by Dan Carlin
Humankind is more than seventy years into an ongoing experiment. The experiment will answer the question of whether we can handle the power of the weapons we’ve created. Since the weapons aren’t ever going to get any weaker, the only way this experiment will likely ever conclude is if we find out that we can’t.
We are an ostensibly adaptable species. Our ability to accommodate changing circumstances has helped Homo sapiens overcome countless challenges and achieve our current level of civilizational growth. In the twenty-first century, we are alive and thriving, and there are more of us than ever before. But there are several major problems on the horizon that have the potential to reverse those trends unless we are able to adapt yet again.
We currently live in an era of human history that some have referred to as the Long Peace. There has not been a war for more than seven decades between great powers such as we’ve seen from Mesopotamia onward—the world wars, the Napoleonic Wars, the Thirty Years’ War, the Hundred Years’ War, the Punic Wars. Large-scale warfare between the most powerful states has been a regular feature of human history right up until about seventy-five years ago—right about the time that humanity’s weaponry made a quantum leap forward in power. This is not to say there haven’t been bloody conflicts—human violence is, alas, ongoing and constant—but we’ve managed to avoid major conflicts between the superpowers. Have we seen the last of the big wars?
It’s hard to imagine us ridding society of problems relating to any number of baseline human instincts: sex, greed, intoxicating substances, violence . . . war?* Could we give up war? When the adaptation required to avoid the nightmarish outcome involves altering aspects of human behavior that seem almost innate, it’s easy to get pessimistic about our chances. Even if we decided it would mean self-destruction and renounced the practice, it would be tough to feel confident that we wouldn’t slip back into our old habits. We might be good for a while, but “forever” is a long time to try to maintain vigilance against nuclear conflict.*
Humans have been improving their weapons from the Stone Age forward. Weapons technology sometimes changed little over centuries, and until relatively recent times armies from different eras might still have been competitive if pitted against each other. Spears, archery, and men mounted on horses, for example, had been used for a very long time. (And sometimes the process of military improvement involved things other than weapons.)*
But after about Napoleon’s time, the killing power of cutting-edge militaries really began to increase. By the late nineteenth century, industrialization—with its factories and assembly lines and modern science and its continuous technological innovations—was transforming warfare. Armies doubled in size between the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the Battle of Sedan in 1870, and then doubled again by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The changes to the power of their weaponry was even greater. The largest artillery pieces of the First World War fired shells that weighed more than Napoleon’s heavy cannons of a century before, and the infantryman’s rifle in 1914 outranged those eighteenth-century horse-drawn artillery pieces. All this was backed by the wealth, power, and populations of deep nation-states. The power to kill lots of people had increased almost incomprehensibly in a relatively short time period, and continuously striving to stay cutting edge was more important than it had ever been.* To fall behind on the latest equipment, tactics, and practices was to court military (and perhaps national) disaster.* And this made scientists some of the most important contributors to the war effort.*
The employment of twentieth-century technology in the First World War scared everyone. The damage wrought with purely conventional weapons in that conflict was shocking. Added to that, the new horrors that science had contributed to the world’s arsenals included the equivalent of human insecticide—gas and chemicals that treated people like ants.
If this was how bad things had become by that war’s end in 1918, what did the future hold? One can understand why there was an effort after that war to see that such a global conflict wouldn’t happen again.
Yet less than twenty years later, an astonishingly powerful new weapons class was about to be revealed.
In 1938, with war clouds on the horizon, German scientists made a discovery that foreshadowed the weaponization of the atom. In August 1939, less than a month before the Second World War broke out, Albert Einstein wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president of the United States, warning about the potential for atomic superweapons. He also made it clear in the note that such potential might be realized soon:
It may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.
This phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.
It’s worth noting that to a highly educated man of that preatomic era like President Roosevelt, this warning would have been difficult to understand.* If you don’t understand the information, what do you do with it?* In the case of the president of the United States, he instigated a program to build an atomic bomb.
The Manhattan Project—the multinational cooperative effort to develop a superweapon—was a significant gamble involving precious resources. It cost a huge amount of money, brought together scientists and experts from around the world, and had a small city of people doing secret work to help develop and test a weapon before it was finalized by the other side. Once the war broke out, it almost seemed like a defensive measure—after all, the other side had brilliant physicists, too (Einstein had been one of them before leaving Germany).
Human beings in ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia would have understood the reasoning behind the geopolitical realism of the Manhattan Project. Some of the scientists involved certainly had reservations about creating a monster bomb so that humans could more effectively kill one another, but the idea of the Nazis getting their hands on such a superweapon first was the stuff of nightmares.
