Comments on: A not very possible fact

By: Airminded · Acquisitions

Airminded · Acquisitions — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 05:25:57 +0000

[...] is all good! But I’m worried about that subtitle. Hanson argues that there was a plan to use Elektron incendiary bombs to burn out London in 1918, which seems plausible enough. A plan is one thing, but Hanson seems to [...]

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 08:04:52 +0000

Sorry, I don’t understand what your point is, or how it relates to the thread? Do you have a reference for the German use of gas in Warsaw (and do you mean 1943 or 1944?) In what way was Churchill ‘ignoring this reality’?

By: enigma_foundry

enigma_foundry — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 04:14:39 +0000

Well, yes the Germans did not use poison gas against the British, but they had no qualms about using gas against the partisans who led the Warsaw uprising.

Churchill largely ignored this reality–I guess the Poles, having broken the enigma code and participating in the Air War during the Battle of Britian–didn’t count.

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 07:21:36 +0000

It dates to 1902, when Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy worked out the law of radioactive decay. (This appears to be an excerpt of the paper.) The half-life is effectively a term in that formula. Wells dedicated The World Set Free to Soddy's Interpretation of Radium (1909), so that may be where Wells picked up the idea.

By: The Doctor

The Doctor — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 08:20:13 +0000

Roger, the quote from ‘The World Set Free’ is interesting. You wouldn’t happen to know when the half-life concept first arose & where.
Mind you, anything with that short a half-life would be too dangerous and unstable to actually use in something with more lethality than watch dial!

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 09:47:01 +0000

Well, that’s good enough for me. Let’s get this war off the ground!

By: CK

CK — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 16:39:32 +0000

Elektron bombs? I think Iran has those.

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 07:15:28 +0000

Yes, Wells came closest to the reality, but as you note his weapons are still strange compared with actual atomic bombs. Continuous explosives, which diminish in power by one half every 17 days (the half-life of “Carolinum”) — they’re more like runaway reactors than super-bombs. (They even start sinking into the Earth, China syndrome-style.) On the one hand he does say that because of the mathematical nature of half-lives, the bombs would always be active, which does anticipate the idea of radioactive wastelands. On the other, as far as I can recall he doesn’t have any notion of radiation damage to living tissue — it’s the fire and molten rock and steam which seems to do the killing — so there are no long term physical consequences of the remaining bombs, they are merely ‘inconvenient’.

None of which is any criticism of Wells at all, of course, but is just offered as part of an explanation why pre-Hiroshima atomic bombs couldn’t compete with the horrors of gas warfare. (Aside from the fact that one existed and the other didn’t, yet …)

By: Roger Todd

Roger Todd — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 23:42:40 +0000

George, I’d never heard of St John Irvine or his play - very interesting, thanks!

As for the dangers of radiation and fallout, well, as ever, the redoutable Mr Wells had some inkling back in 1913/14, in ‘The World Set Free’ (which actually gave us the term ‘atomic bomb’). His atomic war happens in 1959, whilst the novel is an account ostensibly written by some anonymous historian many years in the future after the war, from the vantage point of a World State. Although Wells’s bomb relies on a fictitious element, ‘Carolinum’, and is a queer cove, being a ‘continuing explosive’, nevertheless, his descriptions of it in action convey something of the horror of 1945…

“…these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them… As with all radio-active substances this Carolinum, though every seventeen days its power is halved, though constantly it diminishes towards the imperceptible, is never entirely exhausted, and to this day the battle-fields and bomb fields of that frantic time in human history are sprinkled with radiant matter, and so centres of inconvenient rays…”

“For the whole world was flaring then into a monstrous phase of destruction. Power after Power about the armed globe sought to anticipate attack by aggression. They went to war in a delirium of panic, in order to use their bombs first. China and Japan had assailed Russia and destroyed Moscow, the United States had attacked Japan, India was in anarchistic revolt with Delhi a pit of fire spouting death and flame; the redoubtable King of the Balkans was mobilising. It must have seemed plain at last to every one in those days that the world was slipping headlong to anarchy. By the spring of 1959 from nearly two hundred centres, and every week added to their number, roared the unquenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs…”

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 11:51:51 +0000

Interesting! I hadn’t come across that one before. How does the bomb destroy a city? Is it just some super-explosive or is it actually an atomic bomb? Not that there was much of a distinction in pre-1945 fictional atom bombs; the danger of radiation and fall-out were not yet recognised.

The effects of the gas as described are not out of line with those found in other fictional extrapolations between the wars (or even before the war). Which I think gives a clue to the special horror of gas warfare: blast and fire were horrible enough, but gas attacks the body directly, worms its way inside, corrupts from within. So there are all sorts of nasty, fictional gas weapons: ones which make you sterile, ones which melt your eyeballs, ones which consume your entire body and turn it to a pile of green sludge. These don’t seem to have been so popular after 1945; I guess they couldn’t measure up to radiation sickness and atomic mutants.