Too Damn Close

1

SOME of us have had the experience of seeing hung behind a car an intriguing little plate which excites our desire to find out what it is all about. When we have succeeded in maneuvering ourselves behind the car at a stop light, this plate carries the very disagreeable message: “If you can read this, you are too damn close!”

I must say that I do not approve of this way of conveying a message by inducing the recipient to contravene the orders it contains. Nevertheless, the sign is very significant. We may find ourselves in a position behind a preceding car which does not of itself imply a catastrophe, but which may instantly become one by any sudden braking of the front car, or by any emergency which may face us around a corner.

The country has recently been flooded with a series of books on atomic warfare. Some of these tell us how close we may come to world destruction and still not be destroyed. This may be a valid message, if only the road is clear and no new emergencies face us around the corner. The author of one of these books has told me personally that his purpose is to show that another war will not necessarily be fatal to civilization. This military version of “Another little drink won’t hurt us" shares much of the unconvincingness of the alcoholic assertion on which it is patterned. Another little drink is going to hurt us, and this is the reason why.

The author of the comforting statement in question is a well-known engineer. The engineer must be accurate in estimating the powers and significance of existing pieces of apparatus. He can tell us if a bomb drawn to certain specific plans will exterminate everyone within a radius of 2000 feet, or only within a radius of 1800 feet. However, the traditionally trained engineer does not like even to consider the possibility of a piece of apparatus for which he has not yet received the blueprint. Nevertheless, the level of invention is continually shifting, and part of that future which we have to allow for in any path of human activity is the future of the art of invention itself.

Note that the economic forces of our society compel the inventor to assume an ambivalent attitude toward his work. No man can be an inventor unless he has developed an apparatus going beyond those before him. At the same time, when he has developed this apparatus, he has the problem of exploiting it. He must make his fortune in the possibly short period which elapses between the completion of his own invention and the arrival of the next one to make it obsolete. Thus, once his invention has been made, there is no more desperately conservative soul than the inventor. The man who invents an analogy computer will fight tooth and nail before he deigns to admit that the digital computer may have some legitimate advantages; and the man who invents the mechanical type of digital computer will see himself almost drawn and quartered before he recognizes the electronic computer as its destined successor.

Now, the atomic bomb and its monstrous progeny do not represent a static discovery. They represent a very active stage in the course of developing science.

Nuclear physics was born in the work of the Curies. From then until the first time that Cockcroft and Walton were able to produce transmutation in a normally stable element was a matter of thirty years. From the time of Cockcroft and Walton to the first large-scale production of energy derived from nuclear sources was no more than a decade. In the few years which have passed since the explosions of Los Alamos, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, progress — with all its devils — has been made by leaps and bounds.

The present situation is this: We know of quite a number of reactions of the nuclear type which take place in the sun and in the stars. We know a considerable amount concerning the conditions which are necessary for these reactions to take place. Some of them have been duplicated on the earth, and others which have nowhere been observed in the heavens have been performed for the first time on the earth.

The great difficulty with these reactions is that although they generate enormous concentrations of energy, they cannot occur except in situations in which enormous (although often smaller) concentrations of energy have already been generated. We thus find a certain interplay of the nuclear reactions and of our possibility of further experimentation.

I know nothing specific about the proposed hydrogen bomb except that it involves reactions of a type known to occur in the sun. To trigger these reactions, there is needed something not too remote from solar temperatures and pressures. The natural place to seek these is in the neighborhood of the atomic bombs which we have already created — the uranium or plutonium bomb. In other words, in some sense or other, we may expect the hydrogen bomb to have a primer of the character of the atomic bombs already known to us; and we may further expect it to serve itself as a primer for even more potent reactions.

The ultimate limit to which Einstein theory permits us to go in the transformation of matter into energy is the complete transformation. This is hundreds of times more potent than any atomic reaction of which we have as yet made use. It could be obtained if we could bring an accumulation of electrons into close enough contact with an accumulation of positrons. Up to the present, the positrons have been among the most intractable members of our repertory of primitive particles; but there are signs that this intractability may be only a thing of the present.

What has happened is that we have discovered a considerable number of new intellectual and experimental tools for handling the atomic nucleus. Some time may come when these exploratory tools may be used to the limit, and yield nothing new. Nobody is ready to believe that this time has yet come. We are in a situation analogous to that of the liquefaction of gases toward the end of the last century. Then each liquefaction of a new gas rendered possible the liquefaction of a more refractory one. That sequence of discoveries and techniques did indeed come to an end, and that end was permanently obtained by the liquefaction of helium — the most refractory of all gases. In other words, it came to an end only when it could go no further.

2

UNDER these circumstances, it is sheer folly to estimate the social consequences of atomic physics on the strength of what we can knowingly accomplish with the present atomic bombs. The first group of bombs, those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, numbered their dead in tens of thousands. The experiments of Bikini made it clear that even these primitive bombs might have vastly increased their total kill if they had been used to inundate a maritime city with a spray of poison water instead of being used for the sake of a detonation well above the surface of the earth.

After Bikini, there was a period during which the experts estimated from 100 to 1000 to be the number of bombs needed so to poison the atmosphere that a permanent effect was to be expected on the whole heredity of the human race. There have been various revisions of this estimate, and it is quite possible that it is too small. The new hydrogen bomb has so far displayed its power only in estimates, but its sheer power to scorch and burn appears to be of the order of 1000 of the Hiroshima bomb. It seems possible that it may be so used that its poisoning of the atmosphere is of far less relative importance than that of the uranium or the plutonium bomb. Note well, however, the precise words of this statement: “it may be so used.” It seems equally clear that if it succeeds at all, and most atomic physicists estimate that it will succeed, it may also “be so used,” in connection with metallic powders and dust, that its poisoning power is quite on a par with its searing power. If this is so, we are but one step or a step and a half from a weapon which may well give the coup de grâce to the whole human race.