When, after years of work, the Trinity bomb test was conducted in a desert region of New Mexico on July 16, 1945, not only was the weapon successful (this had not been a given), but it turned out to be more powerful than the physicists who developed it had expected.* When the bomb went off, there was a huge sense of relief and triumph among those involved in creating it, but also mixed emotions. Many of them already sensed that this weapon would only grow in power as time went on.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, sometimes called the father of the atomic bomb, described the moment that the bomb went off in a 1965 interview on a program called The Decision to Drop the Bomb:
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed. A few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the end of scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multiarmed form and says, ‘Now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that one way or another.
Context is everything, and this bomb test was not occurring in a vacuum. It’s important to remember what that last year of the Second World War was like. Many consider it the worst year of the war in terms of the meat grinder–like nature of the conflict. In 1945, cities were being virtually wiped off the map a couple of times a week. If there’s one thing the Second World War proved, it was that it doesn’t matter how many arms treaties nations sign or what limits countries impose during peacetime—when societies are in the midst of a Total War, with their survival at stake, there’s nothing ethically sacrosanct in the arsenal.* The bombings of cities that had so horrified the wo
rld when the war first started were now so commonplace that the moral outrage of 1939 seemed a quaint remnant of a prewar mentality. And to some, this new bomb just seemed like a more efficient and economical way to do with one airplane what was currently being done in raids with hundreds and hundreds of them.
This is a point often not emphasized enough in modern-day discussions of the morality of dropping the atomic bombs on Japan, but it would certainly have loomed large in the minds of those at the time. The plan had been to use the new superbomb on Germany the same way that the Allies had been using conventional bombs to level the Third Reich. Almost every major and midsize German city had been torn up.* In May 1945, two months before the successful Trinity test, Nazi Germany surrendered, but the Allies were still at war with Japan.
By 1945, Japan was getting the same conventional bombing treatment that had been meted out to Germany. Its cities were being systematically burned to the ground, and had atomic bombs not been dropped on Japan, the United States would simply have continued to fight the war the way it had been. In March 1945, five months before Hiroshima, US forces, flying more than three hundred heavy bombers, conducted a firebombing raid on Tokyo that killed a hundred thousand people, wounded about a million more, and incinerated seventeen square miles of the capital.* By the time the atomic bombs were dropped in August, Tokyo was already so devastated by previous firebombing raids—fifty to sixty square miles of the city had been burned out—that it had been taken off the priority targeting list. Some sixty-plus other Japanese cities had suffered the same fate.
Today, when we talk about the two atomic bombs* the United States dropped on Japan, we tend to do so in the context of the morality of dropping them. The truth is, the decision makers almost certainly didn’t have the range of options we often assume (or wish) they had. The idea that President Truman could have done something other than use the atomic bomb on Japan is probably a little out of step with the political realities of the time.* As the historian Garry Wills wrote in his book Bomb Power: “If it became known that the United States had a knockout weapon it did not use, the families of any Americans killed after the development of the bomb would be furious. The public, the press, and Congress would turn on the President and his advisors. There would have been a cry to impeach President Truman and court-martial General Groves. The administration would be convicted of spending billions of dollars and draining massive amounts of brain power and manpower from other war projects and all for nothing.”
Of course, an atomic bombing does have unique horrors associated with it. Those who’ve lived though twenty-four- or thirty-six-hour conventional bombings have written about how strange it is to emerge from bomb shelters to see a city that had been intact when they descended now transformed into a ruin. Yet there’s at least a short span of time, a matter of hours probably, in which a person living through such an event can mentally process what’s occurring. In an atomic attack, the initial damage occurs in the blink of an eye. The people who lived through the only two actual bombings carried out on human beings often appeared stupefied. And many would die of their wounds or from the bomb’s radiation before they ever had a chance to get their minds around what had happened to them, in any case.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6 and 9, respectively) together probably killed more than two hundred thousand people. Those victims became the only cases in world history of what happens to human beings in a nuclear attack. They were living examples, unwilling guinea pigs.* It motivated some to publicly share their stories and speak out about how terrible a nuclear war would be.
Others cataloged and immortalized the eyewitness accounts for future generations. The author Susan Southard writes in her book Nagasaki that within a second of the bomb being dropped, the resulting fireball was 750 feet in diameter, and the temperature inside it was 540,000 degrees Fahrenheit, higher than at the center of the sun. “Horizontal blast winds tore through the region at two and a half times the speed of a category five hurricane, pulverizing buildings, trees, plants, animals, and thousands of men, women, and children. In every direction, people were blown out of their shelters, houses, factories, schools, and hospital beds; catapulted against walls; or flattened beneath collapsed buildings.” And all of it happened in an instant.
