Nuclear, biological, chemical

In late March and early April 1938, the Manchester Guardian ran a competition inviting readers to send in ‘a List, with short reasons, of Six Books with which to Furnish a Gas-proof Room’¹ — that is, a room designed to provide a temporary refuge in a gas attack. The article which discussed the entries began by noting that ‘A gas-proof room is not a desert island, at least from a literary point of view’, because desert island books are meant to be aids in survival, whereas those in a shelter are intended to divert the mind from dwelling on the danger of poison gas. So,

The competitor from Ulverston who suggested Bacon’s “Novum Organum,” “The Last Days of Pompeii,” “The City of Dreadful Night,” “Paradise Lost,” “Sighs from Hell,” by Bunyan, and Blair’s “Grave” presumably knows his own mind better than anyone else does, but most people would say that the furniture of such a room would only be complete with a revolver to be used in case the gas and bombs and literature all failed to do their work.

Despite this admonishment, many of the entries displayed a rather dark humour:

Talking about once-obtainable foods will obviously be THE diversion in the War to end Civilisation. No better guide, then, to the menu of one’s dreams than “Mrs. Beeton.”

To the common suggestion of Who’s Who, the Guardian responded by saying that this ‘would easily, in an air raid, take on the appearance of an anthology of brief obituaries’.

Other submissions were more practical:

The books must steady jittery nerves by distracting the mind from business overhead. Whilst entertainment is required, purely light literature is useless, since it does not demand sufficient concentration. Humour only irritates in moments of strain. Books giving something to do are, therefore, best.

Though just how many people could be bothered with ‘A Book of Mathematical Problems’ or ‘Any Chosen Work in Foreign Tongue, and a glossary for it’ may be questioned!

While some suggestions were fairly optimistic — ‘Holiday Guide. — To plan the next holidays’ — others, quite naturally, despaired of humanity:

Pope. — For a reminder that men were once civilised.

Boswell’s “Johnson.” — For a reminder that men were once sensible.

Urquhart’s “Rabelais.” — For a reminder that there are better kinds of nonsense than dropping gas bombs.

So, who won? Douglas Rawson (or perhaps Hawson) of Malton in Yorkshire. His list had a bit of everything:

“Anatomy of Melancholy.” — For general reading.

Italian Phrase-book. — In case of visitors.

German Phrase-book. — Same reason.

Family Bible. — Exhibiting Aryan descent.

Students’ Song-book. — For community singing.

Telephone Directory. — To call doctors, &c., or locksmith if door combination forgotten.

It might be interesting to know what reading material people actually took with them into shelters during the Blitz. Some insight could no doubt be gleaned from diaries, especially Mass-Observation ones. Did people want to be amused while the bombs fell? Educated? Tested? Though amusing, the Manchester Guardian competition quoted here does not, I think, have much bearing on the question: the readership (middle class, left-Liberal, I suppose largely Mancunian) was small and not particularly representative. More importantly, people would have submitted lists which they thought would catch the judge’s eye, in the hopes of winning the prize (two guineas), rather than the books they would really take into the refuge with them. Even more importantly, perhaps, when the air raids did eventually come, they were mostly at night, and shelterers (from HE and incendiaries rather than gas) were generally more concerned to get some sleep than to feed their heads.

Still, it’s a fascinating little glimpse into the grim humour with which the British were facing up to the horrors they believed were coming:

But perhaps in the end we should all be pessimists enough to reach out automatically for Jeremy Taylor’s little treatise on A.R.P. — “Holy Living and Holy Dying.” Its advantage is, of course, that, supposing the precautions did work after all, we could concentrate on the first half.

1. Manchester Guardian, 28 March 1938, p. 5. All other quotes from “Literature and gas”, Manchester Guardian, 6 April 1938, p. 6.

Long-time reader, second-time commenter Ian Evans was in the Royal Observer Corps in York at the end of the 1950s. Here he describes how the ROC, in addition to retaining something like its planespotting functions during the Second World War, took on the job of measuring the Third:

When I joined the ROC (1958) it was still pretty much an RAF auxiliary, officers with handlebar moustaches and all. We spotted, reported and plotted aircraft in a very similar manner to our WW2 predecessors, though things had been simplified and speeded up, with special procedures for fast low flying aircraft (Rats). The nuclear reporting role was just being introduced, the observer posts were given “bunkers”, a small underground room with bunks and stores, airlock and reinforced tunnel to the surface, a nuclear burst recorder (a souped-up pinhole camera), a pressure recorder to measure the blast strength, a Geiger counter to measure the fallout, and individual dosimeters (we were rather cynical about these).

The operating theory was that there would be sufficient political warning for the observers to man their posts, they would wait for the noise to stop, surface, extract the recording paper from their recorders, read off the bearing and altitude of the burst and the peak overpressure. This would then be phoned in to Group HQ where we would plot the (hopefully several) bearings, and get the position of the detonation. Then, using the reported overpressures, plus sets of tables and nomograms we woud evaluate the bomb power and report back to…..anyone still alive. After that the posts would report radiation levels at regular intervals until…

Which is quite a terrifying job description (luckily they didn’t have to do risk assessments in those days!)

