Doomsday Men

by P. D. Smith

  In the new year, the cobalt bomb continued to dominate headlines around the world. In West Germany, Otto Hahn, the chemist who first discovered atomic fission in 1938, discussed the cobalt bomb on radio. He too warned that ‘man would in the near future be in a position to destroy the world’.44 In the same month, Val Peterson, head of America’s Civil Defense Administration, made what the New York Times described as ‘one of the frankest statements ever made by a high Government official on the little discussed cobalt bomb’. On NBC’s Meet the Press TV programme, the civil defence chief was asked whether atomic weapons could destroy the world. ‘I think there’s only one area in which that were true,’ replied Peterson, ‘and that was if someone were foolish enough to make a cobalt bomb.’ If this were exploded, he said, radioactivity ‘would drift around and around the world and kill everybody’. In a somewhat unconvincing attempt to reassure viewers, he added: ‘I rather doubt we are going to have suicide.’45

  Despite such reassurances, people begin to wonder whether the scientists, soldiers and statesmen who had developed such monstrous weapons could be trusted not to destroy the world.The Times was certain that the logic of the arms race meant the ultimate weapon of mass destruction – the cobalt bomb – would soon be built. Humankind,The Times solemnly declared in its editorial, now stood on the brink of a ‘self-made precipice’. Below lay the abyss of nuclear Armageddon.46

  In 1950, the authorities were quick to condemn Szilard and Einstein as ‘prophets of hydrogen doomsday’. Now even official reports admitted that if the Bravo H-bomb was exploded in Washington, 11 million people could die from the blast and fallout.47 Across America, people would suffer the same fate as the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands or the Lucky Dragon.

  A new wave of ‘hydrogen hysteria’ swept America. Nuclear physicist James Arnold, who had corroborated Szilard’s idea of a cobalt bomb back in 1950, now revisited the idea. In the four years since then the H-bomb had become reality, and now that cobalt was being used in the production of televisions the metal was more readily available and thus cheaper. ‘There is’, concluded Arnold, ‘correspondingly less doubt that the cobalt bomb could be made. One thing seems clear from recent events – it had better not be tested.’48

  Some scientists even believed that the cobalt bomb had already been built. Ralph E. Lapp, a physicist with the US Navy’s scientific think-tank, the Office of Naval Research, pointed out that ‘the official silence of the AEC with respect to the cobalt bomb has led many to assume that the C-bomb is a stockpile item in our nuclear arsenal’. He thought a ‘definitive statement’ was desirable.49 In 1956 the Democratic presidential contender Adlai Stevenson challenged President Eisenhower to do just that and reveal the government’s plans for the cobalt bomb. Stevenson spoke movingly of ‘the millions who tremble on the sidelines of this mad arms race in helpless terror’.50 Government spokesmen responded by briefing journalists that it was not ‘on the drawing boards’.51

  Despite repeated denials that anyone intended to build a cobalt bomb, many in the military were clearly in favour of its development. Air Force scientists claimed that a 15-megaton cobalt bomb could render 20,000 square miles uninhabitable for a decade. ‘Denial of territory’ on this scale could be a powerful tool in the military arsenal. (Indeed, this had been one of the perceived military advantages of using mustard gas.) During the Korean War, General MacArthur was so impressed with the idea that he proposed using cobalt-60 to create a radioactive no man’s land between Korea and China.

  Assurances from eminent atomic scientists, such as Sir John Cock-croft, that only a ‘lunatic designer’ would dream of building a cobalt bomb did not reassure a public which was growing accustomed to thinking of the scientists responsible for the ‘alphabet bombs’ as decidedly eccentric if not mad.52 Freeman Dyson worked on top secret US weapons projects as well as the Project Orion atomic spaceship in the 1950s. According to the British physicist, there was more than a grain of truth in the stereotypical image people now had of scientists, such as himself. ‘The mad scientist is not just a figure of speech,’ says Dyson, ‘there really are such people, and they love to play around with crazy schemes. Some of them may even be dangerous, so one is not altogether wrong in being scared of such people.’53

