The Rise of Nuclear Fear
By Spencer R. Weart
Harvard University Press

For readers born since 1990, nuclear fear may be a concept hard to access. Thermonuclear war is something out of cheesy old movies or video games, and nuclear power is a running joke on The Simpsons. Even older generations that saw those movies without irony— on any given day nuclear apocalypse was possibly just around the corner—don’t think about it much anymore. Even though the U.S. and Russia have enough hydrogen bombs still pointed at each other to set civilization back for decades.

But as Spencer Weart writes, “Sometimes the most powerful things in our heads are the ones we don’t pay attention to.” It takes just a few new events to resurrect fearful images: the Fukushima reactor disaster in Japan, the specter of a mushroom cloud over an American city from a terrorist bomb from Iraq or Iran. Those nightmarish images were created over many decades, and Weart produces a history of that imagery.

At first it was extremely positive: the discovery of radium and early theories of atomic potential led some scientists and journalists to proclaim unlimited power for almost no cost, leading to the rich and gleaming White City of the future. But even in the early 20th century the atom’s equally immense potential for destructiveness was the subject of warnings and science fiction tales of total devastation: the Empty City.

  Then in 1945 came the reality. “With the news from Hiroshima sensitive thinkers quickly realized that doomsday was no longer just a religious or science-fiction myth, but as real a part of the possible future as tomorrow’s breakfast.” Weart chronicles the oscillating hopes for utopia and fears of oblivion, and the highly instructive repressions, denial and numbing during the most obviously threatened decades from the 50s through the 80s. He does so in even greater detail (and with better sourcing) in his earlier book (titled simply Nuclear Fear) but in exploring what he calls the post-1990 Second Nuclear Age  in this book, he demonstrates how this imagery echoes—for example, in the pictures of the Twin Towers falling and the devastation around Ground Zero, with their powerful reminders of the mushroom cloud and the Empty City of Hiroshima.

Weart also links nuclear imagery with more ancient and archetypal images, particularly of alchemy (as did some early atomic scientists.) The failure of the climate crisis to inspire motivating imagery, he believes, is because it had not yet found that mythological depth.   

  While Weart suggests that nuclear fear may have helped prevent actual nuclear war, he sees more virtue in disengaging the imagery from the realities, especially when it comes to nuclear power versus fossil fuel pollution—particularly from coal-- that has already killed and sickened millions.

As Weart shows by his approach and this book's content, the response to atomic power involves facts and feelings, in many different combinations.  (Sometimes when the public felt they were being lied to, they were right.) Weart is frequently perceptive in both the more metaphorical areas and in the relationship of imagery to fact in both of the nuclear arenas--as well as in their relationship to each other. His writing voice is clear and with enough personality to carry reader interest and confidence.  Because he explores the topic to the depth required for understanding it--and our times--this is an important book.  Together with Nuclear Fear, and a few other books like DeGroot's The Bomb and  Lindquvist's A History of Bombing, it is indispensable to that understanding.         

'>THE BOMB: A Life
by Gerard J. DeGroot
Harvard University Press 432 pages, $27.95

by William S. Kowinski

Gerard DeGroot includes a number of eyewitness descriptions of nuclear explosions, which bring the march of names, facts, lies, rationales and theories in this relentless history back to human reality, if only for a moment at a time. The largest hydrogen bomb explosion to that date---twice as large as expected---took place on Bikini Island in 1954. From a U.S. Navy destroyer thirty miles away, Marshall Rosenbluth watched the fireball: "rising and rising, spreading...It looked to me like what you might imagine a diseased brain, or a brain of some mad man would look like...And it just kept getting bigger and bigger..."

DeGroot, Professor of Modern History at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, writes with grace and economy of a 60-year history still unfolding. Besides his admirable summations and deft narratives based on many long-available sources, he was able to add descriptions of the Russian bomb program and other details that have emerged in recent years (some crucial information about nuclear missiles already in Cuba during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was only revealed in the late 1990s.) Although always ready to call a lie a lie (and there were many), and to name insane policies for what they were, he also provides the reader with enough well-organized facts in convincingly developed contexts to allow everyone to form their own impressions.

The pre-history of the bomb is fascinating. In the mid-1930s, few physicists had even thought about an atomic bomb, or if they had, believed one was possible; or if they believed it was theoretically possible, that it could be made a practical reality. But between 1938 and the autumn of 1941, the bomb went from a weird notion to a massive research and development program in the U.S., and lesser but still significant programs in Germany and the USSR. Eventually there was even a small program in Japan.

That Germany didn't develop the bomb is the most resonant story. Most advanced physics was being done in Europe, and most of that in Germany, until 1933, when Hitler directed that non-Aryans be fired from civil service jobs, which included universities and scientific institutes. Eleven physicists who had won or would win Nobel Prizes were dismissed. Around 100 German physicists, most of them Jews, wound up in the U.S. by 1941. They not only provided the scientific talent but a lot of the motivation for the U.S. bomb program.