But, of course, there was plenty of terror to go around. Long-time reader and commenter CK pointed out a 1982 BBC documentary called “Nuclear War: A Guide to Armageddon” (written and produced by Mick Jackson, director of Threads) about the effects of a nuclear war and how civilians should prepare for it.

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In a previous post, I looked at some of Arthur C. Clarke’s predictions, made in 1946, about how rockets would change the types of weapons and vehicles used by military forces of the future.¹ He got some hits (space stations) but, on balance, more misses (rocket mines, more turret fighters). In the latter half of his paper, Clarke steps back to consider the broader implications of rockets for future warfare, and does rather better.

These are grim, given the advent of atomic weapons. It may be the case that for every weapon, Clarke says, a defence is eventually evolved. But

During the interval between the adoption of a new weapon and its countering, the damage done to the material structure of civilization grows steadily greater, and there must come a time at last when breakdown occurs. The present state of Germany shows how nearly that point had been reached even with the weapons of the pre-atomic age.²

One particularly interesting possibility Clarke considers is that of ‘radiation war’.³ He notes that the vast majority of the radiation emitted by an atomic bomb must fall outside the visible spectrum, concluding that ‘the bomb acts as an X-ray generator of unimaginable power’.⁴ So a bomb could be detonated at high altitudes to blind large numbers of people, or to ruin huge areas of crops. Atomic bombs carried by long-range rockets would be the ‘ultimate weapon’.⁵
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1. Arthur C. Clarke, “The rocket and the future of warfare”, RAF Quarterly, March 1946, 61-9; reprinted in Arthur C. Clarke, Ascent to Wonder: A Scientific Autobiography (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1984), 71-9.
2. Ibid., 76.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 77.

Nearly a year ago, I wrote about a childhood hero of mine, on the tenth anniversary of his death. Today, I’m writing about another one, and it’s a happier occasion: it’s Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s 90th birthday!

Clarke has always been my favourite of the ‘big three’ post-war science fiction writers: he evokes a sense of wonder at the universe that was mostly missing in Asimov and Heinlein, as much as I loved their stories.¹ From the decaying billion-year-old city of Diaspar in Against the Fall of Night (1953), to the giant interstellar interloper in Rendezvous with Rama (1973), to the last visitors from home in Songs of Distant Earth (1986), Clarke’s universe is indifferent to humanity’s presence, but it’s precisely our human qualities which make its immensities explicable and bearable. It’s terrific stuff, at its best Wellsian and Stapledonian, and just talking about it makes me want to go re-read it all again …

I was casting around for some way to connect Clarke to the themes of this blog. I could have speculated on the parallels between the British Interplanetary Society, in which he was heavily involved from the 1930s to the 1950s, and aviation advocacy groups like the Royal Aeronautical Society or the Air League of the British Empire. Or there’s his wartime work for the RAF on ground control approach radar. Or the way his experience of being billeted in the bombed-out East End in 1941 apparently inspired him to write a chapter on space warfare which he later used in Earthlight.² Or the fact that the first publication of his famous idea for communication satellites in geosynchronous (or ‘Clarke’) orbits was in a letter on potential scientific applications of V2 rockets, which appeared in the February 1945 issue of Wireless World — at a time when V2s were still falling on London!³

But then I found that in March 1946, RAF Quarterly published a prize-winning essay by Clarke on “The rocket and the future of warfare”, which was outside Clarke’s usual range of topics, but well within mine — just too perfect a fit to ignore! But it’s not available online like his satellite stuff, and nobody around here has the RAF Quarterly. Luckily it was reprinted in Ascent to Wonder, a compilation of his more technical papers, so I made an impromptu trip to the State Library this afternoon to check its copy.⁴
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1. Asimov’s non-fiction more than made up for this lack, of course.
2. Neil McAleer, Odyssey: The Authorised Biography of Arthur C. Clarke (London: Victor Gollancz, 1992), 47.
3. Arthur C. Clarke, “V2 for ionosphere research?”, Wireless World, February 1945, 58. His better known paper devoted to geosynchronous communication satellites was published in the same journal the following October. See here for more on both articles.
4. Arthur C. Clarke, “The rocket and the future of warfare”, RAF Quarterly, March 1946, 61-9; reprinted in Arthur C. Clarke, Ascent to Wonder: A Scientific Autobiography (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1984), 71-9.

Sometimes I worry about the British.

Gary Smailes has put together Military History Carnival 8, and it’s a good one. The item which, inevitably, appealed to me most was Damned Interesting’s account of incidents where the world nearly stumbled into an accidental nuclear holocaust. (But wait, there were more!) Obviously, a scenario where the survival of a significant proportion of humanity, and of civilisation itself, depends upon accidents not happening is not a particularly good thing. But we got WarGames out of it, so on balance I think we’re ahead.