  The idealism of the early years of the twentieth century, when scientists were hailed as saviours of humankind, was long gone. Films were quick to reflect the growing suspicion of scientists. The stock-in-trade character of the mad scientist was as old as cinema itself and had produced such memorable figures as Dr Alexander Thorkel, who uses radium rays to reduce people to the size of garden gnomes in Ernest B. Schoedsack’s Dr Cyclops (1940). ‘What you are doing is mad, it is diabolic,’ says his assistant. ‘You are tampering with powers reserved to God.’54

  In the 1950s, more subtly flawed scientists began to appear in the movies. They included scientists like Dr Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) in The Forbidden Planet (1956), a classic science fiction film based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Morbius channels his subconscious ‘lust for destruction’ via an alien super-technology into violence towards his fellow man. The British Oscar-winning movie Seven Days to Noon (1950) is a gripping thriller about a scientist, Professor Willingdon, who steals a bomb with the intention of destroying London in the hope that it will ‘awaken the rest of mankind to the misuse of powers that might have brought them happiness’. His London landlady, is dismissive of this idea: ‘People can be happy alright. We don’t ask so much. It’s you and your sort. Inventing things. Interfering with nature. That’s what’s causing all the trouble.’55

  In the classic science fiction film The Thing (1951), based on John W. Campbell’s story about alien invasion, the distinctly sinister scientist Dr Carrington is prepared to sacrifice human lives in the cause of science. The military, represented by the clean-cut Captain Patrick Hendry, wants to kill the aliens before it’s too late. But it becomes clear that the scientist, a veteran of the Operation Crossroads atomic tests at Bikini, wants to keep the deadly aliens alive to serve a Faustian purpose:

  DR CARRINGTON: You’re robbing science of the greatest secret that’s ever come to it. Knowledge is more important than life, Captain. We’ve only one excuse for existing: to think, to find out, to learn.

  CAPT PATRICK HENDRY: What can we find out from that thing, except a quicker way to die?

  DR CARRINGTON: It doesn’t matter what happens to us. Nothing counts except our thinking. We’ve fought our way into nature, we’ve split the atom.

  CAPT PATRICK HENDRY: Yes, and that sure made the world happy, didn’t it?56

  Both Seven Days to Noon and The Thing accuse science and scientists of undermining people’s well-being and peace of mind – quite a reversal compared with the idolization of scientists at the beginning of the century. In The Thing, scientists are even shown to value knowledge above human life, the ultimate Faustian betrayal of humanity. Indeed, audiences may well have come away thinking that two alien species were portrayed in this film, both equally hostile to the future of the human race: the extraterrestrials and the scientists. For movie-goers, it was not at all inconceivable that men (and it was always men) like Morbius and Carrington would be capable of constructing a doomsday bomb.

  Fiction too looked critically at scientists in the 1950s. Frederic Brown’s wonderfully concise story ‘The Weapon’ (1951) tells how Dr James Graham, a ‘key scientist of a very important project’, receives an unexpected visitor, a Mr Niemand. Dr Graham tells Niemand that he is designing a new weapon, ‘a rather ultimate one’, but justifies it in the terms used by Dr Carrington: he is ‘advancing science’. Niemand disagrees; his ‘scientific work is more likely than that of any other man to end the human race’s chance for survival’. He poses the classic question that occurs in most superweapon films and fictions: ‘is humanity ready for an ultimate weapon?’ Before he leaves, Nie-mand gives a small present to Dr Graham’s mentally disabled son. Later, Graham is shocked to find that it is a loaded revolver. Surel
y, he thinks, ‘only a madman’ would give a weapon to such a child. The scientist fails to see the irony or to grasp the powerful point Niemand is making, one H. G. Wells had also made in The World Set Free.57

  As had happened in the period after World War I, there were now clear signs in film and fiction of a genuine resentment towards scientists for betraying the high ideals of their profession and, indeed, the best interests of humanity. The French writer and intellectual Albert Camus did not find it at all surprising that in such a violent world ‘science devotes itself to organized mass murder’. The news of Hiroshima’s destruction was, he said, evidence that ‘technological civilization has just reached its final degree of savagery’. Now the real choice facing humankind was ‘between collective suicide and the intelligent use of scientific conquests’. Camus concluded that ‘peace is the only battle worth waging’.58

