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nevertheless convinced themselves that the bomb should be built and used, not so much because it represented human progress, or because they as scientists were amoral with respect to politics and military strategy, but rather because they believed that using the bomb would defeat the enemy more quickly than not using the bomb and thus save human lives on all sides. In this calculation, considerations of jus in bello yielded to jus ad bellum: any means can be employed if the cause is represented as just and the aim is to end a combat as soon as possible—which is, presumably, a universal desire. Shorter wars mean fewer people die. There is a logic to that, though hardly an impeccable logic; as Michael Walzer points out, it is not clear why civilians in Hiroshima sacrificed their rights to remain unharmed during the war. Nor would Americans have looked benignly on an atomic bombing of Philadelphia had the Japanese possessed the bomb and felt the need to shorten the war and thus save lives on all sides.40

TWO - Great Britain: Refugees, Air Power, and the Possibility of the Bomb

The World Set Free, H. G. Wells’s futuristic novel simultaneously dystopian and hopeful, was published as Europe verged on war in 1914. It was dedicated, curiously, not to an intimate, nor even a person, but to another book: The Interpretation of Radium, by the University of London chemist Frederick Soddy, which Wells acknowledged as the principal source for his scientific material. In his book, Wells predicts the discovery of nuclear fission. His character Wells Holsten explores the phosphorescence of Italian fireflies, then moves to experiment with heating and cooling gases. Another character—a physics professor at Edinburgh—lectures on radioactivity. He declares that the atom, which ‘once we thought hard and impenetrable’, was in fact ‘a reservoir of immense energy’, capable of powering an ocean liner, lighting the city streets for a year, or—and here the professor waved a small bottle of uranium oxide—blowing the lecture hall and everyone in it to fragments. It is, unhappily, to this last purpose that humankind chooses to put nuclear power. World war breaks out in the mid-twentieth century. A plane from the Central European alliance strikes Paris with an atomic bomb. A French pilot vows to retaliate; he flies off to Berlin carrying three atomic bombs made from the radioactive element Carolinum. The moment of truth seems in retrospect almost quaint. As his ‘steersman’ guides the plane, the pilot (‘a dark young man with something negroid about his gleaming face’) straddles his box of bombs. Lifting out the first, ‘a black sphere two feet in diameter,’ he activates it by biting through a celluloid strip between the bomb’s handles, then heaves it over the side of the plane in the general direction of Berlin. He repeats the process with the second bomb, but the third one detonates while it is still clutched to his chest, turning pilot, steersman, and plane into ‘flying rags and splinters of metal and drops of moisture in the air’. Below, struck by the first two bombs, Berlin is laid waste.

All the atomic bombs dropped during Wells’s world war burrow into the earth, where they create a volcano effect, turning soil and rock molten and spewing forth radioactive Carolinum and vapor for weeks or months or years. After Berlin has been obliterated, the Germans punish Holland with atom bombs that ‘fell like Lucifer’ on Dutch dikes. The East End of London is destroyed, as is Parliament and an additional portion of Westminster. China and Japan bomb Moscow, the United States hits Tokyo, a Japanese attempt on San Francisco falls short but makes the Pacific steam, and, with the bombing of New Delhi—‘a pit of fire spouting death and flame’— India falls into anarchy. Everywhere the sky grows dark, blotting out the daylight. The ground fissures. Radioactivity drifts miles from the bombs’ targets, rendering nearly every major city and its environs uninhabitable.

In the end, however, Wells offers hope. A few humble statesmen bring their colleagues together in the