Doomsday Men

by P. D. Smith

  In the previous century, the laws of thermodynamics had raised the frightening prospect of what was called ‘the heat death of the universe’. The second of these laws asserts the irreversibility of natural processes, whereby heat cannot be transferred from a cold body to a hot one. Related to this is the concept of entropy, which is a measure of the unavailability of a system’s energy to do work. As the physicist Rudolph Clausius said in 1850, entropy is always increasing. The implication of these laws is that in the distant future, when entropy ultimately reaches a maximum, the universe’s heat will have dissipated to such an extent that life will become unsustainable.

  In The Time Machine, H. G. Wells’s Time Traveller, ‘drawn on by the mystery of the earth’s fate’, journeys forward 30 million years to a time when ‘the red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens’. The earth has fallen silent and is gripped by freezing winds. ‘All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over.’85 For all our insight into the universe and its workings, humankind is ultimately powerless before the laws of thermodynamics. As the philosopher of science Alfred North Whitehead said, in the ancient world it was gods who determined the fates of mortals. But in the modern world, the laws of physics have become the ‘decrees of fate’.86

  Wells’s novel appeared in the year that Röntgen chanced upon the astonishing rays that could render solid matter transparent. The discovery of radioactivity and the disintegration of matter added a new scientific doomsday to the eventual heat death of the solar system. A writer for the Edinburgh Review was shocked by the apocalyptic implications: Sir William’s idea conjured up ‘an appalling scene of desolation – of quasi-annihilation’.87

  In his 1909 novel Tono-Bungay, H. G. Wells rendered yet another memorable scene of desolation. The book is an attack on the values of capitalism and the new consumer society. Tono-Bungay is a health tonic which has much in common with the radium tonics widely available at the time. The narrator, George Ponderevo, describes his uncle’s invention and marketing of this successful (though totally useless) medicine. According to its inventor, it’s ‘the secret of vigour’, but for George, who like Wells had studied the sciences, it’s nothing but ‘a quack medicine’.88

  In this ambitious novel, Wells uses a powerful scientific metaphor for the terminal decay of society: radioactivity. To save his uncle’s business, George makes a foolhardy trip to Africa to smuggle back a quantity of radioactive ore. It contains ‘canadium’, which they hope to use to make the ‘perfect filament’. ‘We’d make the lamp trade sit on its tail and howl,’ predicts George’s greedy uncle. ‘We’d put Ediswan and all of ’em into a parcel with our last trousers and a hat, and swap ’em off for a pot of geraniums.’89

  The pitchblende-like radioactive ore is called ‘quap’ in the novel: it is ‘the most radioactive stuff in the world… a festering mass of earths and heavy metals, polonium, radium, ythorium, thorium, carium, and new things too.’90 But quap is far more radioactive than even radium and polonium: ‘those are just little molecular centres of disintegration, of that mysterious decay and rotting of those elements, elements once regarded as the most stable things in nature’.91

  In comparison, quap is ‘cancerous’, says George. It is ‘something that creeps and lives as a disease lives by destroying; an elemental stirring and disarrangement, incalculably maleficent and strange’. Perhaps influenced by Sir William Crookes’s doomsday vision, George offers a remarkable one of his own, inspired by the creeping contagion of radioactivity:

  To my mind radioactivity is a real disease of matter. Moreover it is a contagious disease. It spreads. You bring those debased and crumbling atoms near others and those too presently catch the trick of swinging themselves out of coherent existence… When I think of these inexplicable dissolvent centres that have come into being in our globe… I am haunted by a grotesque fancy of the ultimate eating away and dry-rotting and dispersal of all our world. So that while man still struggles and dreams his very substance will change and crumble from beneath him… Suppose indeed that is to be the end of our planet; no splendid climax and finale, no towering accumulation of achievements but just – atomic decay! I add that to the ideas of the suffocating comet, the dark body out of space, the burning out of the sun, the distorted orbit, as a new and far more possible end – as science can see ends – to this strange by-play of matter that we call human life.92

