by P. D. Smith
12. Max Wild, Mes aventures dans le service secret, 1914–1918 (Lausanne: Payot, 1932).
13. Malraux, 132.
14. ibid., 131–2.
15. ibid., 129.
16. ibid., 135.
17. Haber speaking in 1923; quoted in Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman,
A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare (London: Arrow, 2002), p. xv.
18. Malraux, 134.
19. ibid., 153.
20. ibid., 155.
21. ibid., 156.
22. ibid., 185.
23. ibid., 165.
24. ibid., 175.
25. ibid.
26. ibid., 176.
27. ibid., 185.
28. ibid., 177.
29. Szöllösi-Janze, 318.
30. Malraux, 180.
31. Szöllösi-Janze, 463; see also Dietrich Stoltzenberg, Fritz Haber: Chemist, Nobel Laureate, German, Jew (Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage, 2004), 234–5.
32. Malraux, 130.
33. Otto Hahn, My Life, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (London: Macdonald, 1970), 120. On this attack, see Haber, 37.
34. Hahn, 117.
35. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence. A Selection, 1846– 1895 (London: Martin Lawrence, 1934), 456–7; quoted in Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 55–6.
36. In the words of the military historian Basil Liddell Hart, quoted in Richard A. Preston and Sydney F. Wise, Men in Arms: A History of Warfare and its Interrelationships with Western Society (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979), 239.
37. Conversation between Hahn and J. Jaenicke, Jan. 1955; quoted in Stoltzenberg, 137.
38. Hague Peace Conference, 1907, Article XXIIIa; quoted in Haber, 18–19.
39. Hahn, 118.
40. Meitner to Hahn, Mar. 1915; quoted in Leitner, 205; my trans.
41. Max Born, My Life: Recollections of a Nobel Laureate (London: Taylor & Francis, 1978; 1st edn 1975), 188.
42. Haber, 292.
43. Szöllösi-Janze, 329.
44. S. J. M. Auld, Gas and Flame in Modern Warfare (New York: George H. Doran, 1918), 11–12; quoted in Hugh R. Slotten, ‘Humane Chemistry or Scientific Barbarism? American Responses to World War I Poison Gas, 1915– 1930’, Journal of American History, 77 (Sep. 1990), 476.
45. ‘Asphyxiating Gas in the Trenches’, American Review of Reviews, 56 (July 1917), 94; see also Wyndham D. Miles, ‘The Idea of Chemical Warfare in Modern Times’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 31, no. 2 (1970), 297–304.
46. Haber, 79.
47. Owen, ‘Dulce et Decorum est’, in Brian Gardner, ed., Up the Line to Death: The War Poets 1914–1918 (London: Methuen, 1986), 141–2.
48. Haber, 29–34.
49. Leitner, 211.
50. Arthur Conan Doyle, The British Campaign in France and Flanders, vol. 3 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1917), 48–9; quoted in Haber, 231.
51. Letter from V. M. Ferguson, 5 May 1915; quoted in Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Modern Age (London: Bantam, 1989), 162.
52. Haber, 39. Haber suggests that there may have been as many as half a million casualties from chemical warfare on the Western Front in World War I, of which 20,000 were fatalities (p. 242).
53. Harris and Paxman, 36.
54. G. W. G. Hughes; quoted in Eksteins, 162.
55. ‘Full Story of Ypres: The New German Weapon’, Times (30 Apr. 1915), 9.
56. Harris and Paxman, 9; see also Haber, Poisonous Cloud, 22–3.
57. Bernard Brodie, ‘Defense and Technology’, Technology Review, 43 (1941), 109.
58. General von Deimling; quoted in Edmund Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 27.
59. Charles Delvert, 27 Jan. 1916, in Carnets d’un fantassin (Paris 1935), 138–9; cited in Eksteins, 152–3.
60. Ernst Jünger, In Stahlgewittern [In Storms of Steel] (private publication, 1920); quoted in Eksteins, 144.
61. Szöllösi-Janze, 319.
Chapter 6
1. Ernest Volkman, Science Goes to War: The Search for the Ultimate Weapon, from Greek Fire to Star Wars (New York: Wiley, 2002), 51–2.
2. Both comments are recorded in Bertha von Suttner’s Memoiren (Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 1909), the first from 1876 (p. 134), the second from 1892 (p. 271); quoted in R. W. Reid, Tongues of Conscience: War and the Scientist’s Dilemma (London: Constable, 1969), 17–19.
3. W. W. Knollys, ‘War in the Future’, Fortnightly Review, 54, ns 48 (1890), 274–81.
4. John Bourne, ‘Total War I: The Great war’, in Charles Townshend, ed., The Oxford History of Modern War (Oxford University Press, 2000), 131.
