by P. D. Smith
Cartmill’s story is about a war between two imaginary world powers, the Seilla and the Sixa. The Sixa have almost lost the war and have been forced to retreat to their heartlands in Ynamre. Although his story appears to be pure fantasy, the fact that ‘Ynamre’ spells ‘ermany’ backwards reveals Cartmill’s true purpose. Read ‘Seilla’ backwards and you find the Allies; similarly, the ‘Sixa’ are the Axis powers. Cartmill’s story is in fact a thinly disguised depiction of World War II.
The plot of ‘Deadline’ is familiar now from countless cold-war thrillers, such as the James Bond movies. A mad scientist working for the Sixa has developed an atomic bomb. It is made from sixteen pounds of uranium-235, and the Seilla scientists are afraid that the ‘explosion of energy would be so incomparably violent, its sheer, minute concentration of unbearable energy so great, that surrounding matter would be set off’. This was the doomsday scenario that had terrified Arthur Compton during his Michigan holiday in 1942. The Seilla’s secret agent infiltrates the enemy’s lines to find and destroy the atomic bomb. ‘They started out to conquer the world,’ he says. ‘But now they are about to lose it. We, the Seilla, would not dare to set off an experimental atomic bomb.’ But the Sixa are so ‘desperate’ that they would risk destroying the world for a chance of victory.36
Dr Sitruc, the mad atomic scientist who has built the doomsday bomb, is a ‘slender man with snapping dark eyes, an odd-shaped face, and a commanding air’. His love of power and his cavalier attitude to the survival of the human race mark him out as a forerunner of that other Germanic scientist of atomic megadeath, Dr Strangelove.
‘You’re like a god here,’ says the agent to Dr Sitruc as they face each other over the ‘most destructive weapon the world has ever known’.
‘I have control of the greatest explosive force in world history and my whims are obeyed as iron commands,’ sneers Dr Sitruc, pistol in hand and with a smirk on his thin lips.
He is prepared to take the chance ‘that all animate life will be destroyed in the twinkling of an eye’ by his bomb.37 World dominion is worth that risk. Fortunately, the agent outwits Dr Sitruc and is able to defuse the bomb. The world is saved – this time not by a scientist, but from a scientist. From now on, scientists would be increasingly depicted in film and fiction as part of the problem, rather than the solution. That was the price they would pay for realizing the dream of the superweapon. The saviour scientist began to make way for the Strangelovean mad scientist.
The atomic bomb that Cartmill describes is not the Hiroshima bomb, but it’s a good guess. The modest critical mass of uranium-235 (Cartmill’s bomb is small enough to be carried) and the description of the ‘fuse’ (actually the initiator, a neutron-producing assembly of radium and beryllium) were close enough to the real thing to scare the pants off Military Intelligence. But although the critical mass of uranium in the actual atomic bomb was smaller than top German physicists like Heisenberg believed it needed to be, it was not quite light enough for someone to carry. The secret service failed to ban Cartmill’s story, but they did later prevent the publication of one by Philip Wylie, ‘The Paradise Crater’, which described a Nazi attempt to gain revenge on America with atomic bombs secretly built in the Nevada Desert. As far as Military Intelligence were concerned, the science fiction writers were too far ahead of the game.
Robert A. Heinlein, who produced some of his greatest short stories for Astounding in the early years of World War II, wrote what is easily this period’s most chilling account of war in the atomic age. It was a story widely read by those working on the Manhattan Project. ‘Solution Unsatisfactory’, published in May 1941 under his pen name Anson MacDonald, describes not an atomic bomb, but rather the use of radioactive isotopes as a radiological weapon. Heinlein called this a ‘consciously Wellsian story’, one in which he set himself the task of thinking through the implications of an ‘Absolute Weapon’.38 The title refers to the situation that results from the invention and use of the superweapon – a global American military dictatorship.
