by P. D. Smith
Science fiction had anticipated both the threat and the promise of the atomic age. But as the A-bomb was replaced by the H-bomb and then the C-bomb, reality began to seem ever more like science fiction. Cover by David E. Pattee for Astounding Science Fiction (November 1950).
It was wholly natural, therefore, to translate the widespread horror at the ‘thermonuclear monster’ of the Bravo test into a real monster. According to Tomoyuki Tanaka, the film’s producer, Gojira was about ‘the terror of the Bomb. Mankind had created the Bomb, and now nature was going to take revenge on mankind’.15 It was inspired in part by the 1953 American film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, about a dinosaur thawed from hibernation by nuclear tests which then attacks Manhattan. But Gojira was not just another B-movie. It featured distinguished actors and for a Japanese film had quite a large budget.
Gojira begins with a clear reference to the fate of the Lucky Dragon: the crew of a ship witnesses a ‘blinding flash of light’ as the ocean explodes. When a sailor is washed ashore, he talks wildly about a monster. Gojira has been awakened from its Jurassic slumber by the explosion and is now intensely radioactive. The monster’s skin is deeply furrowed in a way that resembles the scars of Hiroshima survivors. Gojira wreaks havoc across Japan, trampling people and buildings, or burning them with his fiery, radioactive breath. Scientists armed with Geiger counters discover strontium-90 in the monster’s footprints.
Although Gojira is unleashed by a scientific superweapon, ironically it is science that saves the world from the monster. Dr Serizawa – a mad scientist with an eyepatch and dishevelled hair – has invented a doomsday weapon: an oxygen destroyer. ‘Used as a weapon, this could be as powerful as a nuclear bomb,’ he claims. ‘It could totally destroy humankind.’ Initially he refuses to use his discovery, as he is afraid of what politicians will do with it: ‘Of course, they’ll want to use it as a weapon. Bombs versus bombs, missiles versus missiles, and now a new super-weapon to throw upon us all.’16 But he relents and turns his weapon on Gojira. Determined that no one will misuse his superweapon, this saviour scientist destroys his notes before using it, and while he is underwater he cuts his own air supply – the secret of the doomsday weapon dies with Dr Serizawa.
Gojira was an instant box-office success in Japan. Audiences who knew better than any nation on earth what a superweapon could do, watched in total silence. Many left the cinema in tears. The film’s director, Ishiro¯ Honda, wanted to make ‘radiation visible’. ‘When I returned from the war’, he said, ‘and passed through Hiroshima there was a heavy atmosphere – a fear the earth was already coming to and end. That became the basis for the film.’17
Hollywood responded with a series of films about creatures mutated by radioactivity. The most famous of these is Them! (1954), featuring giant ants created by radiation from nuclear tests. ‘When man entered the atomic age, he opened a door into a new world,’ says a scientist in the film. ‘What we eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict.’18 Popular films such as Them! echoed the doubts about science and progress voiced when gas was used as a weapon in World War I.
On his return from the Bravo test site, AECchairman Lewis Strauss – who pronounced his name ‘straws’ – boasted to reporters that they could now make an H-bomb ‘as large as you wish, as large as the military requirement demands’.19 Strauss clearly hoped to reassure his fellow Americans that they were winning the arms race. Instead, many asked: But at what price?
By 1954, the hands of the Doomsday Clock on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists stood at two minutes to midnight. With the Bravo H-bomb test, the world entered its most dangerous years. Not until 1960 would the hands of the clock move back, and then only by a few minutes.
Within days of the Americans exploding the biggest bomb the world had yet seen, in March 1954, a high-level meeting of civil servants and top scientists took place in London. The man in charge of building the British atomic bomb, mathematician Sir William Penney, briefed them on the hydrogen bomb projects of the Soviet Union and the United States. Joe-4, the West’s code name for the most recent Soviet test device, had exploded on 13 August 1953 with a yield of just 400 kilotons. It was not a true hydrogen bomb, as it used high explosives, not radiation, for compression. Only Stanislaw Ulam and Edward Teller’s discovery of how to use X-ray radiation from the primary fission explosion to compress the deuterium in the secondary fusion device made possible the megaton yields achieved in the Bravo test. It would be well over a year before the Soviets would make that breakthrough.
