by C. P. Snow
‘Is this bomb all they say?’
I answered yes, so far as I knew.
‘Do you think it will finish the Japanese? Do you think the war’s going to stop?’
‘I should have thought so,’ I replied.
‘I don’t believe it. Bombs don’t end wars.’
I was puzzled, but the explanation was straightforward. He was arguing against his own hopes. He had an elder brother, who was booked to fight in the invasion of Malaya. He could not let himself believe that the war would end in time.
When I left the club, I began to walk across London, trying to tire myself. But soon the energy of distress left me, almost between one step and another: although it was not yet eleven I found myself tired out. I took a taxi back to Pimlico, where from the houses in the square the lights were shining, as serene as on any other night of peace, as enticing to a lonely man outside.
I went straight off to sleep, woke before four, and did not get to sleep again. It was not a bad test of how public and private worries compare in depth, I thought, when I remembered the nights I had lain awake because of private trouble. Public trouble – how many such nights of insomnia had that given me? The answer was, just one. On the night after Munich, I had lain sleepless – and perhaps, as I went through the early hours of August 7th, I could fairly count another half.
As I lay there, I wished that I were able to speak to someone I was close to. The thoughts, the calculations of the future, pressed on me out of the morning dusk; it might have taken the edge off them if I could have admitted them to Martin. Soon after breakfast, I rang him up.
‘So this is it,’ I said.
‘Yes, this is it,’ came his voice, without any stress.
For some instants neither of us spoke, and I went on: ‘I think I should like to come down. Can you put up with me?’
A pause.
‘It might be better if I came to London, he replied. ‘Will that do?’
‘I can come down straight away,’ I said.
‘The other might be better. Is it all right for you?’
I said it was, but I was restless all morning, wondering why he had put me off. It was just after one when he came into my room.
As soon as I saw him, I felt, as often when we met, the familiar momentary wiping away of fret. I had felt the same, over five years before, when he visited me in that office, and we talked of the bomb, and I induced him to work on it.
‘Well, it’s happened,’ I said.
‘I’m afraid so,’ said Martin.
It was a curious phrase, inadequate and polite.
‘I don’t find it easy to take,’ I said.
‘It’s not pretty,’ said Martin.
I looked at him. His eyes were hard, bright, and steady, the corners of his mouth tucked in. I felt a jolt of disappointment; I was repelled by his stoicism. I had turned to him for support, and we had nothing to say to each other.
Without pretending to be light-hearted, Martin kept up the same level, disciplined manner. He made some comments about his journey, then he asked where we should eat.
‘Where you like,’ I said.
His eyes searched mine.
‘Would you rather wait a bit?’
‘I don’t care,’ I said.
‘I mean,’ said Martin, his eyes harder, ‘would you rather wait and talk? Because if so it may take some time.’
‘It depends what we talk about–’
‘What do you think I’m going to talk about?’
His voice was not raised – but suddenly I realized it was unsteady with anger.
‘I thought you felt it wasn’t any use–’
‘It may be a great deal of use,’ said Martin. His voice was still quiet, his temper utterly let go.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You don’t expect me to sit by and hear about this performance, and not say that I should like my dissent recorded in the minutes?’
‘I’ve felt the same,’ I said.
‘I know you have,’ said Martin. ‘But the question is: what is a man to do?’
‘I doubt if you can do anything,’ I said.
Martin said: ‘I think I can.’
‘It’s happened now,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing to do.’
‘I disagree.’
At that moment, each of us, staring into the other’s eyes, shared the other’s feeling, and knew that our wills must cross.
Part Four
A Result in Private
27: An Uneffaceable Afternoon
Big Ben had just struck, it must have been the half-hour, when Martin said: ‘I disagree.’
He continued to look at me.
‘I oughtn’t to have stopped Arthur Mounteney sending his letter,’ said Martin. Just then, that was the focus of his remorse.
‘It wouldn’t have done any good,’ I said.
‘It would have done the trick,’ said Martin.
I shook my head.
He said: ‘So now I shall have to send a letter myself.’
He added, in a tone that was casual, cold, almost hostile: ‘Perhaps you’d better have a look at it.’
He opened his wallet, and with his neat deliberate fingers unfolded a sheet of office paper. He leaned across and put it on my blotter. The words were written in his own handwriting. There were no corrections, and the letter looked like a fair copy. It read:
To the Editor of The Times (which failing, Daily Telegraph, Manchester Guardian). Sir, As a scientist who has been employed for four years on the fission bomb, I find it necessary to make two comments on the use of such a bomb on Hiroshima. First, it appears not to have been relevant to the war: informed persons are aware that, for some weeks past, the Japanese have been attempting to put forward proposals for surrender. Second, if this had not been so, or if the proposals came to nothing, a minimum respect for humanity required that a demonstration of the weapon should be given, e.g. by delivering a bomb on unpopulated territory, before one was used on an assembly of men, women, and children. The actual use of the bomb in cold blood on Hiroshima is the most horrible single act so far performed. States like Hitler’s Germany have done much wickedness over many years, but no State has ever before had both the power and the will to destroy so many lives in a few seconds. In this respect, our scientists and our government have been so closely interwoven with those of the USA that we have formed part of that power and that will…
‘You’ve not sent this?’ I said, before I had finished reading.
