Dreams of Earth and Sky

by Freeman Dyson

  Princip started the war and he won it. He achieved both of his grand objectives: the total destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the independence of the kingdom of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia united his homelands Bosnia and Serbia in a confederation of Slav peoples. He did not even pay with his life for his victory. He was first imprisoned by the Austrians and then transferred by them to a hospital where he died peacefully of tuberculosis. From the point of view of Princip, the war was a complete success, and the deaths of a few tens of millions were only collateral damage. The war was also a complete success from the point of view of another group of underdog rebels, the Bolsheviks, who took advantage of the war to achieve their aims in Russia.

  World War II was asymmetric in a different way. It was started in Europe by Germany and in Asia by Japan, as a conventional war to be fought by big armies on the ground. The aim of Germany was to fight World War I over again and this time win. The aim of Japan was to complete the conquest of China without interference from the United States. The war became asymmetric because Britain and the United States were determined not to fight World War I over again. Britain and the United States made the decision, before the war started, to build large bomber forces that could destroy the enemy homelands from the air.

  Germany and Japan did not build strategic bomber forces. The bombing of London was done in a haphazard way by forces not designed for the purpose. The German V-1 and V-2 bombardments were too little and too late to have any substantial effects. Whether the bombing of Germany and Japan was militarily effective is still a matter of dispute. One fact that is not in dispute is that the British and American peoples supported the bombing campaigns, partly for military reasons but mainly to teach the enemy populations a lesson that they would not forget.

  Both the Germans and the Japanese had fought all their earlier wars in other people’s countries, and now they would finally feel the horrors of war on their own skins. The Germans called the firebombing of their cities Terrorangriffe, terror attacks, and they were right. The British public knew that they were terror attacks and was willing to pay the price: 40,000 bomber crewmen dead.

  Now, seventy years later, we can see clearly that terrorism worked. In 1945, the year when spectacular firestorms raged in Dresden and Hiroshima, something happened in Germany and Japan that was more profound than military defeat. The traditional cultures of Germany and Japan, which had been the most militaristic on earth, changed abruptly to become the most pacifistic on earth. The change was deep and lasting. Terrorism did not defeat the German and Japanese armies. The Russian and American armies did that. Terrorism did something more difficult and more permanent. It cured the German and Japanese insanities. Terrorism is shock treatment of the crudest sort, but it sometimes works when all else fails.

  Gladwell’s book is not about big wars and big history. It is about individual people and their problems. In addition to those that I have mentioned, there are seven more underdogs with a chapter for each. They are real people and Gladwell brings them wonderfully to life. The book is divided into three sections. The first is called “The Advantages of Disadvantages (and the Disadvantages of Advantages).” After Ranadivé comes Teresa DeBrito, a schoolteacher who is now principal of the Shepaug Valley Middle School in Connecticut. Her problem is a shortage of kids. The Shepaug Valley has been so gentrified that families with young children can no longer afford to live there. Nearby is the elite Hotchkiss private school, where parents pay exorbitant fees to have their children taught in small classes. DeBrito’s classes will soon be smaller than those at Hotchkiss. Parents and politicians think that smaller classes mean better education. But DeBrito knows from her experience as a working teacher that bigger classes are usually better. One of the best classes she ever taught had twenty-nine kids. The moral of the story is: Things that appear to be disadvantages often turn out to be advantages, and vice versa.

  The middle section is called “The Theory of Desirable Difficulty.” It begins with David Boies, who is an underdog because he is dyslexic. He struggled through high school and then enjoyed life as a construction worker. Building houses did not require reading. Now he is a famous trial lawyer in California. He says he is a good trial lawyer because he listens. His dyslexia is an advantage because he trained himself to learn everything by listening. He listens to the opposing lawyers and to the witnesses in trials and remembers every word they say. Remembering every word gives him the upper hand.