Or, at least, not very likely. In June 1922, the Daily Mail printed a two-column article under the headline “Our lost air power” (a title it used for just about all of its air-scare stuff that year).¹ The author’s name is not given, but is described as ‘An Armament Expert’, who until recently was on the ‘Allied Commission to Germany’. The bulk of the article concerns two types of aerial bombs he inspected while overseeing German compliance with the disarmament clauses of the Versailles treaty.

The first was the elektron bomb. Though this sounds like it might be an exotic weapon based on the latest advances in atomic physics, it’s actually just an incendiary, for setting cities ablaze. But this was something special. In contrast to the crude, and fairly ineffective, incendiaries used by the Germans against London during the war, the elektron burned so hotly that it could burn through armour plate, and what’s more, once ignited it could not be extinguished. As it weighed less than pound and was only nine inches long, thousands could be carried per bomber (or airliner). The German High Command thought it had a war-winning weapon, since

A fleet of aeroplanes would carry sufficient to set all London alight, past any hope of saving.

But — fortunately for London — the war ended before sufficient numbers of elektron bombs were available to the German forces.

The other weapon revealed by An Armament Expert was a small globe, made of glass and only four inches across. Inside the globe was a dark brown liquid: an unspecified form of poison gas (mustard, I’d guess). When the globe is dropped from an aeroplane and hits the ground, the glass shatters and generates ‘thousands of cubic feet of poisonous gas’. If used against London, the gas would permeate into cellars and tunnels, and lie in the streets for weeks.

One raid using such bombs would paralyse the very heart of our Empire, and bring a horrible death to most of London’s citizens.

How horrible? Imagine:

That girl with the baby sitting opposite to you on the Tube — can you see that girl rushing wildly and blindly away, pressing that same little mite’s face to her breast in a hopeless attempt to shield it from the fumes? Can you see her face drawn in the most horrible of death agonies and the baby’s lips covered with blood and mucus? A horrible description? A very horrible, yet very possible, fact.

Again, London was lucky to avoid being gassed during the war. This time, Germany had sufficient numbers of gas globes, but the ‘Secret Service’ knew this, and made it known to the Germans that Britain had them too, and would use them in large numbers against German cities if any fell on British soil.

Here we have an expert eyewitness describing two horrible new weapons, both of which were nearly used against civilians in the last war and which will certainly be used against civilians in the next war. So what’s the problem? Simply that one of these existed and the other is — I believe — made up!
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1. Daily Mail, 20 June 1922, pp. 9-10. All quotes taken from this article unless otherwise specified.

The above photograph, and all of the following, are from Poison Gas (London: Union of Democratic Control, 1935).
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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

It’s 50 years since Sputnik I lifted off. Although I was airminded as a kid, I was much more spaceminded. So 1957 was always a crucial year in my understanding of history back then: it was where the modern age began. (In fact the very first historical work I ever I started — but never finished! — was a history of the space race from Sputnik on. I can’t have been older than 12 so it’s not exactly sophisticated …)

More than that, to me 1957 was where the future began. A future where humans would spread out into the solar system and then explore the universe beyond. And who knows? Maybe I’d even get to take part in that somehow! That future hasn’t quite worked out the way I’d envisaged it — yet — but of course, I’m in good company where failing to predict the future is concerned. There’s a good article by Michael J. Neufeld in the July/August 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, on Wernher von Braun’s proposals for manned orbital battle stations. In the early 1950s, von Braun predicted that these would be used to deploy nuclear weapons in orbit. For example, in a conference paper published in 1951, he wrote that

Our space station could be utilized as a very effective bomb carrier, and for all present-day means of defense, a non-interceptible one.¹

and that

The political situation being what it is, with the Earth divided into a Western and an Eastern camp, I am convinced that such a station will be the inevitable result of the present race of armaments.²

Neufeld makes the point that for all his expertise in rocketry — including leading the V2’s development team — von Braun’s obsession with space stations meant that he failed to realise that ballistic missiles actually made a lot more sense as a delivery platform for nuclear weapons, rather than space-launched hypersonic gliders — a space station being a relatively big and very predictable target, for one thing.³

Von Braun wasn’t the only one arguing along those lines. There were others. The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein co-authored a popular article in 1947 for Collier’s Magazine which suggested putting nukes in orbit. In a novel published the following year, Space Cadet, he expanded upon this idea. Now, I read Space Cadet probably a couple of dozen times when I was a kid, but haven’t for a long time so I’ll have to rely upon the Wikipedia page to explain:

The Space Patrol is entrusted by the worldwide Earth government with a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and is expected to maintain a credible threat to drop them on Earth from orbit as a deterrent against breaking the peace. […] The cadets are taught that they should renounce their allegiance to their country of origin and replace it by a wider allegiance to humanity as a whole and to all of the sentient species of the Solar System.

It never occurred to me before now, but this is nothing more than the international air force concept, so beloved of liberal internationalists in the 1930s (it was included in the Labour Party’s manifesto for the 1935 general election, for example), but now updated for the coming space age! Only now instead of pilots of all nations standing by, ready to drop high explosives on any aggressor nation, it would be astronauts with atom bombs. Plus ça change … sometimes, anyway.

