Kati Marton, The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the WorldSimon & Schuster; US$27; 271pp
P. D. Smith, Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon; Allen Lane; $59.95; 553pp
Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe
Simon & Schuster; $49.95; 675pp
[First published in Australian Literary Review, 07/11/2007]
In Point of Departure (1967), the British journalist James Cameron evokes in darkly humorous detail the formative event of his life and career: his attendance at Operation Crossroads in Bikini Atoll in 1946. In his account of the preparations for the test – ‘a monstrous scientific joust’ designed to analyse the effectiveness of atomic weaponry on a battle fleet – Cameron recalls the ‘extravagant multitude of strange personalities’ and their stacks of equipment. In particular, he remembers
the underwater specialist whose contribution to the sum of human knowledge was the fact that the shrimps at the bottom of Bikini Lagoon could talk. They made a sound, he said, resembling: ‘Awk, awk.’
Cameron continues:
Questioned after the explosion as to the behaviour of the atomised shrimps he replied: ‘They are still saying “Awk, awk”, only shriller.’
It is one effect of nuclear weaponry to have made us all a little shriller. And small wonder, when you consider the subject. The two explosions at Bikini Atoll were, scientifically speaking, a failure (neither did the kind of damage predicted). But no one can watch the explosion footage, or the footage of any nuclear explosion, without experiencing a flash of emotion analogous to the blast itself. Is this what the human race has come to – this spectacular act of Promethean hubris? A witness to the Trinity test in New Mexico, the first ever test of a nuclear weapon, described the resulting mushroom cloud as looking like a ‘diseased brain’. Confronted with the pictures, it is hard not to feel that that description works on two levels.
However, and as these books testify, the moral waters are far murkier than that, and we shrimps, if we want to be taken seriously, do well to put our ‘awks’ of protest on hold until the facts are in. Retrospective clairvoyance is a historian’s luxury – one that the better historians avoid. Looking to the future, there are no counterfactuals for precisely the reason that there are no facts to counter. Put simply: ‘what ifs’ are all we have.
The big ‘what if’ in 1939, seven years before Operation Crossroads, was almost too appalling to contemplate. What if Germany – Nazi Germany: stomping, genocidal Germany – develops an atomic weapon? The possibility was by no means remote. In Berlin, the physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had split the uranium nucleus. Moreover, the Nazis would soon have access to the world’s most important source of uranium: the Congo, then a Belgian colony. Of course, we know now that Hitler’s scientists were behind the game in all kinds of ways and that one of the principal reasons for their failure was the fact that the Nazis’ pathological anti-Semitism had chased away (and often killed) the very people who could have finished the job. (Hitler loved to wax hysterical about ‘Hebrew’ science and the German ‘soul’.) In 1939, however, none of this was obvious. To act on any other assumption than that the Nazis would soon be in possession of the bomb would have been morally negligent.
In a sense it is fitting that the very people who might have gifted Hitler the bomb were the ones who eventually developed it for the allies. Indeed, it is tempting (though potentially hazardous) to see the development of the atomic bomb as proof of the link between ingenuity and freedom. The Nazis were the enemies of civilisation. What better revenge for civilisation than to make the war unwinnable for the Nazis?
Kati Marton’s The Great Escape, the story of nine Hungarian Jews who ‘fled Hitler and changed the world’, makes this point implicitly. In Cultural Amnesia, Clive James has shown how anti-Semitism in pre-war Vienna resulted in a thriving café society in which creativity was able to flourish. Marton shows the same chain reaction at work in Vienna’s sister city, Budapest. If anything, it’s an even better laboratory in which to study the phenomenon. It was Hungary, after all, that ushered in the age of militant anti-Semitism with Horthy’s proto-fascist regime and its discriminatory legislation limiting the number of Jews allowed in most professions to twenty percent.
Marton’s Hungarians are Robert Capa (photographer), Andre Kertesz (photographer), Michael Curtiz (film director), Alexander Korda (film director), Arthur Koestler (novelist) and the members of the so-called ‘Hungarian quartet’: Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner and John von Neumann: three scientists and a mathematician, all of whom worked on the atom bomb. Marton’s thesis (never stated, but unmistakable) is that all of these men were instrumental in the fight against totalitarianism: not just Nazism, but fascism and communism. Curtiz’s film Casablanca, for example, was an attack on American isolationism, ‘a call to anti-fascist arms’, while Capa’s immortal photographic record of the victims of Generalissimo Franco alerted the world to the savagery of fascism (his most famous photograph, The Falling Soldier, is likened to Picasso’s Guernica). However, it is the Hungarian quartet that has had the biggest effect on history. Indeed, the book begins with the meeting between Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein (another refugee from Hitler) in Long Island in 1939, in which Szilard argued that a chain reaction could be harnessed to make uranium bombs. ‘Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht’ replied Einstein. ‘I had not thought of that at all.’