‘Not yet.’
‘How many people know you’ve written it?’
‘Only Irene.’
That was the reason, I thought, that he had not wished me to go to Barford.
If this letter were published, it meant the end of his career. I had to get him out of it. From the moment he said that he was proposing to act, I had known that I must prevent him.
Even though I agreed with almost all he said.
As I began to make the first opposing moves, which he was already expecting, I was thinking, his was a letter which an able man only writes when he is near breaking point. Only his mask was stoical, as he sat there, his fingers spread like a starfish on the arms of his chair. In his letter – whatever he had written I should be trying to suppress it – he had not made the best of his case.[1] Yet I agreed with him in all that mattered. Looking back years later, I still agreed with him.
I felt it so, that afternoon, when I set myself to make Martin keep quiet. I shut away the sense of outrage, my own sense of outrage as well as his, and brought out the worldly wise official’s argument, such as we had displayed at Barford in July, such as he had used himself. It was not worthwhile making gestures for no result. One such gesture was all you were allowed; you ought to choose a time when it could do good. We had found ourselves in responsible positions; we could not give them up overnight; for everyone’s sake we had to get through the next few years without a war; then one could make gestures.
There was something in what I sa
id, but they were not the reasons, they were nowhere near the reasons, why I was calling on each ounce of nature that I possessed to force him to conform. It was, in fact, incomparably more simple. For a brother as for a son, one’s concern is, in the long run, prosaic and crude. One is anxious about their making a living; one longs for their success, but one wants it to be success as the world knows it, reputation among solid men. For myself, my own ‘respectable’ ambitions had damped down by now, I should perhaps have been able, if the choice was sharp enough, to throw them away and face a scandal. For myself; but not for him.
I had seen friends throw away what most men clung to, respectability, money, fame. Roy Calvert: Charles March: even old Martineau. I understood why they had done it. I should have been the last to dissuade them. But they were friends, and Martin was a brother. The last thing you want with a brother is that he should fulfil a poetic destiny.
Martin met my argument point by point; we were getting nowhere. All of a sudden he began looking down beside his chair, under the desk, by the hat stand.
‘Did I bring in a briefcase?’ he said.
I said that I had not noticed, and he went on searching.
‘Does it matter?’ I was put out.
He said that it contained notes of the new method for extracting plutonium: it was top secret. He must trace it. He thought he remembered leaving it in his car: would I mind walking to the garage with him? Irritated at the interruption, I followed beside him, down Whitehall, across Victoria Street: Martin, his forehead lined with anxiety was walking faster than usual, and we were both silent. The offices, the red-brick houses of Great Smith Street, glowed shabby in the sunshine. Just as on the night before, I felt a tenderness for the dirty, unfriendly, ugly streets such as I had never felt before. I even felt something like remorse, because what had happened to another town might happen here.
The briefcase was not in the car. Martin said nothing, except that he must ring up Barford from my office. Back there, he sat leaning forward, as though by concentrating he could make the call come through. It was minutes before the telephone whirred. Martin was talking to his secretary, his words fast but even then polite. ‘Would you mind looking…?’ He waited, then cried out: ‘Thank God for that! With elaborate thanks he put the receiver down, and gave me a sharp, deprecating grin.
‘I never moved it. It’s sitting there in its proper place.’
‘It seemed a curious thing to worry about,’ I said.
For an instant he looked blank. Then his face broke into a laugh, the kind of noiseless laugh with which as children we used to receive family jokes. But soon his expression hardened. He asked, had I anything more to say before he sent the letter?
‘A good deal more,’ I said.
‘I wish you’d say it.’
His tone was so inflexible that I became more brutal.
‘How are you going to live?’ I said.
‘A decent scientist can make some sort of a living,’ he said.
‘Whatever trouble you get into?’
‘It wouldn’t be a good living, but I can make do.’
‘What does your wife think of that?’
There came a surprise. Martin smiled, not affectionately, but as though he held a trump which I had miscounted. He said: ‘As a matter of fact, she wants me to do it.’
He spoke with absolute confidence. I had made a stupid mistake. I should have remembered the way she welcomed his first risk. I tried another tack.
‘Have you thought of your son?’
‘Yes, I’ve thought of him,’ said Martin, He added: ‘I’ve also thought of you. I’m sorry if it harms you, and I know that it must.’ He said it formally.
I cast round again. He and I took too much responsibility on ourselves, I said. That was true in our human relations.
He stared at me, and for an instant I was silent.
I went on with the argument. We should be better men if we took less upon our shoulders. And scientists as a class had the same presumption. They thought too much of their responsibility. Martin that day had no more guilt to carry than any other man.
‘Again I disagree,’ said Martin. After a silence, he went on: ‘In any case, I can make a more effective noise.’
