, with all the freedom and uncertainty such
relationships implied.

6. The ethical obligations of scientists
Behind the issue of the scientist’s relationship to the state there lurk several
questions. Does the scientist have a responsibility to serve her nation if she
is asked to do so by her government? Is there an obligation for all citizens
to put aside other loyalties, including that to the scientiﬁc republic, in the
event of what is judged by political leaders a situation requiring national
service? Or do scientists have the right, or even the obligation, to weigh
the ethical or moral import of what they are being asked by the state to
do, and to refuse to serve if they ﬁnd their government’s cause or means of
attaining it ethically or morally wanting? These are fraught questions that
bear, of course, on a scientist’s decision to help build a weapon like poison
gas or an atomic bomb.
It is possible to suggest that there is no need for individual handwringing
over these questions. In an authoritarian state, naturally, citizens have no
choice: they can be, and usually are, conscripted into service. In a pluralist
state, conscription can occur during time of war, as in Britain in 1916–18
and the United States in 1942–5. More often, and even during war, the
pluralist state must ask its citizens for their help. It must persuade them that
an emergency exists, or great danger looms, and that their involvement



in the war eﬀort is essential to ending the emergency or warding oﬀ the
danger. Citizens in a democracy must be its defenders; all must do their
part as shareholders in a system that protects and rewards them. Young
men (and sometimes women) must ﬁght, farmers must grow more food,
workers must shoulder the wheel to increase industrial output, and scientists
must contribute their expertise to the war eﬀort. Moral considerations do
not apply because the state itself, and the international system in which it
participates, are amoral. Governments decide what to do based on national
interest, not on what is right or just or moral. This is the realist paradigm
of government, expressed most extremely by Benedetto Croce (an admirer
of Machiavelli), and more plausibly during the twentieth century by the
American scholar/diplomat George Kennan. The combination of state
coercion or political obligation and a belief in the need for realism in
international aﬀairs makes the scientist’s choice easy: one serves the state
because one ought to do so, and because there is no need to make a moral
decision when doing so.36
But it is precisely during wartime that the realist paradigm falters, for war
by deﬁnition raises moral issues of the profoundest sort. These start with
the justice of the war itself. Scientists in an authoritarian country cannot
assume that a war entered into by their government is popularly condoned
or based on generally accepted principles of international law: dictators are
known to ﬂout these standards of right and wrong. (Authoritarian states are
not always in the wrong when it comes to ﬁghting; the Soviet Union was
engaged in self-defense after Germany attacked it in June 1941.) Nor is it
entirely safe to assume that a nation with a pluralist form of government will
embark only on a just war. Wars of empire—the British in India and South
Africa, the Americans in the Philippines, the French in Indochina—are
morally problematic, and, even after the end of formal empire, adventures
from Suez to Saigon suggest that democracies sometimes go to war for
the wrong reasons. These are matters concerned with jus ad bellum—the
justice of war. Equally complicated are issues of jus in bello, justice in war.
A nation might go to war for good reason: because it is attacked or is in
imminent danger of attack, because it wishes to stop aggression, or because
it is determined to end a genocide or the terrible suﬀering of another
nation’s people. Yet in its just wars it must ﬁght well and fairly, doing only
what damage is necessary to defend itself or halt aggressions or stop the
slaughter of innocents. In the realm of jus in bello lies the real vexation for
scientists who serve the state.37