Colonel Clyde C. Manning ‘was one of the army’s No. 1 experts in chemical warfare’.39 In Heinlein’s story he is called out of retirement to head up the top-secret nuclear research laboratory in Maryland, ‘War Department Special Defense Project No. 347’. With his scientific and military background, Manning combines the skills of both Oppenheimer and Groves. He is a fictional General Ishii in charge of developing not biological but atomic weapons of mass destruction. Heinlein clearly grasps the powerful position such administrator-scientists would hold in warfare and the Big Science of the future. Manning’s assistant, John deFries, who narrates the story, is in no doubt that the Colonel has the necessary skills:
[T]here was certainly no one else in the United States who could have done the job. It required a man who could direct and suggest research in a highly esoteric field, but who saw the problem from the standpoint of urgent military necessity. Left to themselves, the physicists would have reveled in the intellectual luxury of an unlimited research expense account, but, while they undoubtedly would have made major advances in human knowledge, they might never have developed anything of military usefulness, or the military possibilities of a discovery might be missed for years.40
Initially, Manning’s task is to find ‘a way to use U235 in a controlled explosion’. The objective is an atomic bomb, ‘a one-ton bomb that would be a whole air raid in itself’. In the future his scientists hope to build a ‘war rocket’ that could deliver uranium bombs onto their enemies, ‘then we would be in a position to make most anybody say “uncle” to Uncle Sam’. But in 1944, Dr Estelle Karst – a rare female scientist in a field dominated by men in both fact and fiction – makes a discovery. She is working on the medical uses of ‘artificial radioactives’, isotopes, and has found that the ones she has produced are far more radioactive than required for medical purposes. Dr Karst is not herself developing weapons but, as Manning quickly realizes, these isotopes are ‘lethal’.41
Manning postpones work on the atomic bomb, which has turned out to be more complex than expected. Thanks to his background in chemical warfare, he has spotted a new weapon: radioactive isotopes. Known as ‘K-O dust’ after its inventors, Karst and Obre, the lethal radioactive powder is tested on horses. ‘After they had died,’ says deFries, ‘any part of their carcasses would register on a photographic plate’.42 Once the powder was scattered over an area, the radioactivity could not be neutralized. Every living thing would die, and the area would be uninhabitable until the isotope’s radioactivity naturally declined. Karst had stumbled upon a truly terrible weapon of mass destruction.
For Manning, the K-O dust ‘is not just simply sufficient to safeguard the United States, it amounts to a loaded gun held at the head of every man, woman, and child on the globe!’ Given enough uranium and a knowledge of physics, soon any nation would be able to produce the K-O dust in just a few months. The world would be like ‘a whole room full of men, each armed with a loaded .45’. It was a truly Wellsian scenario. As the British writer had said back in 1913, discovering the atomic bomb was like giving a loaded revolver to a crèche. Manning admits he had even considered killing everyone who knew the secret, including himself, to protect the world. But he quickly saw that this idea was ‘sheer funk’.43 K-O dust would soon be discovered by some other scientist – the same argument of inevitability used by Wells’s scientist, Holsten.
True to his military background, Manning decides that America must use the new superweapon first, ‘to enforce a worldwide peace, ruthlessly and drastically’. A ‘Pax Americana’ is the only way, he decides, to prevent another nation from getting the upper hand and to keep the secret in America, at least for now. It is agreed that the dust will be used by the British against Nazi Germany as a demonstration of the weapon’s lethal power. (Heinlein’s story was written before Pearl Harbor, so America was not yet at war with Japan.) While deFries accompanies the dust to Britain, the scientists who developed it have been confined to the laboratory to
keep the weapon’s secret on American soil. Warning leaflets are dropped on German cities telling people to leave immediately. ‘We were morally obliged to try’, says deFries, knowing that they will be ignored.44 The real targets of the first atomic weapons, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were never warned. In Heinlein’s story the target is Berlin. All it takes is the flick of a switch in an aircraft, and the dust is spread over the city. Such is the simplicity of mass murder in the modern age.