When I was 12, I understood that Sputnik I was part of a ‘Race for Space’ between two superpowers, as I put it, but I mainly saw it it as a straightforward — if impressive — technical achievement, which the Soviet Union managed to do first. I certainly didn’t have much clue about the bigger picture of the Cold War or the historical background to the decision to launch a small sphere into orbit, though. Now it’s hard for me to see things in any other way, as all of the above probably demonstrates. But sometimes it’s good just to forget about all that context and just appreciate the thing-in-itself.

So I’ll end by reverting to age 12 and saying wow, that is just so ace!

1. Quoted in Michael J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun’s ultimate weapon”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2007, 53.
2. Quoted in ibid.
3. But the fact that von Braun was still trying to sell the public on manned space stations in 1965 with no military role beyond reconnaissance suggests that it’s more that he just really, really liked space stations, rather than that he wasn’t aware of the potential of ballistic missiles.

It’s not often that I happen across a discussion of knock-out blow novels outside specialist literature, so I was interested to see that Gideon Haigh (probably best known as a cricket writer, but also a fine essayist) talks about Nevil Shute’s What Happened to the Corbetts (1939) in the current issue of The Monthly. The article itself (which is not online; a precis of sorts is available from the Sunday Telegraph) is about On the Beach, published fifty years ago this month: ‘arguably Australia’s most important novel’¹ since it was the first really popular novel to deal with nuclear war and human extinction, selling 4 million copies worldwide.

In retrospect, 1957 was a hinge point in the Cold War, when passive resignation about nuclear arms began yielding to alarm and horror. It was the year that the CND was founded in Britain and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy was established in the US; it was the year that the National Council of Churches warned that the arms race might “lead directly to a war that will destroy civilization”. In 1955, fewer than one-fifth of Americans knew what fallout was; by 1958, seven in ten were saying they would favour a worldwide organisation to prohibit nuclear weapons.

How many people during that transition read JB Priestley’s ‘Russia, the Atom and the West’ in the New Statesman? Or heard the Nobel-winning chemist Linus Pauling rail against nuclear arms? And how many read On the Beach? Nevil Shute’s novel was the great popular work on the gravest matter besetting civilisation.²

Haigh is right to see that the two books have a great deal in common.

What Happened, like On the Beach, is a conventional novel on an unconventional, very nearly taboo, subject: the civilian experience of war, with its trials of disaster and displacement. It is not, however, an anti-war novel. To write against war when its coming was inevitable would have struck Shute as pointless posturing. He was arguing not for peace but for preparedness, to ready Britons “for the terrible things that you, and I, and all the citizens of the cities in this country may one day have to face together”. On the novel’s release in April 1939, a thousand copies were distributed to workers in Air Raid Precautions. It was “the entertainer serving a useful purpose”.³

But I don’t know that I agree that the subject of the ‘civilian experience of war’ was ‘very nearly taboo’. There were plenty of novels dealing with this subject written in the 1920s and 1930s, at least as it related to aerial warfare. It’s just that virtually all of the others were sensationalistic trash in comparison to What Happened to the Corbetts, as I have previously argued.⁴ Otherwise I like Haigh’s take on it.

And what happened to Nevil Shute? After moving to Australia in 1950 and buying the country’s first dishwasher, and writing a few more books, he died in 1960. And after that?

The decline of Shute’s reputation is unremarkable: it simply attests the perishability of popular art. Shute sold 15 million books in his lifetime, but he aspired to neither literary immortality nor critical approval: “The book which thrills the reviewer with its artistic perfection will probably not be accepted by the public, while a book which the public value for its contents will probably seem trivial and worthless artistically to the reviewer.” His obscurity also reflects the contours of the book market: the middle-class, middlebrow novelist of ideas is a discontinued line.⁵

Still, he wrote one book of almost geopolitical significance; that’s more than most writers can aspire to.

1. Gideon Haigh, “Shute the messenger: how the end of the world came to Melbourne”, The Monthly, June 2007, 52.
2. Ibid., 53.
3. Ibid., 47.
4. Haigh has clearly benefited from reading Paul Brians’ Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, but doesn’t seem to have any comparable sources for the knock-out blow literature. That’s ok, but you know, he could have asked me!
5. Haigh, “Shute the messenger”, 46.

