Another environmental danger that is even more poorly understood is the possible coming of a new ice age. A new ice age would mean the burial of half of North America and half of Europe under massive ice sheets. We know that there is a natural cycle that has been operating for the last 800,000 years. The length of the cycle is 100,000 years. In each 100,000-year period, there is an ice age that lasts about 90,000 years and a warm interglacial period that lasts about 10,000 years. We are at present in a warm period that began 12,000 years ago, so the onset of the next ice age is overdue. If human activities were not disturbing the climate, a new ice age might begin at any time within the next couple of thousand years, or might already have begun. We do not know how to answer the most important question: Does our burning of fossil fuels make the onset of the next ice age more likely or less likely?
There are good arguments on both sides of this question. On the one side, we know that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was much lower during past ice ages than during warm periods, so it is reasonable to expect that an artificially high level of carbon dioxide might stop an ice age from beginning. On the other side, the oceanographer Wallace Broecker3 has argued that the present warm climate in Europe depends on a circulation of ocean water, with the Gulf Stream flowing north on the ocean surface and bringing warmth to Europe, while a countercurrent of cold water flows south in the deep ocean. So a new ice age could begin whenever the cold, deep countercurrent is interrupted. The countercurrent could be interrupted when the cold surface water in the Arctic becomes less salty and fails to sink, and the water could become less salty when the warming climate increases the Arctic rainfall. Thus Broecker argues that a warm climate in the Arctic may paradoxically cause an ice age to begin. Since we are confronted with two plausible arguments leading to opposite conclusions, the only rational response is to admit our ignorance. Until the causes of ice ages are understood in detail, we cannot know whether the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing or decreasing the danger.
The biosphere is the most complicated of all the things we humans have to deal with. The science of planetary ecology is still young and undeveloped. It is not surprising that honest and well-informed experts can disagree about facts. But beyond the disagreements about facts, there is another deeper disagreement about values. The disagreement about values may be described in an oversimplified way as a disagreement between naturalists and humanists. Naturalists believe that nature knows best. For them the highest value is respect for the natural order of things. Any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil. Excessive burning of fossil fuels, and the consequent increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide, are unqualified evils.
Humanists believe that humans are an essential part of nature. Through human minds the biosphere has acquired the capacity to steer its own evolution, and we are now in charge. Humans have the right to reorganize nature so that humans and biosphere can survive and prosper together. For humanists, the highest value is intelligent coexistence between humans and nature. The greatest evils are war and poverty, underdevelopment and unemployment, disease and hunger, the miseries that deprive people of opportunities and limit their freedoms. As Bertolt Brecht wrote in The Threepenny Opera, “Feeding comes first, morality second.” If people do not have enough to eat, we cannot expect them to put much effort into protecting the biosphere. In the long run, preservation of the biosphere will only be possible if people everywhere have a decent standard of living. The humanist ethic does not regard an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as evil, if the increase is associated with worldwide economic prosperity, and if the poorer half of humanity gets its fair share of the benefits.
Vernadsky, as Smil portrays him, was a humanist. He foresaw the gradual transformation of the biosphere into a noosphere. The word “noosphere,” a sphere of mind, means a planetary ecology designed and maintained by human intelligence. He recognized that, as the noosphere comes into existence, “the aerial envelope of the land as well as all its natural waters are changed both physically and chemically.” He understood that the maintenance of a noosphere places heavy responsibilities on human shoulders. But he had faith in the ability of humans to rise to the challenge. The main conclusion of Vernadsky’s thinking, and the main conclusion of Smil’s book, is that life is complicated and any theory that attempts to describe its behavior in simple terms is likely to be wrong.
Postscript, 2006
After this review appeared, Vaclav Smil published another book, Energy at the Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties (MIT Press, 2003), dealing directly with the practical issues of energy supply and demand. The new book makes a good complement to The Earth’s Biosphere, which describes the larger framework of ecology within which practical policies must fit. I am grateful to Smil for sending me the new book, and sorry that I had not seen it when I wrote the review.
1. MIT Press, 2002.
2. V. I. Vernadsky, The Biosphere, translated by D. B. Langmuir (Copernicus, 1998).
3. W.S. Broecker, “Thermohaline Circulation, the Achilles Heel of Our Climate System: Will Man-Made CO2 Upset the Current Balance?,” Science, Vol. 278 (1997), pp. 1582–1588, cited by Smil.
