Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [22]
All this seems promising. But there remains considerable bleakness in Wells’s vision. The man mostly responsible for devising the technology of the bomb, young Holsten who once played with fireflies, is tormented by his discoveries even before they wreck, then set free, the world. Perhaps what is done is done; he is helpless to alter the course of events, for, he says, ‘I am a little instrument in the armoury of Change’. Indeed, he despairs, ‘if I were to burn all these [scientific] papers, before a score of years had passed some other men would be doing this’. The book ends with the death of a selfless hero named Marcus Karenin. Before his death, Karenin’s caretakers at a hospital high in the mountains of Kashmir express optimism that humans have learned their lesson, bitterly taught by atomic bombs. Karenin is doubtful: ‘There is a kind of inevitable logic now in the progress of research ...If there had been no Holsten there would have been some similar man. If atomic energy had not come in one year it would have come in another.’ This logic would become familiar to the physicists who, through the 1920s and 1930s, closed in on the awesome and terrible potential of the atom’s nucleus.1
Wells was hardly the first, of course, to consider the potentially disastrous consequences of science and technology run amok. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) comes readily to mind. Less commonly read is the dystopian novel The Coming Race, published in 1871 by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who is perhaps best remembered for writing the sentence, ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ The Coming Race concerns the discovery, beneath the surface of the earth, of a people called the Vril-ya, who have harnessed an enormously powerful force called vril. This substance gives the Vril-ya light, the ability to heal the sick, and control over the weather. Because it is at the same time so destructive, it has made war impossible: ‘If army met army, and both had command of this agency, it could be but the annihilation of each.’ Bulwer-Lytton concludes that a society so fearfully well adjusted must be deadly dull, unable to produce art, culture, or military heroes such as Hannibal or George Washington. Whatever the logic of Bulwer-Lytton’s position, it was not The Coming Race but The World Set Free that captured the imagination of an avid reader named Leo Szilard when he encountered Wells’s book nearly two decades after it had been written.
1. Hitler’s gifts, Britain’s scientists
Szilard was a Hungarian-born physicist. Drafted during the First World War into the Austro-Hungarian army, he had survived only because he was sent home from his unit with what turned out to be Spanish influenza; while he was recovering in Budapest, his regiment was sent to the front and wiped out. After the war he left Hungary to study in Germany, first engineering, then physics at the University of Berlin. Albert Einstein was there, and Max Planck, and the chemist Fritz Haber, who had survived professionally his involvement in manufacturing poison gas and was back at work. Szilard’s was a restless mind that settled eventually on nuclear physics. He was also an avid reader, and in 1928 he read Wells’s The Open Conspiracy, which envisioned a version of Michael Polanyi’s scientific republic. The following year Szilard went to London to meet Wells, but only in 1932 did he discover The World