The A-bomb won:

I wouldn’t have thought it was necessary to detonate a 19 kiloton nuclear weapon to see what it would do to an airship, but that’s just what the US Department of Energy did on 7 August 1957. Well, to be fair, the primary purpose was probably to test a prototype of the W30 nuclear warhead; the airship thing was just a bonus. The test, codenamed Stokes, was part of Operation Plumbbob, a series of 29 above-ground detonations carried out at the Nevada Test Site between May and October 1957. Statistically speaking, the radiation released into the atmosphere from Plumbbob would be expected to have caused 1900 civilian deaths from thyroid cancer — a small price to pay for the knowledge gained, I think we’d all agree.
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WE ARE ALWAYS pleased to learn of a new post on Professor Palmer’s most interesting blog, the Avia-Corner. It is the first place one would turn in order to learn about the often murky world of Soviet aviation. However, his latest rant — there is unfortunately no other word for it — caught us by surprise, for it is aimed squarely at Airminded itself. It seems that the good professor has taken exception to our previous post, which happened to refer to one of his in what was by no means an unfriendly spirit. As the reaction is out of all proportion to the supposed offence, the suspicion occurs that it is officially inspired. The possible motivations for this scarcely need explaining, but a reply must here be given.
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It’s never too early to start thinking about the shape of the next war, even if the current one is still being fought. At the end of May 1945 — only three weeks after V-E day and over two months before V-J day — some discussion on the subject was held in the House of Lords by interested peers. On 29 May, Lord Vansittart proposed an international commission of scientists to monitor Germany to make sure it did not develop or use ‘any scientific discovery or invention considered dangerous to the safety of mankind’.¹

He said we were dealing with a periodically homicidal nation, and unless we kept a firm hand on them we should have V10 in less than 10 years. There had been an insufficient answer to V 1, and no answer at all to V 2 except the old-fashioned one of conquering the sites. Science had not given the answer. The second world war had been within measuring distance of the atom bomb. Where would the third begin? We had had the very devil of a lesson, and it would be our own fault if we had another.²

He also called for something like ‘a world inspectorate in order to guard against the development or over-development of secret devices’,³ which could lead to ‘a secret armaments race of a far more terrifying character’ than any that had gone before.
Vansittart was clearly disturbed by the effects of the German V1 and V2 missiles on London. At this time, London was (along with Antwerp) the only great city in the world with experience of missile warfare — the last one had fallen in March 1945. V2s in particular were very unsettling, as no defences and no warnings were then possible for objects travelling on a ballistic trajectory four times faster than the speed of sound.
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1. The Times, 30 May 1945, p. 8.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

Here in Australia, we’re just catching up on the last two series of Foyle’s War, a British detective drama which differs from the estimated 734 other British detective dramas in existence by being set in Sussex during the Second World War. This is a very large part of its charm (though due regard must be given to the performances of the three leads, Michael Kitchen, Honeysuckle Weeks, and Anthony Howell — classic English diffidence and stiff-upper-lippery all round, if you like that sort of thing). The war is used very well, I think — plots generally revolve around some aspect of wartime experience, such as black marketeering, conscientious objectors, homegrown fascists. The Blitz and the threat of invasion overshadow the early episodes; the Yanks turn up in the later ones and start stealing all the women.

But the episode which screened last Sunday, “Bad blood”, initially didn’t look very promising in terms of its use of history. There were some uncharacteristically clunky references to various battles and personalities shovelled into a couple of conversations, along the lines of ‘well it looks like Russia’s done for, Stalingrad will be next to fall (wink wink) and what about old Rommel, eh?’ Though it does at least allow us to date one scene to a period of approximately 5 minutes on the morning of 19 August 1942, because we are told that ‘it looks like things might work out in Dieppe‘! But all of that was forgiven as the central plot unfolded …
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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

The minute hand of the famous Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has just moved closer to apocalypse: it is now set at five minutes to midnight. This is the most dangerous level it has been since 1988. The dangers currenty facing humanity are summarised thus:

The world stands at the brink of a second nuclear age. The United States and Russia remain ready to stage a nuclear attack within minutes, North Korea conducts a nuclear test, and many in the international community worry that Iran plans to acquire the Bomb. Climate change also presents a dire challenge to humanity. Damage to ecosystems is already taking place; flooding, destructive storms, increased drought, and polar ice melt are causing loss of life and property.

Obviously, the precise position is fairly arbitrary — the relative movement back and forth is more significant, i.e. whether the world is getting more dangerous or not — but it’s interesting to reflect on the past movements of the minute hand:
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Last month, I noted a parallel between certain pre- and post-Hiroshima nuclear warfare narratives. Here’s an even more common one, this time between the knock-out blow itself and nuclear warfare.

Here’s the American astronomer Carl Sagan, from the final chapter (”Who speaks for Earth?”) of the 1980 companion book to his acclaimed television series, Cosmos:

By the ninth decade of the twentieth century the strategic missile and bomber forces of the Soviet Union and the United States were aiming warheads at over 15,000 designated targets. No place on the planet was safe. The energy contained in these weapons, genies of death patiently awaiting the rubbing of the lamps, was far more than 10,000 megatons — but with the destruction concentrated efficiently, not over six years but over a few hours, a blockbuster for every family on the planet, a World War II every second for the length of a lazy afternoon.¹

Compare with Lord Ponsonby in the House of Lords, October 1933:

The next war, if there is one, is going to be as different from the last war as the last war was from the Battle of Hastings. During the four years of the Great War 300 tons of bombs were dropped on this country. In the next war 300 tons of bombs are going to be dropped on the great cities of this country in the first half-hour.²

And with P. R. C. Groves, in Behind the Smoke Screen (1934):