  Emil Freireich had a horrible childhood in extreme poverty in Chicago. During his career as a doctor he was fired seven times for bad behavior. But he devoted his life to finding a cure for childhood leukemia. Leukemia was then a leading cause of death in children. The leukemia ward was a gruesome place soaked in blood, with children in terminal stages bleeding to death. Freireich worked there for twenty years and is largely responsible for the fact that childhood leukemia is now a curable disease. To find the cure and prove that it worked, he had to inflict pain on a lot of children, breaking rules and antagonizing his colleagues. To be tough helped. Freireich said to Gladwell, “I was never depressed. I never sat with a parent and cried about a child dying.… As a doctor, you swear to give people hope. That’s your job.”

  The last section is called “The Limits of Power,” and begins with Rosemary Lawlor, who was a young mother in Belfast when the Troubles began in 1969. The British army imposed a curfew on the Lower Falls area of Belfast, and the people there were running out of food. An army of mothers, pushing prams filled with bread and milk, broke the curfew. Lawlor describes how it happened. “We got the hair pulled out of us. The Brits just grabbed us, threw us up against the walls. Oh, aye! They beat us, like.” And then the tide turned. “Once all the people started coming out of their houses, the Brits lost control.… The Brits gave up.… We forced and we forced—until we got in, and we got in and we broke the curfew.… We did it.”

  The final chapter belongs to André Trocmé, the pastor of the village Le-Chambon-sur-Lignon, which saved the lives of hundreds of Jewish refugees in France under the German occupation. One of the Jews saved was Pierre Sauvage, who was born in the village during the war. He later became a film producer in Hollywood and made a famous documentary film, Weapons of the Spirit, with some of the original villagers on screen, describing how the saving of Jews came about. The villagers were ordinary people, living lives of hardship and doing what they thought was right. Gladwell concludes: “It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and the damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish.” Trocmé was marginal and damaged. He saved the Jews in the village but lost his son. He wrote afterward: “I am like a decapitated pine. Pine trees do not regenerate their tops. They stay twisted, crippled.”

  Note added in 2014: In the published review I said that Oregon Trail was a RAND Corporation document. In fact it was an army report, and its official designation is Project OREGON TRAIL Final Report, USACDC No. USC-6, February 1965. Volume 1, Main Report, TOP SECRET RD. The full report consisted of two parts: the historical part, which was the biggest part and ought to have been published separately, and a war-game part, which described war games carried out at RAND and at Research Analysis Corporation that were legitimately secret. The decision that I am protesting is the decision to lump the two parts together and classify the whole package as TOP SECRET. As a result of this classification, both parts remain inaccessible after forty-nine years. I am grateful to Lon Jones and to Ashutosh Jogalekar for letters stimulating me to dig out these facts. As usual, I learn from my mistakes only after the review is published.

  *Little, Brown, 2013.

  20

  CHURCHILL: LOVE & THE BOMB

  CHURCHILL’S BOMB IS the story of a love triangle.* The three characters are Winston Churchill the statesman, H. G. Wells the writer, and Frederick Lindemann the scientist. Churchill was in love with war and weapons, ever since he was a small boy playing with a hi
storic collection of toy soldiers. Wells wrote books about war and weapons, real and imaginary. Lindemann invented weapons and enjoyed trying them out. War and weapons brought the three of them together. But Churchill could only listen to one guru at a time. The chief source of Churchill’s ideas about the application of science to war was Wells in World War I and Lindemann in World War II. Lindemann and Wells, being rivals in love, had nothing but contempt for each other.

  Churchill was deeply involved in the prehistory of the atomic bomb for forty years before the bomb existed. More than any other politician, and more than any of the leading scientists of that time, he took seriously the possibility of nuclear weapons. He was born with a romantic attachment to soldiering, enjoyed applying high technology to military problems, and found kindling for his imagination in the science-fiction stories of Wells.