  The African landscape where the seam of quap breaks to the surface has been devastated by radioactivity. The coast is a ‘lifeless beach’ littered with rotting fish. Stretching as far as the eye can see is an atomic wasteland which is ‘blasted and scorched and dead’.93 People who stay there too long sicken and die. This powerful passage, written decades before anyone grasped the full dangers of radioactive contamination, now brings to mind the poisoned landscape around Chernobyl. For Wells, his Dantean vision of ultimate decay is a metaphor for a society that had nowhere to go but down. Today it also offers a haunting vision of the dark side to our dreams of atomic utopia.

  George Ponderevo’s bleak view of an atomic apocalypse that comes not with a bang but a whimper was also an accurate reflection of the science of the day. The unchanging atom of Newton and Dalton was replaced by a chaotic atom that one writer described in 1903 as ‘the scene of indescribable activities, a complex piece of mechanism composed of thousands of parts, a star-cluster in miniature, subject to all kinds of dynamical vicissitudes, to perturbations, accelerations, internal friction, total or partial disruption.’94

  With this dynamic view of matter came the equally strange idea that instead of being solid, the atom consisted mostly of echoing space: ‘the ratio of an atom to an electron… is the ratio of St Paul’s Cathedral to a full stop’. The British writer Dr Caleb Williams Saleeby developed the now standard analogy as early as 1904: ‘Just as the planets are revolving around a centre, so the electrons in each of the atoms that go to make up those planets are also revolving round an atomic centre – revolving at a speed hundreds of times faster than the speed of the planets which they compose.’95

  This dramatic image of atoms as miniature solar systems was published seven years before Ernest Rutherford showed that atoms do indeed have a tiny, compact nucleus surrounded by electrons. Such ideas often gain popular currency before they are given the seal of scientific authority. Indeed, the history of scientific superweapons shows that the imaginations of writers like H. G. Wells have been way ahead of the scientists and the generals.

  As we shall see, fiction and the popular imagination often work together to give an idea critical momentum, eventually allowing it to cross from fantasy to reality. The foresight of fiction writers was acknowledged after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September the 11th, 2001. After this audacious strike, the FBI paid a visit to Hollywood to find out what possible terrorist scenarios the scriptwriters thought might be in store for America in the new era of ‘asymmetric warfare’. It emerged in 2002 that al-Qaeda terrorists had themselves been inspired by Hollywood. Prisoners revealed that they watched Roland Emmerich’s 1998 remake of the cold-war classic Godzilla and hoped to emulate the monster’s destruction of landmark buildings in New York, such as the Brooklyn Bridge. Similarly, science and fiction came together in the dream of the superweapon to produce some of the world’s most terrible weapons of mass destruction.

  The world, it seemed, was built not on solid rock but on shifting sands. Matter was dynamic and unstable. To X-rays and radio waves, apparently impenetrable ‘solid’ matter was transparent. People began to look at the world around them with new eyes. When the artist Wassily Kandinsky first read about Rutherford’s new theory of atomic structure, it hit him with a ‘frightful force, as if the end of the world had come. All things became transparent, without strength or certainty.’96 But there were still stranger revelations to come.

  In 18
95, the inventor of Wells’s time machine had explained that ‘Time is really only a fourth dimension of Space’. Two years later, Wells’s Invisible Man used a ‘geometrical expression involving four dimensions’ to make his great yet tragic discovery. Joseph Conrad was so taken by the idea of time as an extra dimension that he attempted a scientific romance of his own on the subject. He had seen an X-ray machine in operation in 1898 and had been moved to comment that ‘there is no space, time, matter, mind as vulgarly understood, there is only the eternal something that waves and the eternal force that causes the waves…’97

  Conrad’s novel The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story (1901), which he co-wrote with Ford Madox Ford (who used his family name, Hueffer), is a strange work about a conspiracy masterminded by people from the ‘Fourth Dimension’ – the future. The ‘Dimensionists’ hoped to begin their ‘reign of terror’ imperceptibly: ‘They were to come like snow in the night: in the morning one would look out and find the world white.’98 This paranoid idea of a secret coup taking place beneath a surface of apparent normality anticipates the alien invasion themes of 1950s America, in films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Conrad’s inspiration was not fear of invasion, but the revelation of X-rays and the new dimensions of mathematics and physics: the disturbing realization that the world was full of forces and radiations that no one had thought possible.