But even after Hitler had gotten rid of Jewish practitioners of the "Jew science" of physics, it was a German physicist who had the key insight that for the first time revealed that the atomic bomb was possible. But no one listened. In 1934, Ida Noddack suggested that some puzzling results of an experiment conducted by Enrico Fermi in Italy might be explained by nuclear fission. But Noddack was not well-known, and she was a woman. (In '>The Big Bang, Simon Singh reveals many contributions of women in physics and astronomy through the years, though they didn't get much credit.)

It wasn't until 1938 that Fermi himself figured it out, but even then it took another physicist, Leo Szilard, to understand the implications. He knew immediately that the atomic bomb was possible, because he had already read about it, and how it was developed and used in warfare. It was all in a novel by H.G. Wells, written in 1914, including its name: the atomic bomb. Szilard also realized, from his reading of Wells, that if knowledge of fission and the bomb got into the wrong hands, it could mean the end of civilization.

Szilard won the Nobel Prize in 1938, and after picking up the award in Sweden, he and his wife emigrated to America. In addition to his own researches, Szilard was instrumental in first, getting U.S. and British physicists to stop publishing anything about fission, and then getting Albert Einstein to write his famous letter to FDR, and to enlist other influential people in convincing the U.S. government to develop the bomb before Hitler did.

But as DeGroot shows, the letter was so circumspect, and Szilard, Einstein and other physicists so unable to express in plain language the possible implications, that the American government dragged its feet. Hitler had been given such a clear paragraph, and he started the German program. What convinced FDR was not Einstein's letter but a story, a metaphor. Alexander Sachs was an international financier and friend of Einstein, who got the letter to FDR, but in a later meeting with FDR he simply told a story about a young American inventor who went to Napoleon during wartime and offered his invention, which the emperor turned down. The inventor was James Watt, the invention the steam engine. This got Roosevelt's attention.

The story of the bomb is replete with the tricks of fate and power of metaphor, including some forty years later, when Ronald Reagan finally committed to nuclear arms reductions with the Soviets after seeing the TV movie, '>"The Day After," that depicted the impact of a nuclear strike on families in Kansas.

There is no more powerful and defining story of the past 60 years as well as the world we live in as the story of the Bomb. Though the lethal effects of radioactivity were denied for decades, and the extent of cancers and genetic malformations suffered across America as a result of nuclear tests are still obscured, the bomb settled deeply into our national unconscious, and helped define our feelings about our leaders, about science and scientists, and about the future, or lack thereof.

The Bomb has remained in the national unconscious not only because so much about it is impossible for the rational mind to absorb or the psyche to comprehend, but because of the lies and misinformation. In 1971 Richard Nixon prevented crucial information from reaching the Supreme Court so they would not interfere with the largest bomb ever exploded within the U.S. at Amchitka island in Alaska. Radioactive elements from that explosion were still leaking into the Bering Sea by 1996.

In just a few weeks, diplomats from around the world will gather in New York to discuss the nuclear non-proliferation agreements that U.S. policy now endanger. Some observers expect proliferation to grow substantially as a result of this treaty's failure. Perhaps because visible testing ended decades ago, and the Hiroshima photos are in black and white, Americans don't seem to fear nuclear weapons anymore as beyond the pale. Yet one expert estimates the chances of a nuclear weapon exploding in an American city in the present decade at 50%. This book is essential in more than the classroom.

There are also new books on two of the best-known scientists associated with the Bomb. '>EDWARD TELLER: The Real Dr. Strangelove'> by Peter Goodchild (Harvard University Press) is a careful, detailed biography of the most frightening figure of the atomic age, because he was the most successful in convincing important people and a large segment of the public for a very long time that he was brilliant and trustworthy and courageous, when he was paranoid, dishonest and incapable in the extreme. As the chief model for Dr. Strangelove, Teller was a figure of parody, but in an age that produced Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and such lesser- known demonical liars as General Leslie Groves (who ran the U.S. Bomb program for years), he emerges as the era's best argument for the existence of Satan.

I haven't had the opportunity to see '>AMERICAN PROMETHEUS: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (Knopf), but my virtual colleague at the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, Elizabeth Svoboda, found that this this 721 page biography of the director of the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos laboratories has much to say about the shifting "uneasy partnership between science and politics in America."

While DeGroot's new book takes a comprehensive view of the Bomb's history, there are many worthy books that examine specific facets. One that I particularly admire is '>NO PLACE TO HIDE '>by David Bradley (University Press of New England, 1984) which combines his eyewitness account of the "Crossroads" atomic bomb tests in 1946---of particular interest to me since I was born on the day of the first explosion---with more recent data on the health effects of these and other tests, contrasting with all the lies told to the American people by Leslie Groves and others. The combination is instructive on many levels.