  His personal friendship with Wells began in 1901, when he read Wells’s nonfiction work Anticipations and responded with an eight-page fan letter. The friendship lasted until Wells’s death in 1946. Churchill reacted enthusiastically to Wells’s book The War in the Air, which appeared in 1908 with vivid descriptions of the military uses of the newly invented airplane. In January 1914 Wells published The World Set Free, a story that gave starring roles to two new inventions: “land ironclads,” later known as tanks, and “atomic bombs,” later known as nuclear weapons. Churchill pushed the development and use of tanks in World War I. He understood that they would give soldiers a chance to break out of the horrors of the trenches, making warfare quick and mobile. His tanks came too late to get the boys out of the trenches in that war, but they arrived in time to have a decisive effect in World War II. He gave full credit to Wells for the idea.

  Churchill’s thinking about nuclear weapons was summarized in a piece, “Fifty Years Hence,” published in Strand Magazine in 1931. “There is no question among scientists,” he wrote,

  that this gigantic source of energy exists. What is lacking is the match to set the bonfire alight.… The busy hands of the scientists are already fumbling with the keys of all the chambers hitherto forbidden to mankind.… Without an equal growth of mercy, pity, peace and love, science herself may destroy all that makes human life majestic and tolerable.

  The match to light the nuclear fire was the fission of uranium, discovered in 1938 by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin.

  Lindemann worked at the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough during World War I and became famous for solving the problem of tailspin. Many pilots were losing their lives because their aircraft would stall during combat maneuvers, fall into a tailspin, and helplessly spin into the ground. Lindemann worked out the theory of tailspin and found a remedy. He calculated that the pilot could give a counterintuitive push to the rudder, which would convert the spin into a straight dive and allow the pilot to regain control. He then borrowed an airplane, put it into a tailspin, applied the push that he had calculated, pulled out of the straight dive, and flew the plane safely home. This combination of scientific wizardry and courage won him the lifelong admiration of Churchill.

  Lindemann met Churchill for the first time in 1921 and explained recent scientific discoveries in simple language. Churchill found him to be a kindred spirit, an old-fashioned patriot who saw no shame in using science to win wars. In 1924, Churchill wrote an essay about the future of warfare with the title “Shall We All Commit Suicide?,” describing apocalyptic visions of anthrax weapons and “a bomb no bigger than an orange … [with] a secret power to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke.” Before writing the piece, he turned for advice to Lindemann and not to Wells.

  Still Wells remained faithful to his old love. In 1908 he had written a piece for the Daily News, “Why Socialists Should Vote for Mr. Churchill.” In 1940 he wrote a piece for Collier’s magazine, “Churchill, Man of Destiny.” His verdict on Churchill in 1940: “He has pulled himself together. He is pulling us all together. It is like awakening from a nightmare to think of what might have happened to my country without him.” When the chips were down, Wells was an old-fashioned patriot too.

  Wells was a spinner of fanciful tales while Lindemann was a real scientist. Paradoxically, the information that Wells gave to Churchill was mostly right, while the information that Lindemann gave was mostly wrong. Wells had been right about airplanes and tanks before World War I. Lindemann was wrong about radar in 1935, when it was first proposed for defending Britain against attack from the air. He gave low priority to radar, which turned out to be the decisive technology of World War II and was crucial to the defense of Britain in 1940. One of the offshoots of radar was the proximity fuse, which enabled an antiaircraft shell to destroy an aircraft without hitting it directly. The proximity fuse multiplied the kill rate of antiaircraft artillery by a factor of ten. In 1944, when the V-1 drone airplanes were attacking London, a massive line of antiaircraft guns with proximity fuses was deployed along the coast and succeeded in shooting down 70 percent of the V-1s before they reached England. If the Germans had had proximity fuses for their antiaircraft guns, they could probably have stopped our large-scale bombing of Germany.