  Ten years after Wells’s Time Traveller entered the fourth dimension and glimpsed the end of the world, Albert Einstein, an unknown patent officer from Berne in Switzerland, would transform the scientific understanding of time and space, overthrowing the absolutes of Newtonian physics and laying the foundations of a ‘new physics’ that would be as strange as the wildest dreams of science fiction writers. In that same year, this physicist who grew up surrounded by the latest electrical inventions would also set out the mathematics that proved something scientists and their public were just beginning to grasp: the equivalence of matter and energy. An atom of matter was indeed a vast and terrible reservoir of energy, as Frederick Soddy had predicted. The revolution had truly begun.

  It would be many years, however, before the new physics could reveal to the world the full power of the atom. It was not physics but the science of the previous century, chemistry, that first attempted to create a means of destruction so awesome that – as in Bulwer-Lytton’s novel – war would be unthinkable. The dream of the superweapon was about to become reality.

  II

  The Chemist’s War

  One must understand that the greatest evil that can oppress civilized peoples derives from wars, not, indeed, so much from actual present or past wars, as from the never-ending and constantly increasing arming for future war. To this all of the nation’s powers are devoted, as are all those fruits of its culture that could be used to build a still greater culture.

  Immanuel Kant, Speculative Beginning of Human History (1786)

  5

  The Prospero of Poisons

  I have to confess that I felt rather proud of the simple device of my suffocating cloud. The Prospero of poisons, the Faustus of the front bringing mental magic to modern armament.

  Tony Harrison, Square Rounds (1992)

  In spring 1915, a gunshot shattered the night-time silence of Dahlem, a leafy suburb of Berlin. It was closely followed by the sound of another shot, this time more muffled. Clara Haber was still alive when her son found her, lying on the lawn outside their house. At first, thirteen-year-old Hermann couldn’t work out what had happened. Was it a bungled burglary, or had his mother disturbed enemy agents trying to sabotage his father’s top-secret war work?

  Beside Clara’s crumpled body lay his father’s army pistol. A few weeks ago he had held it in his young hands. He had been surprised how heavy it was – a dead weight of cold steel. In the grey light of the early dawn, Hermann could see a bloody stain on his mother’s dress. She had been shot point blank in the chest. He ran from Clara’s side to rouse his father, but Fritz Haber was still in a deep chemical sleep, heavily sedated with sleeping pills, and had not heard his wife shoot herself through the heart.

  A few hours earlier, at their home in the grounds of the recently founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, they had all been celebrating Fritz Haber’s return from the Western Front. Professor Haber, the Institute’s director, cut a striking figure that evening. With his new military uniform, his shaven bullet-head and duelling scar, he looked every inch the Prussian officer. The Kaiser had just promoted him to the rank of captain, a meteoric rise in a society which honoured military virtues above all others. Soon he would be awarded the ultimate military accolade in the Kaiser’s gift: the Iron Cross.

  Fritz Haber in military uniform, 1916.

  Haber was a proud Prussian and an ambitious scientist. A few days earlier, at Ypres in Belgium, Haber had directed the first battlefield use of poison gas in World War I. His deadly brainchild was the first of a new generation of scientific superweapons, a weapon it was hoped would decisively alter the course of the war. At Ypres, the scientist had been blooded on the field of battle.