It may be thought that even with the very rapid progress of invention in matters concerning atomic bombs, when the stage is really reached at which the makers of policy will themselves become aware that the atomic bomb is a threat to their lives, we shall then suddenly back water and adopt a policy looking forward to universal peace. However, to defend ourselves from a catastrophe by the very imminence of the catastrophe is very far from wise. To begin with, one of the two sides may come to this awareness of the catastrophic possibilities of its own bombs later than the other. We have hardly as yet reached the freedom of communication between antagonists that allows us to say to Mr. Stalin, “Look here, you may not know it yet, but if you use your bomb to blow us up, you will poison your own atmosphere so that the end of the United States will be the end of Russia, and the whole world will be one great shambles.”

In addition we have the fact that human blunders are even now being made, and will be made, such as those which lead to the grounding of ships. This is a field in which we are “supposed” to have an adequate know-how. The sanctions obliging a captain to look after the welfare of his ship are quite as psychologically cogent as those which might deter him from blowing up the human race. It is not that the act in one case is as serious as the act in the other, but that in both cases the sanctions are fully as strong as the moral judgment — and the character — of the officer concerned, and they can be no stronger. In the grounding of the Missouri, it is quite clear from the captain’s own statement that he went ahead when he had insufficient information as to the nature of certain buoys which he had sighted, and that when he had asked his junior officers, he received no answer which caused him to hesitate in his conduct. It appears that one officer present knew of the unwisdom of the course adopted, but he was so junior that he did not dare to tell his superiors about it. This conduct is reminiscent of what happened to King Stanislas of Poland when, in a bout of drunkenness, he fell down one of the chimneys of his palace in Nancy and there was no person present who had a sufficiently elevated rank to be permitted by court etiquette to touch the body of the king.

I ask, What omens do these examples of human folly offer for the proper control of the atomic bomb? Even in peacetime, after the browbeating they have received, atomic scientists are at least as loath to give effective but unpopular advice to generals as were the servants of King Stanislas to profane the Royal Person. In wartime, the situation is aggravated twofold, and only those scientists who happen to have been passed by the FBI and admitted to the Presence will have any chance of preventing a catastrophe which only some obscure worker may have foreseen. Etiquette must be observed, and to hell with King Stanislas and the human race!

The average American, informed only by the press, fears Russia. He is of the opinion that in our diplomatic exchanges with Russia in connection with the atomic bomb we have gone to the extreme of what we can do, and that no problem will be solved by further negotiation. There is no doubt whatever that the Russians are among the hardest people in the world with whom to bargain, but there is in my mind a very considerable doubt as to whether, in view of the nature of atomic warfare, we have gone to the limit to which we should have gone, to come together with them and avoid catastrophe. Our earlier proposals were made under the assumption that we alone possessed the atomic bomb, and during a period in which we most definitely felt that there would be a considerable delay before the Russians’ know-how might enable them to compete with us in this respect. During that period, we stated our offers in such a way that they involved a certain type of machinery of inspection which the Russians, who took the situation as emotionally as we ourselves did, felt to be a threat to their national integrity. The later negotiations have been carried out under the regime of a cold war which is equally unlikely to lead us to a successful understanding. The very idea of temporizing with Russia in any matter has been made so hateful to the people of the United States that for some time now a statesman who ventures to suggest it has become likely to find his authority cut off at home.

Nevertheless, in view of the significance of modern means of warfare, this emotionally distasteful mode of procedure is all that is left for us, and all that is left for Russia. Whether we like it or not, the Russians and ourselves are living on the same planet. The conversion of this planet into a lifeless desert, either by a sudden catastrophe or through a mounting sequence of misfortunes, would be quite as annoying to them as to us. Fundamentally, they can have no more desire than we to celebrate a nominal victory by a universal funeral pyre of both sides. They share with us a healthy hope for a longer span of life on this earth.

Once we realize the devastating power of the next atomic bomb and the fact that before another war comes it may well be this bomb with which we have to deal rather than those which face us now, it becomes clear that our situation vis-à-vis Russia is that of two men locked in a small cellar, each holding a hand grenade. They hate each other, but they are not suicidal men, and each has a desire to survive. Under these conditions, the hand grenades are totally without function. Whoever throws one may smear his opponent on the wall a little more completely than he does himself. But this is not an important matter.

This is not important if the two opponents have a sense of fact. If either of them has his mind so obfuscated by propaganda that he considers the slaughter of the other as a triumph which is only slightly marred by the danger to himself, then we may see a totally stupid annihilation of the two. So long as we are dominated by a rigid propaganda which makes the destruction of Russia appear more important than our own survival, the risk is present. Our hope is that we may meet a tough but realistic adversary by a humane but realistic attitude. The Russians because of their very totalitarian nature are less likely to be led to catastrophe by a psychopathic wish for self-destruction.

If we were now fighting Hitler’s Germany this would not be a valid statement. The Germans were full of a belief in glory, and of a somewhat wistful admiration of self-destruction. Hitler was not totally displeased by ending his career in suicide, and if this suicide could have torn down his opponents with him, he would have been delighted. Indeed he envisaged himself as the Samson of the temple of humanity. The Russians, on the other hand, have no intention of salvaging their glory by suicide. They intend to live, and it is this very desire for life that makes them so tough.

It is thus the very hardheadedness of our enemies that gives us our best hope for something short of race suicide. If we meet the Russian toughness by an attitude which contains an equal willingness to acknowledge facts when they are facts, it is quite likely that we can avoid the explosion in tHo cellar.