6
WITNESS TO A TRAGEDY
THOMAS LEVENSON IS a filmmaker who produces documentary films for public television. He has a sharp eye for the dramatic events and personal details that bring history to life. His book Einstein in Berlin1 is a social history of Germany covering the twenty years from 1914 to 1933, the years when Albert Einstein lived in Berlin. The picture of the city’s troubles comes into a clearer focus when it is viewed through Einstein’s eyes. Einstein was a good witness, observing the life of the city in which he played an active role but remained always emotionally detached. He wrote frequent letters to his old friends in Switzerland and his new friends in Germany, recording events as they happened and describing his hopes and fears. His daily life and activities come intermittently into the narrative but are not the main theme. The main theme is the tragedy of World War I, a tragedy that began in 1914 but did not end in 1918. This tragedy continued to torment the citizens of Berlin through the years from 1918 to 1933 and led them finally to put their fate in the hands of Hitler. Hitler was able to gain his power over them because he promised to erase the tragedy and bring them back to the happy days of the empire when Germany was prosperous and united.
Every aspect of Einstein’s life, the personal, the political, the scientific, and the philosophical, has been described in detail and analyzed in depth by his various biographers. The world does not need another Einstein biography. Fortunately, Levenson’s book is not a biography. He has borrowed everything he needs from the published correspondence and the existing biographies of Einstein, with full acknowledgments and an excellent bibliography. The new and original aspect of this book is the context in which Einstein is placed. The context is a study in depth of the social pathology that gripped Berlin from the day Einstein arrived there in 1914 to the day he left in 1932.
The tragedy is a play in two acts, the first act being the years of war and the second act the years of the Weimar Republic. The most remarkable feature of the first act was the general belief among Einstein’s friends in Berlin that the war was winnable. The war was widely welcomed as an opportunity for Germany to achieve its proper status as a great power. Einstein observed that his academic friends and colleagues were even more deluded with patriotic dreams of grandeur than the ordinary citizens that he met in the street. In a conversation with his Swiss friend Romain Rolland in 1915, he described how Berlin had gone to war. “The masses were immensely submissive, domesticated,” he said. “The elites were worse. They were hungry, driven by their urge for power, their love of force, and the dream of conquest.” As late as the summer of 1918, after the failure of the final German offensive on the western front, many of the leading German academics were still confident of victory.
The state of mind of the mandarins in Berlin was v
ery different from the state of mind of their enemies in Paris and London. In Paris the war was seen as a desperate struggle for survival. The guns on the western front were close enough so that everyone in Paris could hear them. In Britain the war was seen as a tragedy that had done irreparable harm to Britain and to European civilization, no matter who won it. When the war came to an end in November 1918, the British public looked back on it as an unspeakable horror that should never under any circumstances be allowed to happen again. But a large part of the German public looked back on it differently, as a test of strength that they could have won if they had not been stabbed in the back by traitors at home. This book explains how that fatal German sense of betrayal came into being.
The second act of the tragedy is the story of the slow collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rapid rise of Hitler. Einstein was a firm supporter of the republic, but he saw which way the wind was blowing. One episode in the tragedy epitomizes the whole story. Erich Remarque’s book Im Westen Nichts Neues was published in 1929 and immediately became an international best seller. It is the finest of all fictional accounts of World War I, seen through the eyes of a group of young Germans who die pointlessly in the carnage of the western front. In 1930 it was made into a Hollywood film, All Quiet on the Western Front. The film was shown all over the world, except in Germany. When the distributors of the film tried to show it in Berlin, Hitler’s friend Joseph Goebbels organized a riot in the theater. Further Nazi demonstrations and violent protests against the film followed. And then the Weimar government banned the film throughout Germany. The Weimar authorities did not allow the German public to see the film because the Nazis considered it unpatriotic. This episode explains a mystery in my own family. One of my relatives is a lady, now ninety-four years old, who lived in Germany all her life and grew up in the Weimar years. Many years ago, I gave her Remarque’s book to read and she found it very moving. “This book is wonderful,” she said. “Why didn’t they let us read it when it was published? That was before the Hitler time, but we were told that it was disgusting and shameful and respectable people should not read it.” So the respectable Germans of her generation, even those who were not Nazis, did not read Remarque. I always wondered why, and now I know.2
1. Random House, 2003.
2. The lady who did not read Remarque until it was too late was my mother-in-law, Gisela Jung. She died in March 2003. A few sentences of this review have been rewritten to avoid overlap with the review of Yuri Manin’s Mathematics and Physics (Chapter 14).
II
War and Peace
7
BOMBS AND POTATOES
ON OCTOBER 16, 1945, General Leslie R. Groves presented J. Robert Oppenheimer with a certificate from the secretary of war, expressing the appreciation of the government for the work of the Los Alamos Laboratory. Oppenheimer responded with the following speech:
It is with appreciation and gratitude that I accept from you this scroll for the Los Alamos Laboratory, for the men and women whose work and whose hearts have made it. It is our hope that in years to come we may look at this scroll, and all that it signifies, with pride.
Today that pride must be tempered with a profound concern. If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.
The peoples of this world must unite, or they will perish. This war, that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand. Other men have spoken them, in other times, of other wars, of other weapons. They have not prevailed. There are some, misled by a false sense of human history, who hold that they will not prevail today. It is not for us to believe that. By our works we are committed, committed to a world united, before this common peril, in law, and in humanity.
