The Thinkability of the Atomic Bomb II: H. G. Wells' The World Set Free
In H. G. Wells’ novel The World Set Free (1914), the first atomic bombs are conceived and used. The results are so horrible that afterwards the world’s remaining leaders resolve to come together to end war by forming a World Government. Many of the world’s major urban centers and much of its infrastructure have been destroyed, but there is still enough world left for it to make sense to do this.
We are told a few things but not much by Wells about the specifics of this new world. Instead, in a chapter entitled “The New Phase,” we find descriptions like this one:
Now all this phase of gigantic change in the contours and appearances of human life which is going on about us, a change as rapid and as wonderful as the swift ripening of adolescence to manhood after the barbaric boyish years, is correlated with moral and mental changes at least as unprecedented. It is not as if old things were going out of life and new things coming in, it is rather that the altered circumstances of men are making an appeal to elements in his nature that have hitherto been suppressed, and checking tendencies that have hitherto been over-stimulated and over-developed. He has not so much grown and altered his essential being as turned new aspects to the light.
The final chapter of Wells’ novel is a kind of dramatized meditation entitled “The Last Days of Marcus Karenin.” At the center of it is the minister who has become the acknowledged leader in the development of education in the new order, a highly respected Russian named Marcus Karenin.
It has been realized that “education”—what Wells’ had earlier called “the necessary reciprocal of government”—will be crucial to the new order.
The new government early discovered the need of an universal education to fit government to the great conceptions of its universal rule. It made no wrangling attacks on the local racial and sectarian forms of religious profession that at that time divided the earth into a patchwork of hatreds and distrusts; it left these organizations to make their peace with God in their own time; but it proclaimed as if it were a mere secular truth that sacrifice was expected from all, that respect had to be shown to all; it revived schools or set them up afresh all around the world, and everywhere these schools taught the history of war and the consequences and moral of the Last War; everywhere it was taught not as a sentiment but as a matter of fact that the salvation of the world from waste and contention was the common duty and occupation of all men and women. These things which are now the elementary common-places of human intercourse seemed to the councillors of Brissago [where the World Government was first agreed to], when first they dared to proclaim them, marvelously daring discoveries, not untouched by doubt, that flushed the cheek and fired the eye. 237
Karenin and others are at a retreat in the Himalayas where Karenin is about to undergo a second surgery to correct a lifelong “deformity,” the specifics of which we are not given. Karenin believes this surgery will lead to his death.
Before the surgery, Karenin’s doctor permits him to have extended exchanges with some of the “lively minds” at the facility. The exchanges consist of reminiscence, remonstrance, and philosophy on many subjects, among them relations between women and men. And, of course, education.
Wells quotes from a “general memorandum on education” which had become “the keynote to the modern educational system” and was taken to have been authored by Karenin:
"Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it. . . . That is the device upon the seal of this document and the starting point of all we have to do. It is a mistake to regard it as anything but a plain statement of fact. It is the basis for your work. You have to teach self-forgetfulness, and everything else that you have to teach is contributory and subordinate to that end. Education is the release of man from self. You have to widen the horizons of your children, encourage and intensify their curiosity and their creative impulses, and cultivate and enlarge their sympathies. That is what you are for. Under your guidance and the suggestions you will bring to bear on them, they have to shed the old Adam of instinctive suspicions, hostilities and passions, and to find themselves again in the great being of the universe. The little circles of their egotisms have to be opened out until they become arcs in the sweep of the racial purpose. And this that you teach to others you must learn also sedulously yourselves. Philosophy, discovery, art, every sort of skill, every sort of service, love: these are the means of salvation from that narrow loneliness of desire, that brooding preoccupation with self and egotistical relationships, which is hell for the individual, treason to the race, and exile from God. . . ." 239
Fundamental to Karenin’s idea of what is called for to sustain the new order, we see, is something other than a set of rational, practical, political arrangements under what had been the prevailing moral and spiritual dispensation.
“Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it.” In the new dispensation, nothing less than that is called for.
Karenin’s death, days after the surgery, ends the novel, with the fate of the new order still not certain, though Wells gives us no reason to think it won’t prevail.
Before we go on, I’d like to ask: how do you feel about this vision? Does it inspire in you a kind of longing? Or does it inspire in you a kind of disgust at the presumption and naivete of it? Perhaps both? Just not at the same time?1
In 1914, the year Wells published The World Set Free, in the world beyond the novel, a Bosnian Serb assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and World War I followed. The alignment of the parties in the war was similar to the one Wells had imagined for the war in his book.
The new weaponry that would play a big role in World War I was not atomic bombs. It was tanks, poison gas, and the machine gun. Many millions of soldiers and civilians would be killed and maimed, probably more than in any war before. Immediately after the war, a pandemic caused by an H1N1 “Spanish flu” would kill at least twice as many people as the war had.
In 1917, while the world war was still on, the Bolsheviks took over in Russia. The Soviet Union would be formed after the war, in 1922. In 1924, Joseph Stalin would take over from Vladimir Lenin as the leader of the Soviet Union and become a dictator.
Twenty-three years later, World War I would be followed by World War II. The adversaries would be, in general outline, what they had been in World War I and in Wells’ novel.
At the end of World War II, the United States dropped two “special weapons,” actual atomic bombs, on Japan. The United States was the only country to possess them at the time.
A number of scientific and theoretical developments had been required to allow the development of actual atomic bombs:
the discovery of the atom’s nucleus in 1911 by the British scientist from New Zealand Ernest Rutherford,
the discovery of the neutron in 1932 by the English physicist James Chadwick,
the conceiving in 1933 by the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard (in England at the time as a refugee from Nazi Germany) of the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction caused by neutrons,
the “fractionization” in 1938 of atoms of uranium by the German chemists Fritz Strassmann and Otto Hahn,
and the correct interpretation of Hahn and Strassmann’s achievement in early 1939 by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch, physicists and refugees from Nazi Germany, who gave the name “fission” to the process.
It was almost immediately recognized by Hahn and a French physicist named Frederic Joliot-Curie that a chain reaction caused by the release of neutrons in the fission of uranium could produce the release of enormous amounts of energy. The amount would turn out to be 10,000,000 times the amount released by a chemical reaction that consumed an equivalent amount of mass.
Wells died in 1946, the year after the end of World War II. That meant he lived to hear about actual atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At least to learn of their existence. Given the censorship by our government and military authorities of information about the aftermath, Wells would have been unable, as almost all Americans were, to realize what the effects of the bombs had been.
The atomic bombs dropped on Japan were designed on principles different in significant ways from the bombs Wells conceived. The damage caused by them was as catastrophic, and any general use of such bombs by several countries, as in Wells’ book, would have been even more catastrophic and widespread, probably so much more so that no prospect of “a world set free” would be available afterward.
But at first these actual bombs were possessed by only one country, the United States. For three and a half years, the United States would have a monopoly.
The invention and use of the actual bombs did not lead, as it did in Wells’ novel, to a better world.
Might it have?
Next: Niels Bohr and Another Way
Let us assume that in his allusions to “race,” Karenin and Wells mean “the human race.”