One Hiroshima survivor, Hiroshi Shibayama, saw the explosion and ran toward the city center where the bomb had gone off. He wrote, “The people were burned so badly that it was hard to distinguish feature from feature, and all were blackened as if covered with soot. Their clothes were in rags. Many were naked. Their hands hung limply in front of them. The skin of their hands and arms dangled from their fingertips. Their faces were not the faces of the living.” The survivors’ accounts leave a modern reader slack jawed.
In any third world war, the nuclear survivors would likely have similar experiences.* But as everyone knew after the first two bombs were used, in the next big war nuclear bombs will be bigger, there will be more of them, and both sides will probably have them. What if instead of two small atomic bombs, two hundred large ones are used and we begin to damage things beyond fixing?*
Albert Einstein is supposed to have said that he didn’t know what sort of weapons the Third World War would be fought with, but the one after it would be fought with sticks and stones. Air Force general Curtis LeMay allegedly coined the phrase “to bomb someone back to the Stone Age.”* Both quotes, whether said by these men or not, invoke the idea of a future all-out war knocking humanity backward on the civilization scale. For the first time in their history, humans had created weapons so powerful they had the theoretical potential to spawn dark ages.
Humanity hasn’t really dealt with a loss of capacity or a backward step for a millennium or more. It’s easy to forget that there could be things out there that could do to us what the plagues* or earthquakes or massive volcanic eruptions did to civilizations many centuries ago. And it’s unprecedented that a human being could order it done, like an act of God—the civilization-destroying outcomes of any nuclear holocaust would be an act of human beings. If such outcomes were ever to occur, it would be because a person or persons decided that it would. No human being orders a volcano to erupt or a tsunami to strike. The ancient Greeks had all sorts of myths connected to humankind getting its hands on godlike abilities.* What human being or collective group of people is capable of responsibly handling power like this?*
The advent of nuclear weapons made it possible for the first time in history for a single human being to destroy tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of lives—and as delivery technology improved to do so in as little as minutes. None of the scariest people in history—Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Adolf Hitler—had anything like that kind of capability. If in the thirteenth century the Mongol titan Genghis Khan had decided to smash an empire or state, it was going to take some time. If that state was huge—as, for example, China was—it was probably going to take decades. However, if President Richard Nixon in 1969 decided to launch a nuclear strike on that same place, he could have annihilated one hundred million Chinese people in an afternoon.
If humankind treated this new superweapon as it had treated every other effective weapon ever invented, the next world war would be one fought with near godlike destructive capability. Many of the several hundred people who witnessed the birth of the atomic age realized this the minute they saw that Trinity test in the desert. “Now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” as Oppenheimer said.
As with the scientists themselves, the reactions of Americans were mixed. If you are mired in a world war, and your side acquires the superweapon, it’s absolutely going to be seen in a positive light.* In his book In the Shadow of War, the historian Michael S. Sherry described Americans’ varied reactions after President Truman spoke on television to tell the American people and the world that the bomb had been dropped, and to explain what this new weapon was and why it had been used. “Some stressed pride in American achievement and satisfaction i
n gaining vengeance against the Japanese.” A few wished the war had continued so we could drop more bombs on Japan. “Others—especially soldiers who assumed that an invasion of Japan was the only alternative to the bomb’s use—welcomed the peace that the bomb had speeded, and the bomb itself as a tool for enforcing continued peace.”
Others saw something else entirely—to them, the bomb was evidence of the scourge of modern war. Still others felt a sense of foreboding about what the future might hold. The CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow put it this way: “Seldom, if ever, has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear—with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.”
The generations that grew up in the first few decades after the Second World War had the specter of a nuclear conflict hanging over them—they talked about it, wrote and sang about it, and had nightmares about it. American children often did emergency drills in school that taught them what to do and how to behave during a nuclear attack. The literature and popular entertainment of the period was saturated with themes of atomic (and later thermonuclear) war. “The End of the World” became a popular trope, a fantasy. It didn’t even matter if you lived in a so-called neutral country, because no region would escape the fallout—literally—if a third world war happened. In the era when the superbombs were new, people from many varied backgrounds—scientific, military, political, artistic, and philosophical—began to think about the odds of this happening as if their very lives depended on it.
