Doomsday Men

by P. D. Smith

  Jack London’s story first appeared in McClure’s magazine in 1910. Three years later, H. G. Wells’s The World Set Free would also fantasize about a time in the near future when a scientific weapon dropped from a lone aircraft would destroy a city. Such stories were regularly serialized in the popular magazines of the day. One avid young American reader was Harry S Truman, who would himself one day order the use of an atomic superweapon.

  In 1910, Truman was a farmer, working his grandmother’s land near Grandview, Missouri. Magazines such as Everybody’s and Adventure, packed with illustrated short stories, would arrive regularly for him at Grandview’s post office. He admitted to his childhood sweetheart Bess Wallace that his reading was ‘confined to Everybody’s and one or two other fifteen-cent or muckrake magazines and numerous farm publications’.9 He was also a subscriber to McClure’s. On 26 May 1913 he wrote to Bess: ‘I read the Mary Roberts Rinehart in McClure’s. It is a grand story, really good enough to appear in Adventure. Could I possibly compliment it more highly? I suppose I’ll have to renew my subscription to McClure’s now so I won’t miss a number. There are several good stories in this number.’10

  In 1911 he had admitted to Bess how he wished that Everybody’s came every day.11 When it did arrive he was overjoyed: ‘Everybody’s came at last and there was plenty of action, wasn’t there?’ In the same letter, written in June, the man who would order the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki wrote: ‘Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man from dust, a nigger from mud, then threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is a race prejudice, I guess.’12

  In 1910, the young Missouri farmer had read a poem that so impressed him that he wrote out part of it on a piece of paper and kept it in his wallet for the next fifty years. As the paper became worn and tattered, Truman recopied these lines. He did this thirty or forty times. On his way to the Potsdam conference in 1945 he took out this piece of paper and read the poem again. In its words he found reassurance that the terrible weapon that would soon be dropped on an unsuspecting Japanese city would ultimately lead to a new world order. These were the lines that President Truman treasured so dearly:

  For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,

  Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

  Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,

  Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;

  Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew

  From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;

  Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,

  With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;

  Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d

  In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

  There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,

  And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.13

  These lines are from Locksley Hall, written over a hundred years earlier by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson after he had experienced the most advanced technology of the day – a journey on the first steam train from Liverpool to Manchester in 1830. The poem looks beyond present disappointments to a bright future when the secret of flight has been discovered. After a war fought in the air, during which ‘there rain’d a ghastly dew’, armed conflict is banished once and for all. The war-drums are silenced and world government is achieved, a ‘Federation of the world’.

  It is a vision of utopia which has been achieved at the price of a final war fought with a superweapon dropped from the air, a vision which could easily have been penned by Jack London or H. G. Wells. Indeed, one of their contemporaries, Simon Newcomb, quoted Tennyson’s poem in his novel about a saviour scientist, His Wisdom The Defender (1900).

  In Newcomb’s novel, Professor Campbell (a ‘twentieth-century Faust’) discovers a revolutionary antigravity force and secretly builds airships which he uses to compel nations to abandon war. On the scientist’s banner are emblazoned the words ‘When the war-drum throbs no longer and the battle flag is furled, / In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the world.’14 In 1900, this was to be the utopian rallying cry of the new century.

  Stories such as Newcomb’s and London’s show how the dream of a superweapon that could destroy an enemy at a single stroke enthralled the twentieth century from its earliest years. At Hiroshima in August 1945, it was physics rather than biology and chemistry that provided the know-how. Japan was itself engaged in research aimed at building an atomic bomb, but its scientists lagged far behind America’s. However, in the search for a biological superweapon, Japan led the world both before and during World War II.