the world’s atom


There is a scientiﬁc counterpart to Crocean realism, as applied to international relations. It is best represented by Percy W. Bridgman, who was
Robert Oppenheimer’s physics teacher at Harvard. Even after the Second
World War, Bridgman claimed that scientists were meant only to seek
the truth and then to publicize it. What politicians and policymakers do
with the truth thus uncovered is up to them and to the societies they
represent, not to the scientists who make the discoveries. To demand
scientiﬁc responsibility for the terrible things done with their discoveries
is to put science in thrall to the state, chilling scientiﬁc research by insisting
implicitly that it remain safe, free of any possible application to harmful
purposes. A biologist might be constrained from working with microbes
that, if misused, might cause an epidemic, but if used properly could
eradicate a disease. An experiment in genetics could be used by a state
to enforce a policy of racist eugenics—or lead to a cure for diabetes or
cerebral palsy. It must remain for the scientist, according to Bridgman, to
conduct her work without fear that the state will do the wrong thing with
its result. Science must be amoral.38
Bridgman’s ‘ethical positivism’ became problematic in the extreme for
the physicists and chemists who designed and built the atomic bomb. It
remained possible to argue, in 1945, that the bomb was, as Irving Langmuir
wrote, an ‘accident’ onto which scientists had stumbled, or that the bomb
in essence already existed as a force of nature, which scientists had thus
not so much invented as discovered. But most of those involved in the
atom bomb project felt diﬀerently. Had they not solved the structure of the
atom and made its nucleus ﬁssion? Had they not taken it upon themselves
in 1939 or 1940 to stop publicizing their ﬁndings in the international
republic of science for security reasons, and to entreat the US president
Franklin Delano Roosevelt to authorize the building of the bomb? Had
they not constructed a graphite-moderated pile to elicit a chain reaction
in uranium, fashioned great factories to produce the bomb’s nuclear fuel,
worked months on end in the New Mexico desert to reﬁne the bomb’s
shape and design, forge its metal jacket, and fabricate its delicate triggering
mechanism? In H. G. Wells’s The World Set Free, Wells Holsten learns how
to make radioactivity. Afterward, he ‘felt like an imbecile who has presented
a box full of loaded revolvers to a Creche’. ‘I am become Death, the
shatterer of worlds,’ thought Oppenheimer as he watched the mushroom
cloud rise over Alamogordo at dawn on 16 July 1945. Another physicist put
it more prosaically: ‘Now we are all sons of bitches.’39



Decent and humane by nearly all accounts, the scientists from many
nations delivered to the US military an atomic bomb. They knew that
the bomb would be used against an enemy (though some hoped that after
Germany surrendered the bomb would not be dropped on Japan, a lesser
evil in their view), and they suspected how awesomely destructive it would
be. They nevertheless convinced themselves that the bomb should be built
and used, not so much because it represented human progress, or because
they as scientists were amoral with respect to politics and military strategy,
but rather because they believed that using the bomb would defeat the
enemy more quickly than not using the bomb and thus save human lives
on all sides. In this calculation, considerations of jus in bello yielded to jus
ad bellum: any means can be employed if the cause is represented as just
and the aim is to end a combat as soon as possible—which is, presumably,
a universal desire. Shorter wars mean fewer people die. There is a logic
to that, though hardly an impeccable logic; as Michael Walzer points out,
it is not clear why civilians in Hiroshima sacriﬁced their rights to remain
unharmed during the war. Nor would Americans have looked benignly on
an atomic bombing of Philadelphia had the Japanese possessed the bomb
and felt the need to shorten the war and thus save lives on all sides.40

Great Britain: Refugees, Air
Power, and the Possibility
of the Bomb


he World Set Free, H. G. Wells’s futuristic novel simultaneously
dystopian and hopeful, was published as Europe verged on war in
1914. It was dedicated, curiously, not to an intimate, nor even a person,
but to another book: The Interpretation of Radium, by the University of London chemist Frederick Soddy, which Wells acknowledged as the principal
source for his scientiﬁc material. In his book, Wells predicts the discovery of
nuclear ﬁssion. His character Wells Holsten explores the phosphorescence
of Italian ﬁreﬂies, then moves to experiment with heating and cooling
gases. Another character—a physics professor at Edinburgh—lectures on
radioactivity. He declares that the atom, which ‘once we thought hard
and impenetrable’, was in fact ‘a reservoir of immense energy’, capable
of powering an ocean liner, lighting the city streets for a year, or—and here
the professor waved a small bottle of uranium oxide—blowing the lecture
hall and everyone in it to fragments. It is, unhappily, to this last purpose
that humankind chooses to put nuclear power. World war breaks out in the
mid-twentieth century. A plane from the Central European alliance strikes
Paris with an atomic bomb. A French pilot vows to retaliate; he ﬂies oﬀ
to Berlin carrying three atomic bombs made from the radioactive element
Carolinum. The moment of truth seems in retrospect almost quaint. As his
‘steersman’ guides the plane, the pilot (‘a dark young man with something
negroid about his gleaming face’) straddles his box of bombs. Lifting out the
ﬁrst, ‘a black sphere two feet in diameter,’ he activates it by biting through
a celluloid strip between the bomb’s handles, then heaves it over the side
of the plane in the general direction of Berlin. He repeats the process with