5. Archibald Forbes, ‘The New Mechanism of War’, Nineteenth Century, 29 (1891), 782–95.
6. Bourne, 133–4.
7. ‘Revisiting the Enemy’, Times (12 June 1915), 5.
8. Sir William Crookes, ‘Address’, Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 68 (1898), 17–18; cited in Fritz Stern, Einstein’s German World (London: Allen Lane, 2000), 81.
9. Tony Harrison, Square Rounds (London: Faber, 1992), 27.
10. ibid., 28.
11. ibid., 49.
12. Soddy, 16 Oct. 1914; quoted in Muriel Howorth, Pioneer Research on the Atom: The Life Story of Frederick Soddy (St Leonards on Sea, Sussex: King Bros, 1958), 194.
13. Soddy, speaking on 14 Jan. 1904; lecture published as Paper VIII, Professional Papers of the Royal Engineers, 29 (1904); quoted in Howorth, Atomic Transmutation: The Greatest Discovery Ever Made. From Memoirs of Professor Frederick Soddy (London: New World, 1953), 95.
14. Edward Thomas, In Memoriam (Easter 1915); in John Silkin, ed., The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (London: Penguin, 1996), 93.
15. Transactions of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts, 4 (1854), Appendix O, 198; quoted in West, ‘The History of Poison Gases’, Science, 49, no. 1270 (2 May 1919), 415–16.
16. Richard A. Preston and Sydney F. Wise, Men in Arms: A History of Warfare and its Interrelationships with Western Society (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979), 56.
17. Charles Nicholl, Leonardo da Vinci (London: Allen Lane, 2004), 143.
18. ‘Developments in Gas Warfare’, American Review of Reviews, 57 (Apr. 1918), 425–6. In 1932, the name of the German deserter who tried to warn the Allies was revealed. He was arrested by the Germans and imprisoned for ten years.
19. ‘Respirators for the Troops’, Times (29 Apr. 1915), 10.
20. André Malraux, The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, trans. A. W. Fielding (University of Chicago Press 1992; 1st edn 1948 as Les Noyers de l’Altenburg), 126.
21. ibid., 146–9.
22. J. B. S. Haldane, Callinicus: A Defence of Chemical Warfare (London: Kegan Paul, 1925), 31, 71.
23. ‘Gases in 17in. Shells’, Times (29 Apr. 1915), 10.
24. Harrison, 40.
25. B. W. Richardson, ‘Greek Fire’, Popular Science Review, 3 (1864), 176.
26. Dietrich Stoltzenberg, Fritz Haber: Chemist, Nobel Laureate, German, Jew (Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage, 2004), 161. On Haber’s post-war involvement in chemical weapons, see 162ff.
27. Soddy, The Interpretation of Radium: Being the Substance of Six Free Popular Experimental Lectures Delivered at the University of Glasgow (London: John Murray, 1912; 1st edn 1909), 251.
28. L. F. Haber, The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 18.
29. William le Queux, The Invasion of 1910 (1906), p. ix; quoted in Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 127.
30. The bookwas: Ivan S. Bloch, The Future of War in its Technical, Economic and Political Relations, 6 vols. (St Petersburg, 1897–8; trans. Boston, 1902). See Preston and Wise, 2
59.
31. Albert Robida, La Guerre au vingtième siècle (1887); trans. War in the Twentieth Century, in I. F. Clarke, ed., The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914: Fictions of Future Warfare and of Battles Still-to-Come (Liverpool University Press, 1995), 99–103.
32. Chas Baskerville, ‘“Gas” in this War: The Vast Development of a New Military Weapon’, American Review of Reviews, 58 (Sep. 1918), 274, 278, 280
33. See also his article on the tank and its invention in Strand: Col. E. D. Swinton, ‘The “Tanks’”, Strand Magazine, 54 (1917), 270–77.
34. Frank R. Stockton, The Great War Syndicate (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1889), 17, 15.
35. ibid., 17.
36. ibid., 24–5, 60, 64.
37. Haber, 34.
38. Bourne, 135.
39. Stockton, 87.
40. ibid., 51–3.
41. ibid., 66; Stockton does in fact use the word ‘awe’ here.
42. ibid., 184.
43. ibid., 187.
44. American propaganda described Japanese soldiers during World War II as ‘Louseous Japanicas’; see Edmund Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 132.
45. M. P. Shiel, The Yellow Danger (London: Grant Richards, 1898), 313.
46. ibid., 338.
47. ibid., 343.
48. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898); in Wells, The Science Fiction, vol. 1 (London: Phoenix, 1998), 186.
49. H. G. Wells, The Last War [The World Set Free] (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001; 1st edn 1914), 29.