Sir William, Britain’s atomic knight, described to the assembled Whitehall mandarins what would happen if even a modest 5-megaton bomb were dropped on their city. The blast would create a searing fireball two and a quarter miles in diameter, and leave a crater almost a mile across and 150 feet deep. If such a bomb exploded above Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, everything and everyone from the Houses of Parliament and Downing Street in the south (including the room in which they were all sitting) to Soho in the north would be instantly vaporized. Beyond that, buildings would be totally destroyed up to three miles away and badly damaged up to seven miles.
‘The world situation has been completely altered’ was the assessment of the British Cabinet Committee on Defence Policy that June. The American bomb exploded at Bikini Atoll in March had been 1,500 times more powerful than the ‘nominal’ atomic bomb. ‘There is no theoretical limit to the destructive power which can be achieved with the latest techniques,’ they concluded, echoing Strauss’s ominous words.20
The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was appalled. It was, he said, ‘the most terrible and destructive engine of mass warfare yet known to man’.21 But at Cabinet later that year, he still argued that Britain needed to be armed with hydrogen bombs, or risk losing ‘influence and standing in world affairs’.22 As well as deterring an atomic attack from the Soviet Union, Churchill hoped that British H-bombs would deter the United States of America. There was a strong belief in Whitehall that America was quite likely to launch a pre-emptive war against the Soviets. If Britain were armed with thermonuclear weapons, there might be a better chance of preventing what could be the Last War. The RAF had taken delivery of its first British-built atomic bomb, code-named Blue Danube, in November 1953. Churchill’s Cabinet gave the go-ahead for the British H-bomb just a year later. It was tested in May 1957 and carried by British bombers from 1961.
The British Government was under no illusions about the appalling effects of a war fought with the new generation of nuclear super-weapons. In the year it authorized the building of the H-bomb, a Whitehall career civil servant, William Strath, was asked to examine whether the United Kingdom could survive a massive assault with hydrogen bombs. The result, known as the Strath Report, was declassified in 2002. It makes grim reading.
Strath estimated that a ‘successful night attack’ on Britain’s major cities with ten hydrogen bombs would kill at least twelve million people and seriously injure four million more – a third of Britain’s population. As Strath admitted, ‘casualties on such a scale would be intolerable’.23 A single 10-megaton bomb was sufficient to ‘annihilate’ any city apart from London. Strath spelled out to his political masters in dry and matter-of-fact language the utter horror that every person in the land might have to face. ‘Hydrogen bomb war would be total war in a sense not hitherto conceived. The entire nation would be in the front line.’24 An attack against the United Kingdom with ten hydrogen bombs, each of 10 megatons, was equivalent to dropping 100 million tons of high explosive. This was ‘45 times as great as the total tonnage of bombs delivered by the Allies over Germany, Italy, and occupied France throughout the whole of the last war’.
In many of the bombed areas, there would be a total breakdown of civil order. Chaos would reign. ‘The household would become the unit of survival,’ said Strath. But even those sheltering in their homes would be at risk from radiation and fallout. Up to 50 miles from an explosion, people would receive such heavy doses of
radiation that, if they survived, they would be ill for weeks, with the symptoms experienced by the fishermen of the Lucky Dragon. For a thousand square miles around each bomb it would be ‘suicidal’ even to venture outside. ‘Morale,’ concluded William Strath with breathtaking understatement, ‘would be very low.’25
A few weeks after the centres of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been flattened by the first two atomic bombs, John von Neumann was struck by a dark and chilling thought that seemed straight out of science fiction. He told Lewis Strauss what had occurred to him:
[T]he appearance in the heavens of super-novae – those mysterious stars which suddenly are born in great brilliance and, as quickly, become celestial cinders – could be evidence that sentient beings in other planetary systems had reached the point in their scientific knowledge where we now stand, and, having failed to solve the problem of living together, had at least succeeded in achieving togetherness by cosmic suicide.26
After the Bravo test in 1954, politicians and public alike began to fear what the conclusion to the arms race might be. The A-bomb had seemed so terrible when it was first dropped that many thought that it had been dreamed up by some science fiction writer. Now scientists had developed the H-bomb, which was many thousands of times as powerful as the A-bomb and a weapon of potentially unlimited destructive power. What would be the next ‘alphabet bomb’ to emerge from the laboratories? ‘It is easy for the scientists to agree that we cannot trust Russia,’ said Leo Szilard, ‘but they also ask themselves: To what extent can we trust ourselves?’27 Perhaps, as Szilard had warned just four years earlier, the next type of weapon would be the C-bomb, a cobalt doomsday bomb that would spread its deadly fallout around the entire planet.