“Whereas in the late war some 300 tons of bombs were dropped in this country by the Germans, air forces today could drop almost the same weight in the first twenty-four hours and continue this scale of attack indefinitely.” That estimate, made by the Air Staff [in 1926], was based on the number and known ‘performance’ of the bombers possessed by France. Since then the striking power of the French Air Force, which is the accepted standard of measurement in Europe, has been doubled. Hence, and given the same supposition as regards the distance of the objective, it has now a bombing or striking capacity of 600 tons daily.³

And finally, with Sir Malcolm Campbell, in The Peril from the Air (1937):

But nobody need think that war from the air next time will bear any relation to the happenings of 1914-18. What must be realized is that the development of the air arm has made it possible for an enemy to drop a 1,000 [sic] tons of bombs on London in a single day and night. That is, four times the weight that fell on the whole country during four years of war.⁴

There are many more examples that I could supply, but that will do. It’s the same rhetorical device, isn’t it: take the awful destruction of the last war, multiply it, and compress it to fit a timescale of hours instead of years. (And as time goes by, and technology progresses and forces expand, multiply it some more.) It’s an effective one, too, whichever war you are talking about: if you don’t find the thought of a world war in a day a sobering one, then you are probably Curtis LeMay or Arthur Harris. So here we see an instance where the rhetoric of the Cold War was developed first for the knock-out blow, long before the Manhattan Project.

1. Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York and Avenel: Wings Books, 1995 [1980]), 321-2.
2. Lord Ponsonby, Manchester Guardian, 28 October 1933; quoted in Patrick Kyba, Covenants without the Sword: Public Opinion and British Defence Policy, 1931-1935 (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1983), 88.
3. P. R. C. Groves, Behind the Smoke Screen (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 147-8. Emphasis in original.
4. Malcolm Campbell, The Peril of the Air (London: Hutchinson & Co., n.d. [1937]), 49. Emphasis in original.

Between the wars, it was a commonplace that poison gas would be used in the next war, would be used in large quantities, and would probably be used against civilians. This was a natural enough assumption; after all, it was used liberally enough in the Great War, and it was widely assumed that science would have discovered even more lethal gases.¹ As for civilians, they were now in the front line, as the Zeppelins and Gothas had shown.

Of course, gas wasn’t used in the Second World War,² probably because of the fear of retaliation in kind, i.e., deterrence worked. This could not be assumed a priori, of course, particularly since it was in fact in use throughout the period 1919-39. The best known, and the most egregious, example was by the Italians in Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia), in 1935-6. There were other instances too, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a comprehensive list (though this isn’t bad).
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1. This is leaving aside the argument of those like the chemist J. B. S. Haldane, that the statistics showed that gas warfare led to relatively fewer fatalities than shells and bullets, and so was therefore more humane than conventional war, as well as the argument that all likely gases useful for warfare had already been discovered. The German discovery of nerve gases, had this been publicly known, would have put the lie to these claims.
2. There are some dubious claims to the contrary, such as that Germany used gas against Soviet troops in the Crimea in 1942.

The front cover of Victor Lefebure’s Common Sense about Disarmament (London: Victor Gollancz, 1932); the artist’s name is Douglas L. Dick. (I also have a colour scan — the title is in red and the background is a cream tint — but it’s rather muddy and much less striking than the monochrome version above.) Note the cluster of bombs hurtling down towards the already orphaned and probably homeless child. And the four-engine monoplane bombers up in the sky are a futuristic touch, given the state of the art at that time.

Major Lefebure (not LeFebure, as the internets seem to think) had a wide experience in gas warfare, ranging from participating in British gas attacks on the Western Front to surveying the German chemical industry after Versailles. He also became involved in the business of making chemicals himself, specifically dye production, though I am not sure at what level. He wrote several books on the subjects of chemical warfare and disarmament, including The Riddle of the Rhine in 1921 (an American edition is available at Project Gutenberg), and this one, where he argues for the need to regulate the means of production for any disarmament regime to be effective.

Actually, as interwar visions of armageddon go, this is pretty mild. But it reminded me of the scene in Terminator 2: Judgement Day where Sarah Connor has a nightmare about the coming nuclear war, with a nuclear warhead exploding over a playground filled with children:

He was lying on a hill-side. Below him there was a flower-strewn valley. Children were playing there. He could hear their voices, thin and shrill, on the wind. Then he noticed that the children were not alone. Near them, concealed by a fold in the ground, were men, men in uniform. They seemed to be talking earnestly together over something too small for him to see. The next moment they scattered and ran. They seemed to be swarming all over the hillside. Then they stopped and turned to watch the field of flowers and the children playing. Everything was quiet except for the sound of the children’s voices on the breeze. Suddenly there was a quick rumble from beneath his feet. Before his eyes the field rocked. With a tearing, splitting roar a huge crack appeared in it, widening to emit a fountain of blackened earth which rose and hung in the air like a curtain. Then the curtain fell, slowly, as if it were wind borne, to unveil the scene behind it. With a cry of horror the Professor awoke.¹

This is from Eric Ambler’s first novel, The Dark Frontier, a spy thriller published in 1936. The resemblance to Sarah’s nightmare is closer than it might seem from the above quote, for despite the pre-Hiroshima date, the explosion in the valley is caused by an atomic bomb. As Ambler himself wrote, ‘I must be among the earliest members of the Ban-The-Bomb Movement. I may even have been the first’.² In fact, in his depiction of atomic warfare, he was preceded by at least two other well-known British writers: H. G. Wells in The World Set Free (1914) and Harold Nicolson in Public Faces (1932), and it’s hard to believe he didn’t know either of these books. But Ambler was certainly correct to claim membership in a select club.