When deFries returns to America he learns that Dr Karst committed suicide on hearing that her medical discovery had been used to slaughter civilians. The film footage taken from aircraft over Berlin some days later shows that the dust has been appallingly effective. The images in the film are shocking. ‘You have not seen them,’ says deFries, speaking directly to the reader. ‘They were never made public, but they were of great use in convincing the other nations of the world that peace was a good idea.’45 Similarly, the American forces of occupation in Japan confiscated all film and photographs of the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Images of the dead and injured were suppressed and often destroyed. Most of the surviving images were hidden by Japanese and by Americans who believed the world should, one day, see the effect of atomic bombs on people.46
‘The last sequence,’ says deFries, ‘showed Berlin and the roads around it a week after the raid. The city was dead, there was not a man, a woman, a child – nor cats, nor dogs, not even a pigeon. Bodies were all around, but they were safe from rats. There were no rats.’ After seeing the film, deFries (who later dies from the effects of radiation) comments, ‘I left what soul I had in that projection room and I have not had one since.’47
In Washington, some disagree with Manning’s policy of imposing a Pax Americana. ‘The world has seen a lot of weapons which were going to make war an impossibility too horrible to contemplate,’ says the Secretary of the Navy. ‘Poison gas, and tanks, and airplanes – even firearms, if I remember my history.’ But faced with the Strangelovean alternative of living ‘in sealed underground cities’, the President agrees. Ultimatums are issued to every head of state: ‘we are outlawing war and are calling on every nation to disarm completely at once. In other words, “Throw down your guns, boys; we’ve got the drop on you!”’ Nations must surrender their aircraft – the only means of dropping the dust – to the United States. Japan accepts only when it is threatened with attack: the American fleet was ‘halfway from Pearl Harbor to Kobe, loaded with enough dust to sterilize their six biggest cities’.48
But apart from a ‘Four-days War’ during which New York and Moscow are dusted, the United States is victorious. The superweapon has won. Subsequently a supranational body, including a ‘corps of world policemen’, is set up to supervise ‘the unbeatable weapon’. Its director is the soldier-scientist who developed the weapon. He has absolute power: ‘Manning was the undisputed military dictator of the world.’ It is an unsatisfactory solution to a problem, but it is the only solution, argues Heinlein’s narrator. Neither deFries nor Manning are happy with it. But a doomsday war has been postponed, and for now at least, the world has not committed suicide.49
The dilemmas Heinlein raises about the uses of science and the control of superweapons would soon become very real. Not surprisingly, as John W. Campbell said, ‘this story was read, and widely discussed, among the physicists and engineers working on the Manhattan Project’.50 Indeed, Heinlein’s idea of a radioactive super-weapon was under serious consideration in the very month that the story was published. Arthur Compton’s National Academy of Sciences committee investigated the military applications of atomic fission for Vannevar Bush. Compton’s committee declared that both ‘violently explosive bombs’ and a ‘violently radioactive’ dust were feasible as weapons. The latter would become possible after the chain reaction had been achieved, ‘not earlier than 1943’.51 One of the first uses of Szilard’s atomic reactor might have been to create a real ‘K-O dust’.
In July 1941, the popular magazine PIC correctly predicted that ‘this war will be won or lost in the laboratory’. The magazine thought that uranium-235 would be used to power aircraft: ‘A lump of this U-235 the size of an ordinary pack of cigarettes would supply power enough to run the greatest bomber in the world for three continuous years of unceasing flight.’ It also speculated that a radioactive ‘death dust’ would be developed.52 At the end of the year, Henry DeWolf Smyth and Szilard’s friend Eugene Wigner investigated the idea of a death dust. They ‘concluded that the fission products produced in one day’s run of a 100,000 kw chain-reacting pile might be sufficient to make a large area uninhabitable’. But they stopped short of recommending the use in weapons of these ‘particularly vicious’ radioactive poisons.53
Death dust remained on the agenda, however. The subject was revisited at the start of 1943 by a Met Lab committee chaired by James Conant, who had worked on chemical weapons in World War I. Conant’s committee looked at the possibility that Germany might use the poisonous radioactive fission products created in a reactor to make radiological bombs – what we would now call dirty bombs. Although they concluded that an attack on America using such bombs was unlikely, the possibility that Germany might use them remained real until the end of the war in Europe. Military personnel were even trained in the use of Geiger counters before the Normandy landings in order to investigate suspicious bomb sites.