A month after the Bravo H-bomb test, a headline in the New York Times declared: NOW MOST DREADED WEAPON, COBALT BOMB, CAN BE BUILT. In his article, William Laurence revisited the fears voiced by Leo Szilard in the Chicago Round Table discussion on atomic weapons in February 1950. Quoting both Szilard and Einstein, he explained how a thermonuclear bomb with a shell of cobalt around the fission and fusion devices would create a lethal radioactive cloud when it exploded. Such a device would not need to be dropped on a city. It would be in the form of a ship bomb, containing more than a ton of heavy hydrogen. Harrison Brown, who had chaired the Chicago Round Table discussion and was now professor of nuclear chemistry at Caltech, told Laurence that if a cobalt ship bomb was set off in the Pacific a thousand miles west of California, ‘the radioactive dust would reach California in about a day, and New York in four or five days’.28 It would kill everything in its path. One bomb could wipe out an entire continent.
This article drew shocked responses from around the world. The following day, the London Times reported Laurence’s article prominently. Beneath it was a report on the worsening condition of the twenty-three Japanese fishermen exposed to radioactive fallout after the H-bomb test at Bikini on 1 March. In the same issue it was announced that four Labour MPs, including Tony Benn, were launching a national petition on the hydrogen bomb and calling for disarmament talks.29 The previous month, a British paper had reported that the Soviet Union was expected to test a cobalt bomb in late 1955. It was a ‘rigged’ hydrogen bomb ‘designed to produce widespread radioactive effects’.30
In 1953, suspicions had grown that even Britain intended to develop such a doomsday device – the ultimate deterrent against any uncooperative superpower. Assurances had been sought in the Australian Parliament that in forthcoming British tests at the Woomera rocket range, a cobalt bomb was not to be exploded.31 In 1957, Britain did use cobalt in a 1 kiloton bomb exploded at the Tadje site on the Maralinga range in Australia, but apparently only as a radiochemical tracer in order to measure the yield of the device.32
In America too, government officials such as Assistant Secretary of Defense Donald A. Quarles were forced to deny repeatedly to sceptical reporters that a doomsday weapon was on the bomb-makers’ drawing board. During an appearance on ABC’s television programme At Issue in April 1954, Quarles said that although the ‘C-bomb’ was possible, it was ‘not feasible’ as a weapon because ‘the radioactive material it released would kill friend and enemy indiscriminately’. It was, he said, a ‘suicide weapon’.33 But despite these reassurances, tension increased around the world when Italian Treasury Guards at Viggiu intercepted nine tons of pure cobalt carefully concealed in a truck en route from Italy to Switzerland. Police said they believed it was bound for the other side of the Iron Curtain.34 The Soviet Army newspaper, Red Star, retorted that the dangers of the cobalt bomb had been exaggerated by scaremongering ‘imperialists’.35
In the weeks following the Bravo test, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists noted how newspaper, radio and television were dominated by talk of ‘an annihilating cobalt bomb, or C-bomb, which could become a world suicide bomb, with winds carrying the lethal dust around the world’.36 Across the Atlantic, the letters pages in the daily papers reflected the widespread concern for the future of humankind. One correspondent summed up the ‘universal attitude of mind’ among his friends: ‘What’s the use of bothering, we’ll all be blown up soon.’ Another expressed the growing sense of global responsibility engendered by the prospect of worldwide fallout: ‘There can be few today who do not realize… that their own welfare is inextricably bound up with the welfare of other people far away.’37 Such sentiments reveal the origins of today’s environmentalism. In 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring would confirm the harm that humankind had already inflicted on its planet, and compare the pervasive genetic damage done by artificial chemicals, such as the pesticide DDT, to that caused by radioactivity.