Of course, since nobody then knew how an atomic bomb might work, it’s not surprising that his proposed mechanism now seems a little odd:

“Horrible, certainly,” agreed Groom, “but incredible, no. You are no doubt aware that ordinary high explosive depends for its action on a sudden and enormous expansion in volume. Trinitrotoluol, for instance, when detonated with fulminate of mercury expands by something like 500,000 volumes in a fraction of a second. The Kassen bomb, so far as I can gather, is an extension of the principle. Under the influence of the bomb, ordinary silicon rock or earth in its vicinity undergoes an atomic change on detonation, producing huge volumes of some inactive gas such as nitrogen, argon or helium. In other words you are using the earth as your high explosive. The Kassen bomb is merely a special kind of detonator.”³

It’s an interesting idea. Unfortunately for my purposes, Ambler doesn’t connect his atomic bomb with air warfare at all. In fact, he’s not particularly interested in the ramifications of such a weapon for warfare or diplomacy.⁴ Instead, it’s just a MacGuffin, seeking the destruction of which leads the famous physicist Professor Barstow to lose his memory, think he’s the fictional secret agent Conway Carruthers instead,⁵ travel to the fictional Balkan country of Ixania under what he believes is an alias but is actually his real name, help start a revolution, get into and out of a lot of scrapes, fall in love with a sinister countess, and yes, this is a parody of bad spy thrillers. Though perhaps not only that — for example there’s a very noticeable “merchants of death” theme running through it, which I don’t think was there for laughs, and anyway the book could probably be read with profit as a “straight” thriller. Worth a read.

1. Eric Ambler, The Dark Frontier (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973 [1936]), 35-6.
2. Ibid., 6.
3. Ibid., 28-9.
4. It’s never used in the novel, outside of the Professor’s nightmare. The only military use suggested is to bury it, then lure the enemy army onto it by retreating, and explode it remotely, which doesn’t seem like a stratagem that would work more than once!
5. A relation of the narrator of The Riddle of the Sands, perhaps?

As was widely announced in the picture-houses of the United Kingdom at the close of 1936:
THERE IS NO DEFENCE AGAINST POISON GAS

This is from a book by the German exile and novelist Heinz Liepmann, Death from the Skies: A Study of Gas and Microbial Warfare (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1937), 273. There’s no more information than that. What could he be referring to? A film? Newsreel? Advertisement? Public service announcement? Maybe it’s from the 1936 political film Hell Unltd. The BFI describes it as follows:

Hell Unltd. links government’s preoccupation with armaments to a likelihood of war, and relates this to the First World War. Stock footage of the horrors of this war is shown, while titles such as “die” and “to make a world safe for democracy” are displayed. This combination of titles and image is intended to show the negative effects of war and to condemn a government committing itself to further warfare.

On the other hand, it’s also described as a ‘heavily experimental’ film, which seems an unlikely candidate to ‘widely announce’ anything. So what else might it be from?

Last night I watched Threads, an extremely affecting BBC film from 1984 about the effects of a full-scale nuclear war on one British city, Sheffield.¹ One might say it’s a very British ‘kitchen sink’ approach to the subject, following the lives of two ordinary families during the international crisis (involving Iran — so what else is new) leading up to the nuclear exchange, then switching to a relentless depiction of the death, confusion, suffering and struggle for existence in the days, weeks and years afterwards. ‘Harrowing’ is the word usually trotted out for movies like Threads; if you want to feel like you’ve been punched repeatedly in the stomach for two hours then you won’t want to miss it. At the end of it, I let out a huge sigh of relief — it was over, it wasn’t real, I could thankfully escape back to reality again.

The reason why Airminded has a sometime interest in the Cold War is partly because — at the risk of crossing a bridge before I come to it! — it’s an area I may go into after the PhD, but also because the fear of nuclear war is an obvious comparison to the fear of the knock-out blow. The one grew out of and replaced the other. In fact, it seems to me that they are extremely similar indeed: most of the ideas and tropes in literature anticipating nuclear war were used by the writers worrying about the effects of aerial bombardment upon British society before the Second World War. For example, the opening narration² of Threads explains the meaning of the title (over shots of a spider weaving a web intercut with ones showing trucks transporting goods around the city):

In an urban society, everything connects. Each person’s needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric, but the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable.