DeGroot writes about the most significant of the many books, movies and television programs that make up an important part of the Atomic Age history, and there are many other books that deal with just these aspects. I still admire'> NUCLEAR FEAR by Spencer Weart (Harvard, 1988)for its thoroughness and insights, though I don't always agree with his conclusions.

Finally, we must not forget that The Bomb was used as a bomb, and may be again. Therefore, Sven Lindquist's '>A HISTORY OF BOMBING (The New Press) remains essential reading.

Reading Einstein


I recently reviewed Thomas Levenson's Einstein in Berlin (Bantam) in the San Francisco Chronicle---in fact, right here. I was asked to do this review, as opposed to suggesting the book myself, though if I had known about it I might well have asked to do it. I've been fascinated by Einstein, and recently had been dipping into a selection of his own non-scientific essays, called Ideas and Opinions. But I don't write reviews for myself. I write them for readers of the Chronicle, and specifically readers who might be interested in reading the book I'm reviewing.

Of course I can't know who they are, but I can make educated guesses. Who would be interested in a book on Einstein? First of all, I guessed, readers interested in physics and the history of twentieth century science. Because Einstein was and remains famous as a pacifist, there would be readers interested in that aspect, particularly in this time of fresh debate and heartache over issues of war and peace. And there would be people tempted just by the magic of Einstein's name, his image as the model of scientific genius, his celebrity status. Just a few years ago, Time Magazine picked him as the most influential figure of the twentieth century. He's the kind of known name with a little known life that probably attracts readers who simply like reading biographies. These days, there are lots of those people; biographies are high on the list of the most popular nonfiction books.

So I tried to answer questions each of these "readers" might have, as well as answer one of my own---a question that had occurred to me recently: how did Einstein reconcile his pacifism with his letter to FDR that, history says, strongly suggested that the U.S. develop an atomic bomb before Germany did?

For readers of biography and people specifically interested in Einstein, I wrote that this wasn't actually a biography. It was limited to Einstein's years in Berlin, from just before World War I until just before World War II. And at least half of the book was about Berlin in those years, and the various figures that dominated German history, politics, and the arts as well as science---including following Adolf Hitler from his years as a low-ranking, generally enthusiastic and incredibly lucky soldier in World War I. Readers interested in physics and the history of science would find that those topics were treated with economy and precision.

I tried to answer my own question, even though (as I wrote) it wasn't one that Levenson ever asked. The bare facts of it are partly in his book, and partly in another book I read as I was preparing this review, called Einstein in America by Jamie Sayen (Crown, 1985). I liked the Sayen book very much, and it was a delightful companion to Levenson's. They were very interesting to read one after the other.

Though Einstein was pretty much out of the loop on atomic research by the late 1930s, there were few physicists who believed an atomic bomb was possible or practical. Some didn't believe it until Hiroshima. Einstein had already escaped Germany and was vacationing on Long Island in the summer of 1939 when his old friend, Leo Szilard, told him of his own research which suggested that a chain reaction was possible. Einstein immediately realized what this meant, and the two discussed what to do. At a second meeting, Einstein dictated a letter to President Roosevelt, which Szilard rewrote, and possibly others worked on, but that Einstein signed. It warned that an atomic bomb might be possible and that German scientists appeared to be working along lines that would lead them to that conclusion as well. He noted that Germany had stopped the export of uranium from Czechoslovakian mines. He requested that the U.S. government "establish contact with the scientists working on nuclear physics, and that it help subsidize research and the procurement of uranium," Sayen writes.

President Roosevelt responded to this letter by appointing a team to study the matter, and they quickly recommended the actions suggested in the letter, but did little more after that . Szilard got Einstein to write a second letter in 1940 "designed to rekindle Roosevelt's interest in uranium research" and to suggest that the results of the research of Szilard and others be kept secret.

There's an interesting sidelight here, that appears in none of these books, but which I ran across in reading about H.G. Wells for my "Soul of the Future/of Star Trek" projects. Wells is credited with being the first to foresee the possibility of atomic bombs, in his 1913 novel, The World Set Free. It remains one of the more astonishing acts of prophecy in imaginative fiction.

By the 1940s so many science fiction writers were exploding atomic bombs in their stories that pulp magazine editors were complaining, and as real thing got nearer but was still a secret project, the U.S. government was knocking on their doors. But Wells had anticipated the first attempts to figure out if such a device was practicable by about thirty years. When he wrote about it, the atomic bomb didn't even yet have a name. Wells named it. Even dropping a bomb-any kind of bomb-from an airplane was a new idea, and it would be only a small factor in World War I, which had not yet begun. Science didn't even yet have a generally accepted rough sketch of the atom. The Rutherford-Bohr model-the atom as a miniature solar system that was still be drawn on the blackboard when I was in high school-didn't exist yet.