But despite the real fears felt around the world, the British managed to retain their wry sense of humour. ‘Sir,’ wrote Mr D. H. F. Lay of 51 Cantelupe Road, Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex:
In the midst of the present public anxiety about atomic warfare readers of The Times will doubtless be relieved to know that the British Army remains unruffled. This last weekend I attended Territorial Army training – the morning was passed with lectures on the use and effect of the atomic bomb; in the afternoon we practised sword drill.38
As public concern mounted, eminent scientists began to voice their fears about the technologies of destruction. Sir George Thomson, son of the discoverer of the electron and one of the key figures in the British wartime atomic bomb project, spoke out about the hydrogen bomb. It was, he said, ‘absolutely crazy as a weapon’ and a ‘form of world suicide’. ‘The fear of an exploding world is unwarranted,’ he continued, but ‘that of contamination, unfortunately, is not.’ Turning directly to address Szilard’s doomsday weapon, he delivered this warning:
The so-called cobalt bomb is an imaginative attempt to do the worst. As a weapon, it is absolutely crazy, but how about as a form of suicide? The cobalt bomb is a suicide device because once material from such an explosion is shot into the air, it is at the mercy of the upper winds and can come down anywhere on earth. Certainly it would need a much bigger bomb than has been exploded so far, or a very large number of them to damage the earth. But it is not completely impossible if the resources of a great nation were set over a period of years to destroy humanity, including themselves.39
On the same page that carried Thomson’s words, the New York Times announced the end of the current series of H-bomb tests in the Pacific. As if to underline Thomson’s warning, this article contained Lewis Strauss’s remark that atomic scientists could now make an H-bomb ‘as large as you wish, as large as the military requirement demands’.40 The following month – as Godzilla began his cinematic rampage across Japan – Thomson spoke on BBC radio about the cobalt bomb. He compared the effects of such a bomb to that of the volcanic explosion of Krakatoa in 1883, which spread ash around the whole world. He again described the C-bomb as a suicide weapon, adding that ‘it was terrible that a sufficiently large group of madmen, if such existed, should have such a possibility open to them’. However, he scotched media rumours of a new alphabet bomb
– ‘a mysterious thing called the nitrogen bomb’.41
Other prominent intellectuals in Britain shared Thomson’s concerns. Two days before Christmas, the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, who had been imprisoned in World War I for his pacifism, gave a radio talk in what The Times described as ‘the solemn, urgent tones of Cassandra’. ‘Is our race so destitute of wisdom, so incapable of impartial love, so blind even to the simplest dictates of self-preservation,’ asked Russell, ‘that the last proof of its silly cleverness is to be the extermination of all life on our planet?’42
As 1955 dawned, the London Times attempted to sum up the momentous events of the previous year. In Britain, Roger Bannister had run the first sub-four-minute mile, and the food rationing introduced in World War II finally ended. But one news story had dominated 1954, as the ominous photograph of the atomic mushroom cloud in the middle of the page made plain. The public had not been prepared for either the size of the Bravo test or the subsequent talk of the new cobalt bomb, said The Times: ‘But when at last the news broke that the nightmare of scientific visionaries had become a reality, that mankind now held the means of its own extermination, few people escaped a feeling of numb horror.’ The paper accused political leaders of ‘ineffectiveness’ and of naively believing that ‘the louder the bang the greater the deterrent’. It concluded that ‘man was in the predicament of the sorcerer’s apprentice, impotent to control the forces he had unleashed’.43