  When Japan occupied Manchuria in 1932, it transformed the whole region into ‘one gigantic biological and chemical warfare laboratory’.15 This was the work of one scientist, a young Japanese Army doctor, Shiro Ishii. He was a brilliant microbiologist and, like Fritz Haber, fiercely nationalistic. Described by one colleague as having a ‘sharp voice and a hypnotic appearance’,16 the tall and rather scholarly Ishii quickly gained a reputation as the ‘army’s crazed surgeon’.17 In 1932 he set up a laboratory in Manchuria to test biological warfare in the field. His laboratory was near Harbin, now China’s eighth-largest city and the capital of Heilongjiang province.

  At the Harbin laboratory, experiments were conducted on live prisoners using both biological and chemical agents. None of the prisoners who were brought to the laboratory left alive. If Ishii needed a human brain for experiments, his guards would go straight to the cells, select a prisoner and split his or her head open with an axe. Like the Nazis, the Japanese in such establishments were convinced of their racial superiority. They believed Chinese and Korean people to be subhuman, and that experimenting on them was therefore little different from using guinea pigs or monkeys. Indeed, in official reports of experiments, humans were referred to as monkeys and differentiated solely by nationality.

  Shiro Ishii’s military masters were greatly impressed with the results of his work at Harbin. As a reward he received generous funding to develop a major, top-secret biological weapons complex at Ping Fan, on the outskirts of Harbin. Construction began in 1936. When it was completed, in 1939, what became known as Unit 731 ‘rivaled Auschwitz-Birkenau in size’.18 Covering over two square miles and containing over seventy buildings, it was capable of developing, testing and mass-producing bioweapons. Back in 1915, Thomas Edison had predicted that warfare would become a mechanized ‘factory of death’.19 Here, and later in the vast scientific, military and industrial endeavour of the Manhattan Project, that prediction came true.

  Unit 731 contained cutting-edge laboratories and a prison that could hold 200 human guinea pigs. The needs of the three thousand staff (including three to five hundred scientists) were catered for with a thousand-seater auditorium, bars, restaurants, library, swimming pools, schools for the children, a Shinto temple and a brothel. While the workers enjoyed themselves, at least three thousand human beings perished in the experiments that Ishii and his scientists conducted. They developed a hellish arsenal of pathogens, including plague, cholera, typhoid, dysentery, anthrax, tetanus, gas gangrene and smallpox. The atrocities committed here and at Harbin in the search for biological weapons equalled the excesses of the most infamous of Nazi scientists, such as Joseph Mengele.

  In 1936, Shiro Ishii delivered a speech to his colleagues in the new conference room at Ping Fan. He welcomed his fellow scientists and officially inaugurated their research programme. He admitted that they might feel ‘some anguish as doctors’ who were used to curing people, rather than using their biological skills to kill. But he told them to ignore these qualms. ‘I beseech you to pursue this research’, he said with genuine conviction. He reassured his colleagues that they were merely engaged in the traditional, indeed Faustian, q
uest to find ‘the truth in natural science’ and to discover ‘the unknown world’. And he called upon them as members of the Japanese armed forces ‘to successfully build a powerful military weapon against the enemy’.20 Intellectual curiosity and patriotism: from Haber’s laboratory in Dahlem to Oppenheimer’s at Los Alamos, scientists would find the same justifications.

  Ishii was utterly convinced of the importance of his research, both to science and to Japan. His enthusiasm spread among his fellow scientists like one of his lethal viruses. Ishii thus demonstrated to his superiors not only that he was a brilliant scientist, but that he could plan, organize and efficiently run a major facility such as Unit 731. People like Shiro Ishii, who could weld science and war together to produce deadly new weapons, would be increasingly valued by governments and regimes around the world in the coming years.

  The poisonous fruits of Ishii’s research were used against the Chinese and the Soviets. In July 1942, Ishii personally led a campaign of bio-warfare against the Chinese population in Nanjing. As well as coordinating the contamination of wells with typhoid, he handed out chocolates laced with anthrax to local children. Among the weaponry developed by Ishii and his team were bacteria-filled artillery shells and bombs filled with plague-infested fleas to be dropped from the air. All the weapons they developed were tested on prisoners. Field tests were conducted using people who were tied to stakes near Unit 731 while munitions were exploded near them. The facility even had its own airfield from which aircraft laden with experimental bombs could take off.