All that had happened was the discovery of radioactivity and radium. Wells apparently understood more of the implications of Einstein's E=mc2 formula, announced in 1905, than did many scientists. But from these and a few other bare beginnings, he made a series of astonishingly accurate surmises in his fictional history of the past that hadn't happened yet. For example, that the neutron would be the trigger of an explosive reaction (discovered in 1932), and the existence of twin atoms, or isotopes (the actual discoverer of that got the Nobel Prize in 1921.)

He speculated on the properties of a substance yet to be discovered that he called carolinium. It turned out to be plutonium. He also nailed the year of a preliminary discovery. In his future history, artificial radioactivity is produced for the first time in 1933. It was.

Wells also got a lot of things wrong, but he did dramatize an atomic war, and that caught the attention of Leo Szilard, who happened to read Wells novel in 1932. It impressed him, even though he wasn't yet working on nuclear physics. But by 1939 he was, and once he suddenly realized how to set up a nuclear chain reaction, he thought at once that it must be kept secret. He knew what this discovery could mean---"and I knew it because I had read H.G. Wells," he said.

So Szilard prevailed on Einstein to suggest keeping the research secret. He did, and it was. (And a decade after reading Wells, Szilard was working with Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago where they created the first nuclear chain reaction.) But that turns out to probably be the extent of Einstein's influence and involvement in decisions concerning the atomic bomb.

Even after Einstein's second letter, the U.S. government, still officially neutral, kept uranium research limited. Then in the fall of 1941 a report by British scientists concluded that atomic weapons could very well be created and used in the current war. This report was shown to Vannevar Bush, Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, who passed it on. "It was this information, not Einstein's two letters," Sayen writes," which inspired the United State government to make a full commitment to the development of atomic weapons by the creation of the Manhattan Project on December 6, 1941."

Einstein of course was so worried about Nazi Germany developing and using atomic bombs that he hoped the U.S. could counter that threat with its own bombs. Einstein knew what American and British leaders either didn't know or didn't care to dwell on-that in addition to conquering Europe, the Nazis were rounding up and killing Jews (including members of his own family.) Though Einstein's reasons for recognizing the Nazis as a powerful evil that had to be opposed by force may seem self-evident, Levenson's portraits of Germany provides the weight of evidence that Einstein saw during his years there.

After Germany was defeated, Einstein wrote a third letter to President Roosevelt, again at the passionate instigation of Leo Szilard. It was an introduction to a longer letter by Szilard, that Einstein felt he could not read because he didn't have Szilard's security clearance. The substance of Szilard's document however was a warning (possibly inspired by Wells?) of a nuclear arms race, particularly if the U.S. used the atomic bomb on Japan. Roosevelt died shortly after the letter was delivered, and the efforts of Szilard and other nuclear physicists to persuade the Truman administration not to drop the atomic bomb on Japanese cities were apparently never taken very seriously.

"Einstein never wavered in his conviction that use of atomic weapons on Japan was morally unjustifiable," Sayen concludes. "Although Einstein never forgave the German people for their acquiescence to the Nazi slaughter of Jews, he would never have endorsed the use of atomic bombs on Germany once it became known that the German atomic bomb project had failed. The bomb was a defensive weapon and no amount of Germany barbarity could justify American barbarity when the danger of a similar German bomb was removed."

Another sidelight to the reviewing process: there was another biographically-based book on Einstein that came out around the same time as the Levenson book, and I got a copy so I might review the two together. But I found I had little constructive to say about Einstein: The Passions of a Scientist by Barry Parker (Prometheus Books), except that its treatment of Einstein is chronological (whereas Levenson skips around a bit, which caused me some confusion). I was searching for a delicate way to say that since it's so short and the writing so simple, it could be used as a kind of Cliff's Notes chronology, so the reader could keep events that Levenson describes in the proper order. It was in fact useful to me for this purpose, but such faint praise didn't assume enough priority to make it into the final 800 words. Otherwise I found the Parker book no fun to read at all, with its deadened short sentences and graceless vocabulary.

It does have pictures, though, which Levenson's book oddly lacks. It's especially strange considering that Levenson is a TV producer, and his "Nova" treatment of Einstein is quite visual (the animation of Einstein's thought experiments leading to his physics insights were particularly useful to me.) In his book, he describes several photographs, and the architecture of a building named after Einstein. But no photos in the book. Perhaps that's a separate project.

Postscript: By Kowincidence, the Einstein Papers---his scientific and non-scientific writings and a lot more---have just been made available online at this site.