  In the year after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the historian and critic Lewis Mumford had made a dramatic attack on the insanity of the modern age in an article entitled ‘Gentlemen: You are mad!’ ‘We in America,’ he wrote, ‘are living among madmen. Madmen govern our affairs in the name of order and security.’ The modern superweapon society was, he said, comprised of ‘madmen living among madmen’, all unable to recognize the looming apocalypse: ‘The madmen have taken it upon themselves to lead us by gradual stages to that final act of madness which will corrupt the face of the earth and blot out the nations of men, possibly put an end to all life on the planet itself.’59 For intellectuals like Mumford, people were sleepwalking towards the abyss. He wanted to shock them out of their stupor. This was precisely what Leo Szilard did in February 1950 with his vision of the cobalt bomb.

  More than any other weapon in the twentieth century, Szilard’s cobalt bomb came to symbolize the terrible situation faced by humankind. It was the ultimate weapon, a doomsday machine which could contaminate the entire planet with radioactive fallout. In the public mind it was a weapon which combined the worst horrors of both chemical and biological weapons – fallout was an invisible agent which slowly poisoned the body – with the uniquely awesome destructive power of a nuclear explosion.

  In the shadow of the cobalt bomb, the dreams of atomic utopia, translated by Wells and other writers into beguiling future worlds, slowly faded and died. Such dreams had inspired scientists like Szilard himself. But in the cold war, these dreams were transformed into nightmares as scientists turned newly discovered physics into ever more lethal technologies.

  Governments on all sides have denied developing such a weapon.

  This portrait of Leo Szilard in his sixties was used on the cover of the American journal Saturday Review that featured a review of his The Voice of the Dolphins (1961). The threat of nuclear war was a central theme of this collection of stories. ‘If they cannot take it straight, they’ll get it in fiction,’ he had said after one of his articles on arms control had been rejected by an editor.

  The truth may not be known for many years. Because of current fears about terrorists armed with dirty bombs, for which cobalt-60 is an ideal and readily available isotope, many documents relating to weapons design and radiological warfare remain classified. But in the 1950s, as far as the general public was concerned the C-bomb was a reality. It became the most tangible symbol of what J. G. Ballard has memorably described as the ‘Auschwitz of the soul’. In this ‘nightmarish chapter of human history’, the cobalt bomb was the ultimate creation of ‘Homo hydrogenensis’.60

  John von Neumann had speculated that supernovae were planets on which atomic energy had been discovered before the maturity to use it safely. This evocative idea echoed the fears expressed by earlier writers and scientists such as Frederick Soddy, with his seminal atomic text The Interpretation of Radium (1909), and Pierrepont Noyes, whose novel The Pallid Giant (1927) was reissued after the bombing of Japan with a title borrowed from Lewis Mumford – Gentlemen: You Are Mad.

  The horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki convinced many people that a decisive point in human history, an apocalyptic moment, had arrived. The New York Times commented a few days after Nagasaki that:

  Urban civilization might be wholly wiped out, and such as survives at all reduced to the animal level of thousands of years ago. Perhaps the secret of the atomic bomb would thus be lost, and after some thousands of additional years a kind of civilization would be restored. A week ago this kind of speculation would have seemed to most people like something out of a scientific romance. It is not so today.61

  But the cobalt bomb in its most devastating form promised not just a few devastated cities, or even the annihilation of a whole continent. It meant the end of all life on earth: total extinction. Such a possibility exceeded even the worst fears of H. G. Wells, who – in an age before the dangers of global fallout were known – had dreamed of an atomic utopia being born, like a phoenix, out of the radioactive ashes.

  At the end of Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), the time-travelling astronauts find themselves in St Patrick’s Cathedral in what was once New York. But in AD 3955 the object of worship is not Christ on the cross but a twentieth-century ICBM on which are written two Greek letters: Alpha and Omega. One of the astronauts recognizes the missile as the ‘Doomsday Bomb’, a nuclear weapon with a ‘cobalt casing’. It was ‘the last we ever made,’ he explains:

  Only one. One was enough. The idea was to threaten the enemy by the very fact that it existed. A bomb so powerful it could destroy – not just a city – not just a nation – no, not just every living cell on earth, every insect, every blade of grass – but set nuclear fire to the wind, to the air itself. Scorch the whole planet into a cinder! Like the end of a burnt match. The ultimate bomb—.

