Nuclear, biological, chemical

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

[Image removed at the request of the copyright holder.]

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. [↩]

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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. [↩]

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Common Sense about Disarmament

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.

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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? [↩]

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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?

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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. [↩]

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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 obviousy not a quick knock-out blow either. Along with the (consequent?) 'great Economic Collapse', the Nine Years' War gave humanity the impetus for radical change, discarding liberalism, democracy and religion in favour of eugenics, social conditioning and the world state.

Put like that, there are obvious superficial similarities to H. G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come, published the following year. Of course, that ended in utopia whereas Brave New World is a dystopia, but clearly both Wells and Huxley looked at the rapid advances in technology (including military technology) and the world economic crisis, then several years old with no end in sight, and wondered if the conjunction of the two trends might not result in a future radically different from the past (an "ultimate revolution", as Wells put it).

They weren't alone, either -- it seems there was a "utopian/dystopian" moment in the early 1930s. At least two other books written during the Depression take similarly long views: Michael Arlen's Man's Mortality (1933) and Olaf Stapledon's astounding Last and First Men (1930). Aviation plays a part in both of these -- in the former as the basis for a Kipling-esque world government called International Aircraft & Airways, in the latter as an important, almost spiritual, element of the culture of the First World State. But while the prevention of the next war, or the next war after that, is an important motivation for a world state in these novels, the main reason is economic; pretty understandable when you think about the shock of the world slump, particularly how crises seemed to spread from country to country. Economic control and planning on a global scale seemed inevitable to some, though whether it would be worth it in the end was debatable. Huxley suggested that people would have to be conditioned to consume products from an early age, through messages piped into every child's ears in every sleeping moment:

In the nurseries, the Elementary Class Consciousness lesson was over, the voices were adapting future demand to future industrial supply. 'I do love flying,' they whispered, 'I do love flying, I do love having new clothes, I do love ...'3

The idea that people would need to be coerced into buying things seems absurd in today's consumer society (though again, it would have made more sense during the Slump, when falling consumption led to falling production, which led to higher unemployment, which in turn led to falling consumption ...) But maybe that just means that our secret masters have found more subtle means of persuasion :)

  1. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: HarperCollins, 2001 [1932]), 42-3. [↩]
  2. The chemical formulae given are for TNT and mercury fulminate (a detonator). [↩]
  3. Huxley, Brave New World, 43. [↩]

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If you were wondering what the biggest and loudest air raid siren of all time is, then wonder no more, because it's the American Chrysler Victory Siren, made in the 1950s. Well, I don't know for sure that it was -- I'd like to see what the Soviets had to offer -- but it was clearly a mighty impressive piece of hardware: 12 feet long; 3 tons in weight; and 138 decibels at a distance of 100 feet! (120 dB is the pain threshold.) These were dotted all over the United States -- 20 in Detroit alone.

You can hear one of the few remaining examples in action here. It certainly sends a chill down my spine, which is perhaps strange as nuclear drills were not a feature of my youth here in Australia, so I only know the sound of such sirens second-hand. But I can't help but imagine what would have been happening to the communities these sirens were meant to warn, as the missiles (or in the 1950s, the bombs) rained down. Which in turn leads one to marvel at the optimistic choice of the name Victory Siren ... though I suppose the Defeat Siren ("If you can hear this, you're already dead") might not have sold so well!1

  1. Of course, nuclear war looked somewhat more winnable in the 1950s, and civil defence correspondingly less pointless, than was later the case. But still. [↩]

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As everyone knows, cockroaches are supposedly the only creatures able to survive a nuclear explosion.Which may be an exaggeration, but not by much. Well, I think I've found the pre-atomic, chemical equivalent! It's from a novel published in 1926:

Poison gas in the open is one thing. Dropped on a densely populated town like London it's quite another. Suppose you dropped enough to make a lethal atmosphere all over London to a depth of forty feet, not a single living thing could survive, not one -- except flies. Curiously enough, they are immune.

Source: the Earl of Halsbury, 1944 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926), 25.Halsbury is better known to airpower history as Lord Tiverton, a pioneering British air strategist in the First World War.

This is a new one on me, I wonder if this idea became as popular as the cockroach version later did?

It also has grave implications for the future of life on this planet, because chemical weapons are easier to develop than nuclear ones and so that will give the flies an advantage over the cockroaches in the eternal struggle for supremacy ...