  Although General Ishii never achieved his goal of developing a biological superweapon, tens of thousands of people were killed by his bioweapons. After the war, neither Ishii nor his colleagues were prosecuted in the Japanese War Crimes Trial that began in May 1946. His biological research on human beings became his passport to freedom. A decision was made at the highest level in Washington to grant immunity in return for access to Ishii’s valuable data on the effectiveness of biological pathogens. Although America was further ahead than Japan when it came to developing effective munitions, it was unable to conduct the extensive programme of human experimentation that Ishii had pursued. It became a key part of the American cold-war weapons programme.

  The historian Sheldon Harris claimed that no writer of fiction, from Dante to Mary Shelley, ‘could possibly rival the real-life misdeeds of Ishii and his fellow researchers’.21 But in fact fiction had anticipated such horrors – in novels such as M. P. Shiel’s Yellow Danger and the genocidal bioweapons in Jack London’s story – showing that the dream of scientific mass murder lies deep in the collective consciousness.

  On the evening of 30 October 1938, a radio programme of music by a New York City dance band was interrupted for a news bulletin. It brought shocking news for Americans: New York was being invaded. A reporter standing on a Manhattan rooftop described the ruthless armoured invaders to his listeners, who could hear behind his terrified voice the sound of car horns as traffic jammed the streets of the city.

  ‘The enemy’s now in sight above the Pallisades,’ cried the reporter. ‘Five – five great machines. The first one is crossing the river. I can see it from here, wading, wading the Hudson like a man wading through a brook.’ Then, as the reporter watched helplessly, the armoured machines began pumping out a lethal black smoke. Americans were being attacked with chemical weapons. The New Yorkers thronging the streets began falling ‘like rats’ into the East River.

  Worried listeners tuning in to the radio broadcast that evening heard disturbing reports of bomb-like cylinders ‘falling all over the country’.22 It certainly sounded as though America was being invaded. For a nation that had heard the news of Japanese attacks in China using chemical and biological weapons, and had watched as Hitler’s power in Europe grew ever greater, it seemed as though the war everyone had been fearing had finally begun with a surprise attack on America. For the last twenty years the experts had been warning that the next war would be different from the last. This one would be fought with weapons of mass destruction, and not just soldiers but civilians would be the targets. This time it would be a war of terror.

  On that Sunday evening in October 1938, New York experienced that terror. ‘Everybody was terribly frightened,’ recalled a nurse who was holding a party. ‘Some of the women almost went crazy.’23 The radio station and the police were inundated with phone calls from terrified Americans. ‘Residents of New Jersey covered their faces with wet cloths as a protection against poisonous gases and fled from their homes carrying with them their most valuable possessions,’ reported the Manchester Guardian.24 Doctors and nurses rushed to hospitals to treat the thousands of expected gas casualties. Roads were quickly jammed with cars trying to leave the city.

  At Orange, New Jersey, a man ran into a cinema shouting warnings about the invasion. The building emptied within minutes. ‘Panic evacuations’ were reported elsewhere, and people told the police that they had witnessed ‘the invasion’ with their own eyes. A man burst into an Indianapolis church screaming, ‘New York is destroyed. It’s the end of the world. We might as well go home to die. I’ve just heard it on the radio.’ The service ended abruptly and the frightened congregation rushed home.25

  Those who had listened to the broadcast from the very beginning knew that this was no terrestrial invasion force. The invaders were from Mars. This dramatic news bulletin was not reality, but fiction – a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre. The impact of the radio programme shocked its makers and indeed Wells himself. It was an extraordinary moment in broadcasting history, a moment when people’s deep anxieties about the threat from weapons of mass destruction were revealed.

