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CHAPTER 3

POSTNUCLEAR FANTASIES

For modern Americans World War II was the last “good war,” and the “greatest generation” was responsible for winning it. The creation of the bomb during that war completed the transformation of warfare begun during the Civil War. Nuclear weapons could accomplish the extensive slaughter of enemy soldiers and civilians without casualties. Subsequent wars required Americans to hold back their technological advantage, a situation that created moral complexities and retroactively romanticized World War II. The bomb also marked the maturity of both scientific apocalypticism and dispensationalist premillennialism. Speculation about human extinction no longer required much imagination, and dispensationalists did not have to hunt for scientific theories to match prophetic descriptions.

For scientific apocalypticists, the atomic bomb turned the possibility of an undirected apocalypse into an apparent probability. Popular science fiction and nonfiction writers immediately began to offer visions of atomic destruction after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. For American premillennialists, the advent of the bomb was less of a watershed event. Frank Kermode, an English literary scholar, in The Sense of an Ending (1966) argues that “it would be childish to argue, in a discussion of how people behave under eschatological threat, that nuclear bombs are more real and make one experience more authentic crisis-feelings than armies in the sky.”¹ The atomic bomb did not make the apocalypse any more “real” for conservative American Protestants, but it did give Bible prophecy analysts further evidence that the apocalypse was approaching. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, premillennialists had grasped that science could bolster their visions of the End. The atomic bomb became yet another way in which scientific revelation could support biblical apocalypticism, lending support to an already strong apocalyptic tradition. For scientific apocalypticists the atomic bomb brought the scientific apocalyptic to the forefront of popular culture. Despite these differences, scientific and religious apocalypticists were in agreement: the atomic bomb made the end of the world more likely than ever before.

Some science fiction writers anticipated this development before even scientists recognized it. In 1911 the physicist Ernest Rutherford proposed a new conception of the atom: most of the mass of an atom was contained at its core in what Rutherford called the nucleus. Combined with Einstein’s proposal that mass can turn into energy and vice versa, Rutherford’s study of radioactive materials led him to observe that enormous energy is contained within the nuclei of atoms.² If the nuclei could be split or if the nuclei of two atoms could be fused, then that energy could be released, but Rutherford did not think that humans would ever discover how to control such energy.³

Despite Rutherford’s doubts, as early as 1914, H. G. Wells wrote in The World Set Free of a world transformed by atomic energy.⁴ This was a vision with lasting historical impact; the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard read it for the first time in 1932 and referred to it when he described building the first nuclear reactor in a scientific report.⁵ A scientist in Wells’s novel proclaims that when humanity harnesses the power of the atom, “that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual struggle to live on the bare surplus of Nature’s energies will cease to be the lot of Man. Man will step from the pinnacle of this civilization to the beginning of the next.”⁶ The scientist’s predictions come true in the course of the novel, but a war stems over the fruits of the technology.

Wells invented a new element, Carolinum, which supplies the energy in the bombs used in this “last war,” bombs that, in his conception, are tossed from an airplane and continue exploding until the entire element is used up. The world’s major cities are destroyed and abandoned for generations because “the radiations eat into people’s skins.”⁷ Wells, without the reality of the bomb, provided an optimistic ending: leaders of the world realize that they must end “the use of these frightful explosives before the world was utterly destroyed.”⁸ At the end, a world government is formed with a permanent peace ensuing, another aspect of Wells’s novel that would have an enduring impact. After World War II scientists like Szilard proposed similar solutions when trying to find a way to prevent nuclear proliferation or a nuclear war.

Wells was not alone in anticipating the positive effects of atomic power prior to 1945, but the enthusiasm for such energy waned even among Americans as the world hurtled from one world war to the next. A CBS broadcast in 1937 envisaged the end of the world through an atomic explosion.⁹ In the radio play, an alien observer on Betelgeuse in 2179 observes Earth through a telescope so powerful that he can watch Earth’s social and political events taking place. Of course, as he points out to his wife, he is witnessing events that occurred 242 years ago, placing the events in 1937, the same year as the broadcast. On Earth, a scientist announces to colleagues that he has invented a “device for controlling and liberating atomic energy.” “Save for an accident,” he asserts, “man is liberated from death” and war because of this “bottled sunshine.” In the course of lauding the machine’s characteristics, the inventor warns his associates not to touch a lever on the device; an accident follows in which the lever is pushed, and the Betelgeuse observer notes the destruction of the Earth. He tells his wife that there are billions of planets like the now-defunct Earth, and the destruction of a planet happens around four times each night. Despite the destruction at the center of the story, the presence of the alien observer stressed that humanity, despite its own feelings of self-importance, is a trivial detail in the larger picture. As Wells suggested decades earlier, the vastness of time and space was a double-edged sword that cut through the veneer of human self-importance.

The radio play anticipated the reaction of the scientists who worked to build the first atomic bomb.¹⁰ The scientists who toiled at Los Alamos had signed up for the Manhattan Project with the limited intention of beating the Germans to the invention of an atomic bomb. Their good intentions did not prevent them from feeling as if they had made a mistake after the defeat of Hitler. When these scientists began to look back at the significance of their work, apocalyptic fears saturated their memories. In a 1942 summer meeting of physicists that J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project, assembled at Berkeley, California, to discuss developing the bomb, a Hungarian physicist, Edward Teller, proposed that an atomic explosion might ignite the atmosphere; he and other scientists worked out calculations to prove that it would not, and work on the bomb proceeded. On the day of the first atomic bomb test, 16 July 1945, the Italian physicist (and future Nobel Prize winner) Enrico Fermi resurrected the old fear, jokingly taking bets from his colleagues as to whether or not the Trinity shot would set fire to the atmosphere, thus ending the world or at least obliterating New Mexico.¹¹

While the bomb did not blow up New Mexico, it still elicited apocalyptic musings from the scientists involved, at least in retrospect. Oppenheimer has famously said that the test brought to mind the Bhagavad-Gita, a text that Oppenheimer was often known to quote, when Vishnu says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”¹² I. I. Rabi, an American physicist who worked on the project, later described his reaction upon seeing the Trinity explosion as first of joy, then “there was a chill, which was not the morning cold; it was a chill that came to one when one thought, as for instance when I thought of my wooden house in Cambridge, and my laboratory in New York, and of the millions of people living around there, and this power of nature which we had first understood it to be—well, there it was.”¹³

After the successful test in July 1945, Szilard, who had urged Albert Einstein to write the letter to President Franklin Roosevelt that led to the Manhattan Project, offered a petition advising that a demonstration of the bomb be given to the Japanese, rather than the surprise, outright use of it on a Japanese target. Szilard, a Hungarian émigré, had particular influence on other physicists as he, along with Fermi, had managed the first controlled chain reaction at the end of 1942 at the University of Chicago. Many of the physicists at Chicago who had also worked on the problem of separating plutonium from uranium signed the petition. Many of the Los Alamos scientists, Fermi, Oppenheimer, and Teller among them, did not sign the petition, saying that “in any case, physicists had no special competence on the moral question” over whether to use the bomb or mount an invasion of the Japanese mainland.¹⁴