On the one side, these words of Oppenheimer. On the other side, memories of England in 1939. In 1939 in England, the younger generation was very sure that mankind must unite or perish. We had not the slightest confidence that anything worth preserving would survive the impending war against Hitler. The folk memory of England was dominated by the unendurable barbarities of World War I, and none of us could believe that World War II would be less brutal or less demoralizing. It was frequently predicted that as World War I had led to the collapse of society and the triumph of Bolshevism in Russia, so World War II would have the same effect in England.
When Neville Chamberlain declared war on Hitler in 1939, one of his first acts was to empty London hospitals of their patients. Chamberlain expected catastrophic air attacks to begin immediately; the hospitals were asked to be ready to handle 250,000 civilian casualties within the first two weeks, besides another 250,000 people who were expected to become permanently insane. These numbers were not based on fantasy; they were the estimates of military experts who extrapolated to the capability of the 1939 Luftwaffe the results achieved by much smaller forces in Spain and Ethiopia. The experts did not all agree on these numbers, but they agreed on the general order of magnitude. The public, fed by lurid newspaper and magazine articles, tended to view the approaching war in even more apocalyptic terms.
It was obvious to us young people in 1939 that war and surrender to Hitler were both unacceptable, both offering to us no substantial hope for the future. To escape from this dilemma, many of us took refuge in the gospel of Gandhi, believing that a nonviolent resistance to evil could defend our ideals without destroying them in the process. The English pacifist movement of the late 1930s has not been kindly treated by history, but it was in fact neither cowardly nor muddleheaded. We made only one mistake; none of us in those days could imagine that England would survive six years of war against Hitler, achieve most of the political objectives for which the war had been fought, suffer only one third the casualties that we had had in World War I, avoid the massive and indiscriminate use of poison gas and biological weapons, and finally emerge into a world in which our moral and humane values were largely intact. When Chamberlain led us into war in 1939, his view of the outcome was probably as dark as ours, only he was sustained in his determination by the feeling that he had no honorable alternative.
I come at last to Tom Stonier’s book Nuclear Disaster,1 which is a thorough and straightforward study of the consequences of nuclear war. Stonier is a biologist, and this fact gives his analysis breadth which has been lacking in earlier studies by physical scientists. His conclusions are not quantitative but are clear and stark. He asserts that the United States would not survive in anything resembling its present form after a major thermonuclear exchange. He documents his conclusion with detailed discussion of the medical, ecological, and social problems of survival in a physically mutilated and contaminated country. He finds that although each problem by itself might well be overcome by energetic action and organization, all the problems together are likely to present insuperable difficulties. The life of the surviving postwar population is pictured as being “nasty, brutish and short” for many generations.
Stonier’s knowledge of the physical and biological effects of nuclear explosions is solid and professional. His description of the economic and social effects is entirely plausible. Nevertheless, his total assessment of the long-range effect of nuclear war is necessarily dependent on his personal judgment. Nobody can say for sure whether a population subjected to unprecedented horrors and privations would respond with apathetic despair or with heroic discipline. The problem here is to predict the psychological, moral, and spiritual reactions of people in circumstances for which we have no valid historical parallel.
Stonier describes at some length the reactions observed during and after the Irish potato famine of 1845–1848. This description is of absorbing interest, but its relevance to the problem of nuclear war is at best conjectural. In the end, readers of the book must decide for themselves, following their individual tastes or prejudices, whether they accept or reject
Stonier’s gloomy prognosis for the long-range recovery of civilization.
Just because the conclusions of Stonier’s book depend so heavily on subjective judgment, it is important to view the book with a wider historical perspective. For this reason I began with Oppenheimer’s speech and with the lessons of the 1930s. In the 1930s we held views about war very similar to those of Stonier, and these views turned out to be wrong. The experts who so grossly overestimated the effectiveness of bombing in 1939 made many technical errors, but their major mistake was a psychological one. They failed completely to foresee that the direct involvement of civilian populations in warfare would strengthen their spirit and social cohesion. The unexpected toughness and discipline of populations under attack was seen not only in England but even more strikingly in Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union. Would the same qualities be shown in the United States after a nuclear attack? Stonier thinks not. I am not sure.
So we come back finally to the simple and profound words of Oppenheimer’s speech. What we said about war in 1939 did not prevail. We learned in 1939–1945 that a war could still be fought and won without destroying the soul of a country. We learned that yielding to threats is the greater evil, and this is the lesson that most of us are now living by. When we in America apply this lesson to our dealings with the Soviet Union in the year 1964, are we misled by a false sense of human history? Is it a false sense of human history that teaches us that nationalism is still the strongest force in the world, stronger than the hydrogen bomb and stronger than humanity? These are some of the questions which Stonier’s book does not answer.
The Scientist as Rebel Page 8