50. Simon Newcomb, His Wisdom The Defender (New York: Arno Press, 1975; 1st edn 1900), 163, 59.
51. Created by illustrator Harry Lampert for DC Comics: see Margalit Fox’s obituary, ‘Harry Lampert Dies at 88; Helped Create the Flash’, NYT (16 Nov. 2004), A, 25.
52. Roy Norton, The Vanishing Fleets (New York: Appleton, 1908); quoted in H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 41–2.
53. Norton, 237; quoted in Martha A. Bartter, The Way to Ground Zero: The Atomic Bomb in American Science Fiction (New York: Greenwood, 1988), 26.
54. Norton, 243; quoted in Franklin, 42.
55. Hollis Godfrey, The Man Who Ended War (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1908), 154, 183.
56. ibid., 47, 158, 246.
57. ibid., 94, 301.
58. Franklin, 20.
59. Peyton C. March, The Nation at War (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1932), 333; quoted in Russell, 40.
60. ‘Fog Bombs for London’, Times (17 May 1915), 7.
61. ‘J. H. Lartigue: Photographs 1901–1986’, exhibition, Hayward Gallery London, 24 June– 5 Sep. 2004.
62. ‘Airship Raid on London’ and ‘The Zeppelin Raiders’, Times (2 June 1915), 6.
63. Edmund Russell makes this case convincingly in War and Nature. He argues that 350,000 people died in World War II as a result of chemical weapons, by which he means principally incendiaries: see Russell, 3, 10ff.
64. Col. H. L. Gilchrist, A Comparative Study of World War Casualties from Gas and Other Weapons (Chemical Warfare School, Edgewood Arsenal, 1928); quoted in Gilbert F. Whittemore Jr, ‘World War I, Poison Gas Research, and the Ideals of American Chemists’, Social Studies of Science, 5, no. 2 (May 1975), 149.
65. Baskerville, 278.
66. W. Lee Lewis, ‘Is Prohibition of Gas Warfare Feasible?’, Atlantic Monthly, 129 (June 1922), 840; quoted in Whittemore, 158.
67. Haber, 205.
68. Lord Derby, Secretary of State for War, 26 Dec. 1917, UK Public Record Office, CAB/23–4, War Cabinet 306; quoted in Haber (1986), 206.
69. Walker, quoted in Russell, 45.
70. Will Irwin, The Next War (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1921), 37–8; quoted in Whittemore, 154.
71. Editorial, Nature (17 June 1915); quoted in Guy Hartcup, The Effect of Science on the Second World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 2.
72. Fisher quoted in Linda Merricks, The World Made New: Frederick Soddy, Science, Politics, and Environment (Oxford University Press, 1996), 73.
73. ‘Christian Conscience and Poison-Gas’, Literary Digest (8 Jan. 1921), 38; quoted in Hugh R. Slotten, ‘Humane Chemistry or Scientific Barbarism? American Responses to World War I Poison Gas, 1915–1930’, Journal of American History, 77 (Sep. 1990), 486.
74. Professor D. Fraser Harris, ‘The Man of Science After the War’, Scientific Monthly, 7, no. 4 (Oct. 1918), 320.
75. Salomon Reinach, ‘Precarious or Lasting Peace?’, Nation (15 June 1916), 642–3; quoted in Slotten, 481.
76. ‘Herbert Kaufman’s Weekly Page’, Boston Sunday Herald (1916); quoted in a letter to the editor, by F. Lyman Wells, ‘Science and War’, Science, 44 (25 Aug. 1916), 275.
Chapter 7
1. H. G. Wells, ‘The Mobilization of Invention’, letter to Times (11 June 1915), 9.
2. Edison, NYT (3 Jan. 1915); quoted in H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 69.
3. Edison, NYT (16 Oct. 1915); quoted in Franklin, 72.
4. David Wilson, Rutherford: Simple Genius (London: Hodder, 1983), 346.
5. A. Wilkinson, Jr, ‘When the Earth Melted’, Top-Notch (15 June 1918), 4, 2, 5, 6.
6. Martin Swayne, ‘The Sleep-Beam’, Strand Magazine, 55 (Mar. 1918), 191,
193.
7. Christian Hülsmeyer tested his Telemobiloskop on a stretch of the Rhine near Cologne on 10 May 1904. On reports of the German death ray, see Wilson, 474. On Churchill, see Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (London: Heinemann, 1972), 463–4.
8. Gernsback, quoted in Mike Ashley, Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950 (Liverpool University Press, 2000), 28.
9. L. Shaw, Jr, ‘What the Housewife Should Know about Electricity’, The Electrical Experimenter (Nov. 1915), 317.
10. This and the following quotes are from ‘Warfare of the Future: The Radium Destroyer’, The Electrical Experimenter (Nov. 1915), 315.