  Lindemann gave the highest priority to aerial mines. Aerial mines were his pride and joy. The idea was to destroy airplanes with mines floating in the air, just as ships were destroyed by mines floating in the water. The big difference between air and sea is that the air has three dimensions while the surface of the sea has two dimensions. An aerial mine has to kill airplanes over a wide range of heights. The mine with the explosive charge must hang at the bottom of a long steel wire with a parachute at the top. If an airplane flies into the wire, the wire will bite into the skin of the wing until it reaches solid metal. Pulled upward by the drag of the parachute, the wire will slide up through the wing until the explosive charge reaches the airplane and detonates. Lindemann continued to play with this toy all through the years of World War II. It absorbed a large amount of money and attention that might have been put to better use.

  It was obvious to almost everyone except Lindemann that aerial mines could not be an effective defense. The wire had to be thousands of feet long and correspondingly heavy. Even with a big parachute, it would not stay in the air for more than a few minutes. To defend an important target, a fleet of airplanes would be required to continue sowing mines over the area as long as the attack continued. If many targets were to be defended, the defense would quickly run out of mines. And it was easy to invent countermeasures. A system of small clippers along the leading edge of an airplane wing could cut the wires and make aerial mines harmless.

  When I was working for the British Bomber Command toward the end of World War II, we would from time to time receive inquiries from some high level of government, asking whether damage to returning bombers gave any evidence that the Germans were using aerial mines. Our answer was always negative. My boss told me confidentially that the inquiries were coming from Lindemann.

  Lindemann was enthusiastic about technical toys such as aerial mines, but he remained unenthusiastic about nuclear weapons. One week after the beginning of World War II, he moved from Oxford to London to become a full-time scientific adviser to Churchill, who was then First Lord of the Admiralty. Lindemann was well aware of the discovery of fission and the possibility of nuclear weapons, but he waited for two years before advising Churchill to begin a project to develop a British bomb. Toward the end of the war, Lindemann visited the American bomb laboratory at Los Alamos and remarked privately to his friend Reginald Jones, “What fools the Americans will look after spending so much money.” Jones had been Lindemann’s student before the war, and worked closely with him as the head of scientific intelligence. Jones said that until the bomb exploded at Alamogordo, Lindemann never really believed that the thing would work.

  The title Churchill’s Bomb is misleading. It was probably chosen by the publisher to attract readers rather than to describe the book. Graham Farmelo’s main subject is the personal rivalry surrounding the
British nuclear weapons project, in which Churchill played a leading part. But the book is not a history of the bomb. It does not answer some of the obvious questions that a reader might ask: What were the technical obstacles to be overcome? What did the scientists actually do while the politicians argued about it? How was the bomb built? How was it supposed to be delivered? What effect has it had? Is the bomb still relevant in the world of today, sixty years after it was built? Why is it called Churchill’s bomb rather than Attlee’s bomb? After all, it was Clement Attlee and not Churchill who gave the order to build it.

  The subtitle, “How the United States Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race,” is also misleading. There was never an arms race between the United States and Britain. There was an arms race between Britain and Germany, beginning in 1939 and ending in 1942. During that time the United States was still neutral and not seriously engaged in the race. Britain won the race when Werner Heisenberg and Albert Speer secretly agreed to abandon the German nuclear bomb project. Then, in 1942, with the United States at war, Britain and the United States still believed that they were in a race with Germany, since they did not know that the Germans had given up. The choice for Britain was whether to join forces with the United States or to try to build a bomb independently.

  Churchill made the decision to merge British efforts with the American project. A merger meant sharing secrets, and the sharing of secrets was always a delicate problem. A year went by before sharing became effective and British scientists were working at Los Alamos. During that year, the American project took a great leap forward and the British project stalled. Enrico Fermi with his American colleagues built the first nuclear reactor in Chicago and explored the new world of nuclear power. British scientists spent the year waiting for the American authorities to allow them to participate. It was true that the United States overtook Britain, but Churchill was not racing. Churchill had already decided that he wanted a partnership with America and not a race.