the second bomb, but the third one detonates while it is still clutched to
his chest, turning pilot, steersman, and plane into ‘ﬂying rags and splinters
of metal and drops of moisture in the air’. Below, struck by the ﬁrst two
bombs, Berlin is laid waste.
All the atomic bombs dropped during Wells’s world war burrow into the
earth, where they create a volcano eﬀect, turning soil and rock molten and
spewing forth radioactive Carolinum and vapor for weeks or months or
years. After Berlin has been obliterated, the Germans punish Holland with
atom bombs that ‘fell like Lucifer’ on Dutch dikes. The East End of London
is destroyed, as is Parliament and an additional portion of Westminster.
China and Japan bomb Moscow, the United States hits Tokyo, a Japanese
attempt on San Francisco falls short but makes the Paciﬁc steam, and, with
the bombing of New Delhi—‘a pit of ﬁre spouting death and ﬂame’—
India falls into anarchy. Everywhere the sky grows dark, blotting out the
daylight. The ground ﬁssures. Radioactivity drifts miles from the bombs’
targets, rendering nearly every major city and its environs uninhabitable.
In the end, however, Wells oﬀers hope. A few humble statesmen bring
their colleagues together in the north Italian countryside. The devastation
of the world, the collapse of capitalism, government, and social cohesion,
require the abolition of nation states and the advent of a ‘World Republic’.
The leaders agree to ban atomic weapons and the means by which to make
them. A governing council is elected by universal suﬀrage. (One renegade
king tries to secrete away three atomic bombs, but he and his henchmen
are discovered, and dispatched, by agents of the newly formed council.)
‘The moral shock of the atomic bombs had been a profound one’, Wells
writes, ‘and for awhile the cunning side of the human animal was overpowered by its sincere realisation of the vital necessity for reconstruction.’
All this seems promising. But there remains considerable bleakness in
Wells’s vision. The man mostly responsible for devising the technology of
the bomb, young Holsten who once played with ﬁreﬂies, is tormented by
his discoveries even before they wreck, then set free, the world. Perhaps
what is done is done; he is helpless to alter the course of events, for,
he says, ‘I am a little instrument in the armoury of Change’. Indeed, he
despairs, ‘if I were to burn all these [scientiﬁc] papers, before a score of
years had passed some other men would be doing this’. The book ends
with the death of a selﬂess hero named Marcus Karenin. Before his death,
Karenin’s caretakers at a hospital high in the mountains of Kashmir express
optimism that humans have learned their lesson, bitterly taught by atomic

great britain


bombs. Karenin is doubtful: ‘There is a kind of inevitable logic now in the
progress of research . . . If there had been no Holsten there would have been
have come in another.’ This logic would become familiar to the physicists
who, through the 1920s and 1930s, closed in on the awesome and terrible
potential of the atom’s nucleus.1
Wells was hardly the ﬁrst, of course, to consider the potentially
disastrous consequences of science and technology run amok. Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) comes readily to mind. Less commonly read
is the dystopian novel The Coming Race, published in 1871 by Edward
Bulwer-Lytton, who is perhaps best remembered for writing the sentence,
‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ The Coming Race concerns the discovery,
beneath the surface of the earth, of a people called the Vril-ya, who have
harnessed an enormously powerful force called vril. This substance gives
the Vril-ya light, the ability to heal the sick, and control over the weather.
Because it is at the same time so destructive, it has made war impossible:
‘If army met army, and both had command of this agency, it could be
but the annihilation of each.’ Bulwer-Lytton concludes that a society so
fearfully well adjusted must be deadly dull, unable to produce art, culture,
or military heroes such as Hannibal or George Washington. Whatever the
logic of Bulwer-Lytton’s position, it was not The Coming Race but The World
Set Free that captured the imagination of an avid reader named Leo Szilard
when he encountered Wells’s book nearly two decades after it had been

1. Hitler’s gifts, Britain’s scientists
Szilard was a Hungarian-born physicist. Drafted during the First World
War into the Austro-Hungarian army, he had survived only because he was
sent home from his unit with what turned out to be Spanish inﬂuenza;
while he was recovering in Budapest, his regiment was sent to the front
and wiped out. After the war he left Hungary to study in Germany, ﬁrst
engineering, then physics at the University of Berlin. Albert Einstein was
there, and Max Planck, and the chemist Fritz Haber, who had survived
professionally his involvement in manufacturing poison gas and was back at
work. Szilard’s was a restless mind that settled eventually on nuclear physics.
He was also an avid reader, and in 1928 he read Wells’s The Open Conspiracy,



