Sometimes I worry about the British.
Nuclear, biological, chemical
So close and yet (thankfully) so far (so far)
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.
A not very possible fact
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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- Daily Mail, 20 June 1922, pp. 9-10. All quotes taken from this article unless otherwise specified. [↩]
Seventy-two gas masks
The above photograph, and all of the following, are from Poison Gas (London: Union of Democratic Control, 1935).
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Companions
[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!
- Quoted in Michael J. Neufeld, "Wernher von Braun's ultimate weapon", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2007, 53. [↩]
- Quoted in ibid. [↩]
- 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. [↩]
What happened to Nevil Shute
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.
- Gideon Haigh, "Shute the messenger: how the end of the world came to Melbourne", The Monthly, June 2007, 52. [↩]
- Ibid., 53. [↩]
- Ibid., 47. [↩]
- 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! [↩]
- Haigh, "Shute the messenger", 46. [↩]
Airship vs. A-bomb
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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Unthinking the thinkable
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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The next next war
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',2 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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The Wickham Steed affair in popular culture
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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