  A third of all listeners had been convinced that the broadcast described a real invasion. Among those who tuned in halfway through, the proportion rose to 63 per cent.26 Many thought that a foreign power was behind the attack. ‘I never believed it was anyone from Mars,’ said one person. ‘I thought it was some kind of a new airship and a new method of attack.’27 Most people thought that Hitler was the culprit. In their genocidal brutality and advanced weaponry, Wells’s Martians did indeed offer a foretaste of what was to come in Europe.

  Thirty years earlier, a writer for the Contemporary Review had asked whether science could abolish war. ‘Each fresh invention’, he wrote, ‘has been heralded by prophecies that its appalling deadliness must make war so terrible that no ruler would dare to unleash its horrors.’28 The following year, in 1909, one of Harry Truman’s favourite magazines greeted the Zeppelin with the question ‘Does this new machine mean the end of war?’29 Similarly, one of the inventors of the aeroplane, Orville Wright, said after the 1918 Armistice that his creation ‘has made war so terrible that I do not believe that any country will again care to start a war’.30 From Zeppelins and death rays to the plans of Edward Teller and other scientists in the 1980s for a space-based weapons system (labelled ‘Star Wars’ after the science fiction blockbuster), the dream of the superweapon has exerted a powerful grip on the collective imagination, promising both a terrible death and world peace. For much of the twentieth century, humankind walked a dangerous tightrope between these two possibilities.

  In 1938, a confusion of fiction with reality revealed the true power of this dream. Poison gas was the superweapon that struck fear into the heart of America. Just after World War I, an American writer described it as ‘the final consummate weapon of mass murder’. The next war, he said, ‘will no longer be an heroic contest of mind, courage, and prowess, but a mad mingling in mutual annihilation’.31 Gas was held to be the ultimate scientific superweapon, a force of apocalyptic potential, what American journalist Will Irwin described as ‘a power beyond the dream of a madman’.32 But the Strangelovean dreams of future madmen would not be about poison gas. In the next war, science would produce a more terrible weapon – the atomic bomb.

  In the same year that Orson Welles terrified America with a fictional invasion, the
English writer J. B. Priestley published a popular novel about ‘three insane brothers who… tried to destroy the world at one stroke’.33 The Doomsday Men conjures up a deadly combination of religious fanaticism and physics that would not be paralleled in the real world until the Japanese apocalyptic cult Aum Shinrikyo infiltrated the Kurchatov Institute during the 1990s, almost certainly in an attempt to recruit Russian nuclear scientists and obtain atomic weapons.34 Priestley’s readable yarn tells how an atomic device is created at a secret laboratory in the Mojave Desert. Strangely, the location – Death Valley (‘the sullen hot floor of the world’35) – anticipates the area where the real atomic bomb was built and tested seven years later. Indeed, the first atomic bomb was exploded in a desert called the Jornada del Muerto – the Journey of the Dead.

  At the beginning of The Doomsday Men, American physicist George Glenway Hooker is in England, visiting ‘that Mecca of good physicists’, the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. Hooker is ‘an awkward young man with a shy manner, disgraceful trousers, and an ability, almost amounting to genius, for landing himself in uncomfortable hotels’. Like Leo Szilard in 1933, he has ended up at a hotel in London’s Bloomsbury. Hooker is ‘the only genuine magician in the neighbourhood’, for this atomic physicist can ‘transform what we call matter… into light’.36

  But for the moment, Hooker’s mind is not on physics. He is trying to track down his brilliant colleague, Professor Paul Engelfield, formerly of the University of Chicago where he had conducted pioneering research bombarding ‘heavy nuclei’. Having located the enigmatic Engelfield in London, Hooker follows him back to America and his secret desert laboratory. There he has used a cyclotron to create ‘an artificial element, very difficult to produce’, which has ‘a very high atomic number’. As Hooker says, Engelfield is clearly a ‘madman’ – and like all mad scientists he is hopelessly vain. He names this new element after himself – ‘paulium’. Mad he may be, but his science is sound and he intends to use this unstable, plutonium-like heavy element to create a vast atomic explosion that he hopes will destroy the surface of the earth.37