which envisioned a version of Michael Polanyi’s scientiﬁc republic. The
following year Szilard went to London to meet Wells, but only in 1932
did he discover The World Set Free. He denied the utility of Wells’s atomic
vision—‘all this moonshine’, he wrote dismissively to a friend, echoing
Ernest Rutherford—but he nevertheless included with this note a copy of
Wells’s book, and he added that he had ‘reason to believe that in so far as the
industrial applications of the present discoveries in physics are concerned,
of the scientists’.3
Moonshine, and yet powerful explosions, the prospect of cities destroyed
by atomic bombs: denial oﬀset by scientiﬁc curiosity and the possibility
that the work of physicists like him might bring the world to catastrophe
or triumph. There were great scientiﬁc brains in the Soviet Union during
the 1930s. In the Berlin suburb of Dahlem the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
housed Szilard’s brilliant teachers, and Göttingen remained the destination
of choice for the brightest young minds in international physics. France
had Frédéric Joliot and Irène Curie, Denmark Niels Bohr, and Japan Yoshio
Nishina. Despite the ravages of the Great Depression, the United States had
potentially the greatest number of human and ﬁnancial resources in physics.
Yet Szilard had come and would later return to Great Britain, now home
to Rutherford, James Chadwick, and Frederick Soddy. Many others would
join him. Britain would become during the 1930s a place of remarkable
scientiﬁc fertility, congenial home to a combination of soundly practical
lab work and the grandly apocalyptic and ﬁnally resurrectionary vision of
H. G. Wells.
Physics returned quickly to international status following the First World
War. During the 1920s, one prominent physicist likened his professional
colleagues to a colony of ants: individual ants carried new particles of
information into the anthill, but when they turned away their fragments
were snatched up and moved elsewhere by other ants eager to add new
information to their own (mutable) piles of knowledge. The ants moved so
often and so quickly that it was diﬃcult to follow them. Charles Weiner
has called this activity a ‘traveling seminar’, in which physicists drawn by
conferences or long-term fellowships shuttled between Brussels, Copenhagen, Rome, Paris, Leipzig, New York, and Cambridge. The Italians were
peripatetic: Emilio Segré spent time in Hamburg and Amsterdam, Franco
Rasetti visited Lise Meitner in Berlin and Robert Millikan in Pasadena,
Enrico Fermi taught in Ann Arbor. (All three men eventually settled in

great britain


the United States. Segré and Fermi worked on the Manhattan Project,
Rasetti refused to do so.) Hans Bethe joined the traveling seminar with a
Rockefeller Foundation fellowship and went to Rome and Cambridge. He
began his teaching career at Tübingen, went to Manchester then Bristol,
and, in 1935, found a permanent position at Cornell University. Most
nuclear physicists were similarly wide ranging.4
The Cavendish Lab, writes Weiner, was the physicists’ Mecca in the
1920s and 1930s. The best in the ﬁeld were pulled there to visit, including
Albert Einstein, Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Nishina, and George Gamow.
They came to work with Rutherford, of course. But the Cavendish also had
the ﬁnest instruments in the world. Rutherford himself was by nature frugal,
and before 1919 the lab had never exceeded £550 annually in expenditure
for apparatus. That ﬁgure increased decisively into the 1930s. A variety of
wealthy men contributed to the lab, but ultimately the growing needs of the
scientists studying the nucleus outstripped private means, and the lab came
to rely on assistance from the state. The British government was generous,
so the Cavendish stayed ahead of its rivals.
The visitors also came to Cambridge to work with the lab’s staﬀ scientists. Rutherford drew to the Cavendish men of extraordinary talent—
innovative, painstaking in their methods, and adept with their newfangled instruments. ‘His boys,’ he called them. ‘Having no son himself,’
notes Robert Jungk, ‘he lavished all the vigilance, help, and aﬀection he
had to give on these aspiring young men.’ They included F. W. Aston,
P. M. S. Blackett (who came originally to take a single course at the
lab, then stayed on), the Japanese researchers Shimizu and Ishida, John
Cockcroft, Norman Feather, and the Australian Marcus Oliphant, who
would later help convince the Americans that an atomic bomb was feasible.
Rutherford’s favorite, by most accounts, was the Russian Peter Kapitsa,
who came ﬁrst to the Cavendish in 1921 and established himself as a
moving spirit there, a man in Rutherford’s image. Kapitsa liked driving fast
on narrow English roads and plunging nude into English streams. More
than once he pushed his lab machinery beyond its capacity, setting ﬁre to
cables and blasting overloaded electrical coils. (He wrote to his mother:
‘Today a new record was set for magnetic ﬁeld strength. I would have
gone higher but the coil burst. It was an impressive explosion.’) To this
energy, to this intelligence and instrumental abundance, to this atmosphere
charged with scientiﬁc excitement, the best physicists in the world were