The story of the science is its own taut thriller and there isn’t space to retell it here. Nor is it dealt with in any great detail by Marton in The Great Escape, which has many other things to recommend it, including a wonderfully lucid style and a skilfully woven narrative. But for those with the time and inclination to get their heads around nuclear physics, with its dizzying intermingling of the massive and the infinitesimal, then P. D. Smith’s Doomsday Men is as good a place to start as any. Despite its rather titillating title and the schlock-horror gaudiness of its fifties-style cover, Smith’s is a hugely interesting history of some hugely difficult subject matter, in which the alchemy of nuclear fission and fusion is merely part of a wider story stretching back to the nineteenth century and taking in the research into radium conducted by Marie and Pierre Curie, Ernest Rutherford’s ‘disintegration hypothesis’ (which showed that radioactive substances were in a state of constant disintegration), Einstein’s breakthrough in 1905 (his theory of special relativity and its punchline, E=mc²) and Szilard’s flash of inspiration while waiting for traffic lights to change near Russell Square in Bloomsbury, London (it was here that Szilard first conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction). Then, of course, there’s the Manhattan Project, the building of the world’s first nuclear reactor, the Trinity test in 1945, and the starting-point for all moral discussions about the use of nuclear weapons: the destruction of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Smith is no less fascinating on the pre-history of weapons of mass destruction, from the chemical weapons of the First World War, to Japan’s experiments with biological weaponry, to the bombing of German and Japanese cities (the accounts of which are scarcely less harrowing than the accounts of the effects of the atom bomb). He also tells the story of the H-Bomb (the hydrogen, or fusion, bomb), in which Edward Teller played a crucial role. Teller, indeed, according to Smith, is one of the models for Peter Sellers’s crippled ex-Nazi, Dr Strangelove, in Stanley Kubrick’s film of that name, though the idea for the so-called Doomsday device with which the Soviets blow up the world in the final scene of that incomparable film actually came from Leo Szilard, who suggested, by way of a warning to the world, that a hydrogen bomb could be rigged to produce a deadly pall of radioactive fallout, thereby ending all life on the planet.
It is here, of course, that the ethical issues begin to take over from scientific ones and Smith is excellent on the moral debates that went on amongst the ‘Los Alomites’ – the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project. Nuclear science is Janus-faced; it has the potential to be both saviour and destroyer. And it is interesting (and more than a little worrying) that the members of the Hungarian quartet – four men with near-identical backgrounds – should have reached such wildly different conclusions about the role of nuclear weapons. For while Teller and von Neumann, and to a lesser extent Wigner, became pillars of the conservative establishment, Szilard experienced a crisis of conscience not dissimilar to that experienced by the inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel. Consequently, he became, if not a prophet of doom, then at least a pretty vocal Cassandra. As early as 1943, he was advocating international controls to prevent a post-war nuclear arms race. Unfortunately, the attitude in Washington at the time is best summed up by the popular chaff that there was no need to fear a Soviet attack with a nuclear weapon concealed in a suitcase since the Soviets had yet to perfect a suitcase.
Szilard, however, had an impressive ally: his friend and colleague Albert Einstein, a man so fundamental to this story that his contribution is easily neglected. Einstein, of course, is key in two ways: first, as the genius whose 1905 paper, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, had formulated the theory of special relativity, which challenged the basis of classical physics and provided science with the conceptual tools with which to build an atomic bomb (the equation E=mc² states that the amount of energy liberated when matter is annihilated equals the mass of the matter itself multiplied by the speed of light squared); and second, as signatory to the famous letter, the fruit of his meeting with Szilard in Long Island, urging President Roosevelt to fund research into the atomic bomb. But there is also a third, more indirect way, in which Einstein is connected with the nuclear story: his shifting moral response to a technology with the power to rescue civilisation and the potential to wipe out life itself.
Walter Isaacson’s new biography Einstein: His Life and Universe is as excellent on this absorbing topic as it is on every other aspect of Einstein’s remarkable life and career. Isaacson shows how deeply allergic Einstein was to all forms of nationalism and anything that smacked of a herd mentality. Indeed, he was so averse to conflict that he even disliked playing chess with friends. In 1939, however, Einstein put his pacifism on hold and agreed to sign the letter to Roosevelt that led to the establishment of the Manhattan Project and thence to the invention of the atomic bomb. However, and as the destructive power of nuclear weaponry became apparent, Einstein, like Szilard, had a change of heart and began to worry at the question of arms control to the point where it threatened to rival his search for a unified field theory that would explain the universe. A socialist and an internationalist, Einstein’s answer to the nuclear problem was a sort of one-world federalism – an international body backed up by force.
Einstein was right in one regard: the solution has to be political. The nuclear bomb cannot be uninvented; it can only be restricted and monitored. We are now in the midst of a second arms race, one in which the logic of deterrence looks to have markedly less to say, assuming as it does a reasoning mind. (How funny will that crack about the suitcase be when a dirty bomb goes off in London?) Is civilisation up to the challenge? Put simply: if it is to endure, it must be. When Einstein was asked what kind of weapons would be used in a Third World War, he replied: ‘I do not know how the Third World War will be fought … but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth – rocks.’