Although Wigner and Smyth were not keen on the idea of death dust, the subject was revived by a rather unlikely Manhattan Project scientist – Enrico Fermi. A pure scientist in the Rutherford mould,Fermi didn’t like war work. ‘After he had sat in on one of his first conferences here,’ Oppenheimer recalled, ‘he turned to me and said, “I believe your people actually want to make a bomb.” I remember his voice sounded surprised.’54
Nevertheless, Fermi did make one shocking proposal about weapons. He privately suggested to Oppenheimer in April 1943 that radioactive isotopes might be used to contaminate Germany’s food supply. Oppenheimer considered the idea ‘promising’, and discussed it with both General Groves and Edward Teller.55 The Hungarian came up with strontium-90 as the most effective isotope for this purpose. Strontium is chemically similar to calcium, and strontium-90 would be absorbed by the body and deposited in bones and teeth, causing leukaemia and bone cancer. Fears about the presence of this isotope in the biosphere would later lead to a ban on the atmospheric testing of atomic weapons, despite Teller’s heated opposition.
In a letter written on 25 May 1943, Oppenheimer explained to Fermi that it would not be difficult to produce the strontium. But he suggested not pursuing the idea unless an effective means of delivery could be developed. ‘I think we should not attempt a plan unless we can poison food sufficient to kill half a million men.’ Manhattan Project physicist Joseph Rotblat, who later won a Nobel Peace Prize, first read this letter forty years after it was written, having obtained it under the Freedom of Information Act. He was deeply shocked: ‘I am sure that in peacetime these same scientists would have viewed such a plan as barbaric; they would not have contemplated it even for a moment. Yet during the war it was considered quite seriously.’56
The potential of radiological warfare continued to be explored throughout the cold war by all sides. A death dust was almost used during the Korean War. In 1954, General MacArthur confided to Jim Lucas of the Washington Daily News that he had asked permission to ‘sow a 5 mile wide belt of radioactive cobalt – which he assured me “we had in abundance” – along the Yalu [River], thus permanently sealing Korea off from China’. The plan was vetoed by ‘those fools in Washington’ only after the British voiced their strong opposition.57
Robert A. Heinlein’s fictional account of an ‘Absolute Weapon’ was not the only such story read by scientists on the Manhattan Project. Enrico Fermi’s wife, Laura, enjoyed Harold Nicolson’s Public Faces in 1941. Another physicist’s wife had given it to her after she and her husband had read it. Alice K. Smith, also the wife of a physicist and later a historian of the bomb pr
oject, saw the play Wings over Europe with her husband. They ‘were so impressed that they had bought a copy of the script’.58 Los Alamos physicist Robert Wilson read Thomas Mann’s pathology of the European mind, The Magic Mountain, with its evocative description of X-rays. In a letter from Los Alamos, Wilson referred to ‘this magic mesa’.59 On their hilltop, these modern-day magicians genuinely believed they were going to save America and rid the world of war with their scientific superweapon. It is not surprising, therefore, that someone – perhaps Leo Szilard – bought a copy of the most famous account of atomic bombs and the utopian future for the Met Lab library: H. G. Wells’s The World Set Free.
Science fiction seemed to have predicted many aspects of the cold-war world. This headline is from the November 1952 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly.
It was no idle boast when, in 1949, science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon said: ‘There is good reason to believe that, outside of the top men in the Manhattan District and in the Armed Forces, the only people in the world who fully understood what had happened on 6 August 1945 were the aficionados of science fiction.’60 As John W. Campbell put it, the science fiction writers were no longer mere ‘wild-eyed dreamers’.61 The dream had become a terrible reality.
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Destroyer of Worlds
This revelation of the secrets of nature, long mercifully withheld from man, should arouse the most solemn reflections in the mind and conscience of every human being capable of comprehension.
Winston Churchill (1945)