The pull was from Cambridge; the push came from the rise of political
and religious oppression in Germany. Kapitsa, it may be recalled, was
prevented by Stalin from returning to England following a visit home in
1934. The Soviets declared that ‘they could no longer dispense with his
services, in view of the danger from Hitler.’ But the chief eﬀect of Naziism’s
advent was to drive scientists out of Central Europe, often ﬁrst to Great
Britain and then to the United States. Hitler came to power early in 1933.
Almost immediately, groups of Fascist Brown Shirts demonstrated against
university faculty who were Jewish or had married Jews, and within the
ﬁrst month of the regime orders from Berlin brought the dismissal of seven
prominent scientists at Göttingen. Max Born, director of the Institute for
Theoretical Physics and a later winner of the Nobel Prize, was put on
paid leave; he used his salary to underwrite Jewish friends and relatives
whose circumstances were worse than his. James Franck, who had won his
Nobel in 1925, was initially spared despite his Judaism (recall that Franck
had worked on gas during the First World War), but he soon resigned
to protest that German Jews were being ‘treated like aliens and enemies
of our country’. Between 1901 and 1932, one-third of Nobel Prizes had
gone to German scientists. Roughly a quarter of these were Jewish. After
1933, nearly all Jewish scientists who wished to continue their work had no
choice but to leave Germany. And not only Jews: the faculty at Göttingen
was so demoralized that only a third of the mathematicians and physicists
stayed in their jobs.6
Hitler looked upon Jews with murderous intent, and he had no particular
use for physics. ‘If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation
of German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!’ he
reportedly declared. He did not altogether mean it, for, as war approached,
scientiﬁc and technological work considered by the regime essential to
preparedness went forward without great ideological encumbrance. (Frank
Pfetsch notes that Jewish scientists and those with Jewish spouses were able
to work throughout the war at the Zeiss glass and optical plant in Jena.) But
many scientists understood the attacks on Jews as violations of academic
freedom generally, as evidence that religious intolerance could be readily
transformed into contempt for intellectuals and their work. Science did not
end in Germany between 1933 and 1945, but it was decisively compromised
in the way that academic work always is when racism taints it, when
powerful ideologues insist on selecting its practitioners and commanding its direction. ‘National Socialism’, wrote Joachim Fest, ‘represented a

great britain


politically organized contempt for the mind.’ A year after the mass dismissals
at Göttingen, the mathematician David Hilbert found himself at a banquet
seated next to Bernhard Rust, Hitler’s minister of education. ‘Is it really
true, Professor, that your Institute suﬀered so much from the departure of
the Jews and their friends?’ asked Rust. Hilbert retorted: ‘Suﬀered? No, it
didn’t suﬀer, Herr Minister. It just doesn’t exist anymore!’7
Dismissed outright, put ‘on leave’ from their universities and institutes, treated with unspeakable rudeness by colleagues and former friends
(the Berlin University physiologist Wilhelm Feldberg was summoned one
morning in April 1933 and told, ‘Feldberg, you must be out of here by
midday, because you are a Jew’), and horriﬁed by portents foretold by
widespread book burnings that May, Jewish scientists, a good number of
them nuclear physicists, made exodus out of Germany. Many found welcome in Britain. Albert Einstein was in California when Hitler took power
and the Reichstag burned. He had long faced anti-Semitism in Germany,
including from physicist colleagues, but had nevertheless thrived at the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. The triumph of Naziism, however,
made him doubtful of returning. While in New York, he found in a
German newspaper a photograph of himself captioned ‘not yet hanged’.
News that his home near Berlin had been searched and its garden dug up
settled the matter: he gave up his German citizenship, stopped brieﬂy in
Belgium, then went to Christ Church, Oxford, for a stay. He did some
lecturing and appeared, in October 1933, at a Royal Albert Hall rally on
behalf of scientiﬁc refugees. That same month he sailed for the United
States, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Max Born,
the eminent physicist dismissed from Göttingen, moved ﬁrst to the Italian
Tyrol. There he ﬁelded invitations from, among others, Oxford’s Frederick
Lindemann, who arrived in a chauﬀeur-driven Rolls Royce to recruit him,
and P. M. S. Blackett of Cambridge, whose oﬀer Born accepted. It was a
demotion, from head of a prestigious institute to ‘research student’ status,
but Born found his new post stimulating and enjoyed the experience. In
1935 he was given the Chair of Physics at Edinburgh. Born hated Naziism,
but he could not bring himself to work on the atomic bomb; he would shun
the path taken by many of his colleagues and spend the war in Scotland.8
Fritz Haber had shown his zeal for Germany during the First World
War, when he not only pioneered the man