11. Arthur Train and Robert Williams Wood, The Man Who Rocked the Earth (New York: Doubleday, 1915), 4.
12. Train and Wood, 58.
13. Robert Jungk, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists (San Diego: Harcourt, 1986; 1st edn 195), 201.
14. Train and Wood, 68.
15. ibid., 172.
16. ibid., 226.
17. ibid., 110, 100–101.
18. ibid., 108–9.
19. Einstein to Heinrich Zangger, 10 Apr. 1915; in CP8, trans. vol., 87.
20. Einstein to Zangger, 6 Dec. 1917; in CP8, doc. 403; quoted in Thomas Levenson, Einstein in Berlin (New York: Bantam, 2004), 84.
21. Einstein, ‘Meine Meinung über den Krieg’ [My Opinion of the War] (Oct. 1915), in Das Land Goethes 1914–1916: Ein vaterländisches Gedenkbuch (Berlin, 1916); in CP6, trans. vol., 96.
22. Otto Friedrich, Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 142.
23. Einstein to Conrad Habicht, 18 or 25 May 1905; in CP5, trans. vol., 20.
24. Einstein to Habicht, between 30 June and 22 Sep. 1905; in CP5, trans. vol., 20.
25. Einstein to Habicht, between 30 June and 22 Sep. 1905; in CP5, trans. vol., 20–21.
26. Einstein, ‘Ist die Trägheit eines Körpers von seinem Energieinhalt abhaängig?’ [Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on its Energy Content?], Annalen der Physik, 18 (1905), 639–41; in John Stachel, ed., Einstein’s Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics (Princeton University Press, 1998), 164.
27. On references to the idea of matter as latent energy before 1905, see Muriel Howorth, Atomic Transmutation: The Greatest Discovery Ever Made. From Memoirs of Professor Frederick Soddy (London: New World, 1953), 135–6. According to Soddy, British scientists such as Rutherford were very reluctant to accept th
e idea.
28. Einstein to A. Schnauder, spring 1907; in CP5, 28, my trans.
29. Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. A Popular Exposition, trans. Robert W. Lawson (London: Methuen, 1920), 75.
30. Max Born, quoted in Denis Brian, Einstein: A Life (New York: Wiley 1996), 91.
31. Einstein to Paul Ehrenfest, 17 Jan. 1916; in CP8, trans. vol., 179.
32. Einstein to Max Born, 8 Dec. 1919; in CP9, doc. 198 (trans. vol.).
33. Dietrich Stoltzenberg, Fritz Haber: Chemist, Nobel Laureate, German, Jew (Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage, 2004), 47.
34. Levenson, 197.
35. Einstein, in CP7, 90.
36. Arnold Sommerfeld to Einstein, 3 Dec. 1918; in CP8, doc. 662 (trans. vol.).
37. Einstein to Sommerfeld, 6 Dec. 1918, CP8, doc. 665 (trans. vol.).
38. Haber’s daughter, Eva Lewis, interviewed for the documentary ‘Science at War’, in the series The Laboratory of War (BBC2, 12 Nov. 1998).
39. Hitler, Mein Kampf; quoted in Friedrich, 31.
40. ‘Report on the Committee on Chemical Warfare Organisation’ (1919); quoted in Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Modern Age (London: Bantam, 1989), 164.
41. Max Born, My Life: Recollections of a Nobel Laureate (London: Taylor & Francis, 1978; 1st edn 1975), 177.
42. ibid., 184.
43. Levenson, 198; see also Born, 184–5.
44. F. Lyman Wells, ‘Science and War’, Science, 44, no. 1, 130 (25 Aug. 1916), 275.
45. Alfred Döblin, Berge Meere und Giganten [Mountains, Oceans and Giants] (Olten: Walter-Verlag, 1977; 1st edn 1924), 508 (my trans.).
46. All quotes are from Perley Poore Sheehan and Robert H. Davis, ‘Blood and Iron: A Play in One Act’, Strand Magazine, 54 (1917), 359–65.
47. ‘Notes’, Observatory, 42 (1919), 389–98.
48. ‘Revolution in Science’, Times (7 Nov. 1919), 12.
49. Einstein, Autobiographical Notes: A Centennial Edition, ed. and trans. Paul Arthur Schilpp (La Salle,, Ill.: Open Court, 1979), 31.
50. Charles Lane Poor, a Columbia astronomer, described Einstein’s science as the product of a Bolshevist age: NYT (16 Nov. 1919). See also Einstein’s letter to Zangger, Dec. 1919; in CP9, doc. 217, p. 306.
51. Arthur Stanley Eddington to Einstein, 1 Dec. 1919; in CP9, doc. 186, p. 262.