  As his colleague says, ‘not even H. G. Wells at his wildest, not even Jules Verne, had dared conceive of a civilization dedicated to the Bomb’.62

  At the end of his life, Wells sank into a profound despair about the future he had once portrayed as a shining atomic utopia. ‘This world is at the end of its tether,’ he wrote. ‘The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded.’63 It was the bleak vision of Wells’s final years and not the idealism of the early twentieth century that would now permeate the collective psyche, inspiring the dark worlds of 1950s writers such as William Golding and Samuel Beckett, who were part of a generation that lived with a real threat of nuclear doomsday. For this generation, utopia was a hollow promise and science a compromised ideology.

  Other novelists and film-makers quickly grasped the dramatic implications of this fateful moment in human history. Back in 1893, readers of the popular illustrated journal The Idler had enjoyed a chilling story that foretold ‘The Doom of London’. Robert Barr described how people and nature colluded to produce ‘death so wholesale that no war the earth has ever seen left such slaughter behind it’. A combination of air pollution and unusually calm weather creates a lethal fog which envelops London, suffocating nearly all its inhabitants. The fog became ‘one vast smothering mattress pressed down upon a whole metropolis’.64

  In 1955 a British writer – strangely enough with the same surname – resurrected this theme for the atomic age, describing how a mysterious fog terrifies first America and then the whole world: ‘A dark fringe appeared initially over the Pacific horizon, widening rapidly as the black shroud it edged raced towards the land…’ The fog, a dense wall fifty miles high and full of ‘fine dust particles’, sweeps in from the Pacific and smothers America for sixteen impenetrable days before continuing on across the Atlantic and around the world.

  But the fog in Densil Neve Barr’s The Man with Only One Head is radioactive, the result of a test conducted in the Pacific of ‘a new form of bomb based on the nuclear fission of cobalt’.65 Barr’s description of the atomic fog clearly resembles accounts of World War I poison gas attacks. Thus the horrors of one weapon of mass destruction segue into those of another. In the month after the Bravo test, Harrison Brown had told the New York Times of the threat posed to America by
huge ship bombs of the kind dreamt up by Edward Teller. Indeed, the idea had also been raised in the original Chicago Round Table discussion. Detonated in the Pacific, ship bombs would cause clouds of fallout to be blown inland. Barr was clearly influenced by these reports.

  In the novel, newspapers immediately blamed the fog on ‘the warmongers of Wall Street’ and ‘their mad search for new weapons of mass destruction’. The ‘Society for the Banning of the C Bomb’ is formed by anxious citizens.66 Soon insects are dying, and fears grow for the future of humankind. Fortunately (and rather unbelievably) people are unharmed. More realistically, the US Government secretly asks newspapers to play down the story. But the real effect of the C-bomb is too big to conceal: all the men in the world have been made sterile. In Barr’s frankly farcical novel, only one man, a millionaire called Vince Adams, remains fertile because he was hiding in his ‘funkhole’, an underground nuclear shelter in the Arizona desert. When he emerges, the appropriately named Adams finds himself in an unique situation – and with a hundred thousand proposals of marriage.

  The Man with Only One Head takes an ultimately lighthearted view of the serious issues of fallout and the cobalt bomb. Other writers were less inclined to see any silver lining in this ominous cloud looming over civilization. Philip Wylie’s atomic Pearl Harbor novel Tomorrow!, published in the year of the Bravo test, ends with the American President authorizing the use of a secretly built cobalt bomb against the Soviet Union. The huge bomb has been built into America’s first atomic submarine, the USS Nautilus. According to the President, the Nautilus contains ‘the largest hydrogen bomb ever assembled, and around it in her sides, replacing armor, and in her keel, for ballast, is the element cobalt with other readily radioactivated elements’.