‘Yes,’ I said, feeling another spot to probe – he and Luke and the others would be listened to. But if he were patient, some day he would be listened to in a way that did effective good. Not now. It would be a nine days’ wonder, he would be ruined and powerless. But wait. In the next few years, if he and Luke brought their process to success, they would have more influence than most people. That was the only way in which Martin could gain authority: and then, if a protest had to be made, if a martyr were needed, then he could speak out without it being just a pathetic piece of defiance, a lonely voice in Hyde Park.
A girl brought us cups of tea. The argument went on, flashes crossed the wall from bus roofs reflected in the sun. Neither then nor afterwards did I detect the instant at which the hinge turned. Perhaps there was no such instant. Perhaps it was more like a turn of the tide. Towards the end of the afternoon, Martin knew, and I knew, that I had made him give up.
I did not, even then, believe that any reasons of mine had convinced him. Some had been sound: some were fabricated: some contradicted others. So far as reasons went, his were as good as mine. The only advantage I had was that, in resolving to stop him acting, I had nothing to dilute my purpose. Whereas he intended to act, but deep down he had his doubts. Some of these doubts I had brought into the open: the doubt that fed on responsibility, on caution, on self-interest, on a mixture of fears, including the fear of being disloyal.
As the afternoon sun made blazing shields of the windows across the street, Martin said: ‘Very well, I shall just do nothing.’
He spoke sadly, admitting what, for some time past, we had each known.
I asked him to have dinner with me, and stay in my flat. For a second his face had the look of refusal, but then his politeness came back. We were both constrained as we walked across the parks to Hyde Park Corner. In Green Park we stood for a while watching some boys of eight or nine play, in a clearing by the bandstand, a primitive game of cricket. The trees’ shadows stretched across the lumpy grass, and we saw something that had the convincing improbability of a dream; at three successive balls the batsman made a scooping shot, and gave a catch which went in a gentle curve, very softly, to point; the first catch was seriously and solemnly missed. So was the second. So was the third.
‘We shall never see that again,’ I said to Martin.
Usually he would have been amused, but now he only gave a token smile.
We walked along the path.
‘By the way,’ said Martin, in a tone dry and without feeling, ‘I heard one story about tactics that might interest you.’
He had heard it from someone present after the bomb was made.
‘There was a good deal of discussion,’ he said, ‘about how to drop it with maximum results. One ingenious idea was to start a really spectacularly pretty flare a few seconds before the bomb went off.’
‘Why?’
‘To make sure that everyone in the town was looking up.’
‘Why?’
‘To make sure they were all blinded.’
I cried out.
‘That’s where we’ve got to in the end,’ he said. He added: ‘But I agree with you, now I’ve got to let it go.’
We walked on, set apart and sad.
28: ‘What Do You Expect from Him Now?’
Two days later, as we drove down to Barford in the afternoon, Martin and I talked civilly of cricket and acquaintances, with no sign on the surface of our clash of wills.
In Banbury I bought an evening paper. I saw that another bomb had been dropped. Without speaking I passed the paper to Martin, sitting at the wheel, the car drawn up in the marketplace beside the kerb. He read the paragraph under the headline.
‘This is getting monotonous,’ he said,
His express
ion had not changed. We both took it for granted that the argument was not to be reopened. He was too stable a character to go back on his word. Instead, he commented, as we drove into Warwickshire, that this Nagasaki bomb must have been a plutonium one.
‘The only point of dropping the second,’ said Martin, his tone neutral, the last edge of feeling dried right out, ‘must have been for purposes of comparison.’
As soon as we went inside the canteen at Barford he made a similar remark, and was immediately denounced by Luke as a cold fish. Martin caught my eye; just for an instant, his irony returned.
Inside that room, four floors up in the administration building, so that one looked out over the red-brick ranges towards the dipping sun and then back to the tea cups and the white linoleum on the tables, the voices were loud and harsh.
There were a dozen people there, Mary Pearson, Nora Luke, Luke himself, erect and stiff-backed as he had not been for a year; I had never seen them so angry.
The news of Hiroshima had sickened them; that afternoon had left them without consolation. Luke said: ‘If anyone had tried to defend the first bomb, then I might just have listened to him. But if anyone dares try to defend the second, then I’ll see him in hell before I listen to a single word.’
They all assumed, as Martin had done, that the plutonium bomb was dropped as an experiment, to measure its ‘effectiveness’ against the other.
‘It had to be dropped in a hurry,’ said someone, ‘because the war will be over and there won’t be another chance.’
‘Not just yet,’ said Luke.
I had known them rancorous before, morally indignant, bitter: but it was something new to hear them cynical – to hear that last remark of Luke’s, the least cynical of men.
Eric Pearson came in, smiled at his wife, nodded to others, threw back his quiff of hair. He sat down at the table, where most of us were standing. Suddenly I thought I should like to question him. Of them all, he was the only one who had worked directly on the actual bombs, that is, he had had a small part, a fractional part, in what they would call ‘the hardware’, the concrete objects that had been dropped on those towns. Even if it was only a thousandth part, I was thinking, that meant a good many lives.