As the film goes on to show, a nuclear war would completely sever these connecting threads, and with them, all hope and dignity. (One of the main characters sobs in grief when he finds that he can’t get any water out of the taps to comfort his wife, dying from radiation exposure.) Of those Britons who survive the attack, many millions more die for lack of food, water and medical attention. L. E. O. Charlton would have understood the point immediately. In 1938 he wrote that

Our millions are bottle-fed, and all their needs are cared for, by a system of distribution and supply so intricate, and so haphazardly evolved, that once seriously dislocated beyond the power of immediate repair they would be as helpless as new-born babes to fend for themselves.³

But there are also differences. One obvious one is radiation, and its lingering effects. After a knock-out blow, the survivors could rebuild and repopulate Britain without having to worry about no-go areas or genetic damage. Another, related and more striking difference is that the natural world would be largely unaffected by a knock-out blow, whereas a nuclear war would blight the land and the sky for generations to come. In Threads, the global thermonuclear war leads to a nuclear winter (Carl Sagan and Richard Turco are both credited as advisors), with near-freezing temperatures and stunted harvests. Britain’s population drops to medieval levels. These scenes, mostly of silent people in the bare fields hunched over and grubbing for what little crops still grow, are very bleak and extremely effective. Visually, they are so dark as to be almost black, while the wind howls constantly. Nature itself has been wounded. Contrast this with a passage in Sarah Campion’s 1937 novel Thirty Million Gas Masks. The protagonist is caught in a cellar in an air raid, and recalls a bicycle ride the previous May, in glorious spring:

This at least, thought Judith in December confusedly in the hot horror of her gas-mask, was unconquerable. The bombs might fall; did, in fact, fall at this moment, upon the brick and macadam of the railway bridge outside, upon the chestnut trees and the grassy bank and the dark winter-resisting laurels: the bridge might never be built again, for there might be no men to build it: but the grass would sprout of itself over the brick, and the laurel would put out a startling green bud, pale as water, and the chestnut, though split from top to bottom, would spring up in new life from the seedling now cosily safe at its foot, and bear in April a galaxy of green fingers, and in May a candle-blossom as insouciant as the free air itself. This alone, she thought as a brutal crash turned her world tipsy for a moment, this perennial birth in the face of disaster would go on invincibly to some sort of conclusion, some final flowering, however hazardous.⁴

Unsurprisingly, visions of the knock-out blow could sometimes turn into anti-urban, back-to-nature utopias by the back door. With the cities destroyed or emptied, the population drastically reduced, industry and commerce at an end, people could return to a simpler and therefore (of course!) better way of life, closer to the land and free of the corruptions of modernity. A Threads-style nuclear war would take this a step too far, corrupting the land as well and offering only an unrelenting and probably pointless struggle for mere existence instead. Even this, though, could be paradise to some, as shown by the survivalist fiction of the later Cold War.

There are some very good websites devoted to Threads: I particularly recommend Don’t Panic, Mr Mainwaring: Threads, while the site at Action After Warnings is extremely comprehensive. But above all, watch the film.

1. Interestingly, it was co-produced by the Nine Network in Australia; however I don’t remember it being shown here, whereas I do remember The Day After, or perhaps it was just the controversy surrounding it.
2. Actually, the narration was one of the weakest parts of the film: although used sparingly, the documentary-style voiceovers kept pulling me out of the story, a reminder that it wasn’t real. For some reason, the more frequent textual overlays were far less jarring, and also more informative.
3. L. E. O. Charlton, G. T. Garratt and R. Fletcher, The Air Defence of Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1938), 102.
4. Sarah Campion, Thirty Million Gas Masks (London: Peter Davies, 1937), 173.

Just as reading Orwell serendipitously led me to a reference to the next war in the air, so too has reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Here, Mustapha Mond, one of the Controllers of the world state, gives an impromptu history lesson (I’ve cut out unrelated, interleaved dialogue from another strand of the plot):

‘The Nine Years’ War began in A.F. 141.’
‘Phosgene, chloropicrin, ethyl iodoacetate, diphenylcyanarsine, trichlormethyl chloroformate, dichlorethyl sulphide. Not to mention hydrocyanic acid.’
‘The noise of fourteen thousand aeroplanes advancing in open order. But in the Kurfurstendamm and the Eighth Arrondissement, the explosion of the anthrax bombs is hardly louder than the popping of a paper bag.’
Ch₃C₆H₂(NO₂)₃+Hg(CNO)₂ = well, what? An enormous hole in the ground, a pile of masonry, some bits of flesh and mucus, a foot, with the boot still on it, flying through the air and landing, flop, in the middle of the geraniums — the scarlet ones; such a splendid show that summer!
‘The Russian technique for infecting water supplies was particularly ingenious.’
‘The Nine Years’ War, the great Economic Collapse. There was a choice between World Control and destruction. Between stability and …’¹

‘A.F.’ is ‘After Ford’, actually the introduction of the Model T — making this 2049, give or take. So it’s not a near-future war for Huxley, writing in 1932. Naturally enough, though, it’s a war of its time: a massive Russian (presumably) air fleet attacks Berlin and Paris with high explosive,² germs and gas. However, it’s obvious