  Just before Fritz Haber returned home from Ypres, Clara had visited the wife of her second cousin, Dr Zinaide Krassa. Clara admitted that she was disturbed by her husband’s obsessional commitment to his war work. She took with her the private letters he had written from the Belgian front line. Clara confided in her friend that she had seen secret experiments being conducted on animals, both in the laboratory and outside in the leafy grounds of the Institute, in which they were exposed to varying concentrations of poison gas and then dissected to observe the effects on their lungs. It was clear to Dr Krassa that Clara was distressed by what she had seen. But no one suspected that she might take her own life.

  An accident a few months earlier had also affected her deeply. One morning a few days before Christmas 1914, an explosion had rocked her husband’s Institute. Clara rushed out of the house and across the lawn. Inside the Institute, the machine hall on the ground floor was unusually silent. She was relieved to see Fritz leaning against a bench. But although unharmed, he was obviously in shock. He stared fixedly at the floor and muttered something over and over to himself.

  Clara pushed her way through a huddle of scientists and technicians. Lying on the floor was Otto Sackur, a gifted young scientist from Breslau, her home town. As doctoral students, he and Clara had studied at the university together. Otto had taken an active part in Clara’s public defence of her doctoral thesis in 1900. The local newspaper reported how he had asked probing questions, but she had answered them ‘valiantly and bravely, like a man’.1 She had been the first woman to be awarded a doctorate in chemistry at Breslau and one of the first in the whole of Germany. As a scientist, she understood full well what her husband was doing in the war. As a human being, she hated it.

  It was Clara who had helped Sackur to find a position at the Institute just a couple of years ago. Now that same man lay sprawled in front of her with his face blown off. His eyes, nose and mouth had disappeared, reduced to a bloody pulp. His brain was visible through his shattered forehead. Clara knelt down beside him and asked one of the engineers to cut open his collar. As they removed the starched collar, Otto raised his head. He was still alive.

  Fritz Haber was uninjured. But he’d had a lucky escape. An engineer told Clara that her husband had been just about to enter the gas room when he was asked to look at a problem with the high-pressure compressor. As he did so, an explosion shook the whole building. Professor Gerhardt Just ran out of the laboratory cradling his right arm. His hand had been blown off. The other scientists had to carry Otto Sackur out of the gas room, which was now dense with smoke. Haber did nothing to help. He could only stand there saying over and over again, ‘Poor Just, poor Just.’

  The two scientists had been developing a new chemical compound, for use in howitzer shells, which brought together the power of high explosive with the irritant effect of tear gas. They had just combined dichloromethylam
ine with cacodyl chloride. Otto had raised the beaker up to eye level so as to observe it better. It was then that the highly unstable compound exploded in his face.2 It had been the Institute’s first foray into the development of chemical weapons. This experiment was never tried again, but it was the beginning of an intensive programme of weapons research at the Institute that would last for the duration of the war and beyond.

  Sackur did not survive for long. ‘He died as a soldier on the battlefield,’ said Haber later. He managed to win a war pension for the man’s widow and daughter, and recommended Professor Just for an Iron Cross. It was awarded a month before Haber’s top-secret chemical weapon was used on the Western Front. Thanks to Haber, scientists were now soldiers, and a new front line had been opened up that reached right into the chemist’s laboratory.

  When Clara visited Zinaide Krassa with her husband’s letters from the front, she was ‘in despair’ at the ‘terrible effects of gas war’, as her second cousin later recalled.3 Physicist James Franck was among the scientists hand-picked by Haber to oversee the use of poison gas on the battlefield. According to Franck, the sensitive and idealistic Clara ‘wanted to reform the world’.4 By contrast, her husband was interested only in helping Germany to win the war. A converted Jew, Fritz Haber wanted to prove beyond question his loyalty to Kaiser and country. ‘Im Frieden der Menschheit, im Kriege dem Vaterland,’ was Haber’s motto as a scientist: in peacetime he worked for humanity, but in wartime for the Fatherland.5 Haber was convinced that science and scientists would win the war for his country.