Refit Report ections on Mr. Dean's
By C. P. SNOW READING EADING Mr. Gordon Dean's Report on the Atoms, one cannot suppress a sense of the traps, moral and material, in which we are all existing. Mr. Dean's book has recognised everywhere as a good one; he is a fair-minded; te lawyer who for three years (1950-53) found himself chair- Lan of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. Know- n nothing about his new subject, he had to learn from the .veginning, and he learned in a way which the scientists 4:sPected. His report is the best popular account of atomic intro so far written; it is so impartial, both in its historical troduction and its appreciation of Russian technical efficiency, !hat it must have dampened a number of brasher American 5Pirits; both directly and by inference, it reveals Mr. Dean's mess about the relative bomb stocks of America and Russia, and his is likely to be an informed guess. All this is written realistically and with clear eyes. And aYet' the fas most important issues Mr. Dean has domesticated in dangerous. which to my mind makes them more, and not less, ,,uangerous. Obviously any man of affairs, any professional scientist, working on weapons of mass annihilation, must domesticate his daily decisions in order to get through his business at all. But you must not domesticate them so com- pletely that you are just borne along by events, so that there if comes a time when intellectually you can stand outside. ,,,i- that happens, then men of good will have given up the struggle. Mr. Dean writes (pps. 107-8): " To date, two atomic bombs, u" °nly two, have beetan used as weapons of war. They were used, not as so-called ctical weapons ' against troops In the ureic'. but as ' strategic weapons ' delivered against the power Iv an embattled nation to continue to make war." " Strategic TeLaPons delivered against the power of an embattled nation." teulnk for a moment what that means in less domesticated a rrns, in terms of physical fact. It means that, with each bomb, vv Population about the size of Oxford was destroyed, men, bi°,rnen and children : the lucky were burned to death, or i 'sed to death, in a matter of instants : the others lingered. / Z'IrnI"Mr. Dean's complaint, that it has made most people nutnnw. scientists and others, search their souls. They have CScientists found an answer. h.eientists have deceived themselves less than most of us. ays a Pity that their apologia is ,not better known. There first' ,ueen three stages in the history of the atomic bomb certain: '939-1945, that is, when the project was feasible but not dropped second, the days in 1945 when the two bombs were 1 I.. : third, the post-Hiroshima period. Of the scientists ac'new best (I was trained as a scientist and retained my pecIrnaintances after I ceased to be one of them), about ninety As neent• took the same attitude during the first -two stages. 193Ven as an atomic bomb seemed feasible, that is, from early 0,,,,, onwards, if one could help in the project one had no E,La'_n—unless one were an absolute pacifist. For the German se'ttieciernment was known to be setting up atomic' research. It any moral qualms to think of the Nazis being the first 4 Report on the Atom. By Gordon Dean. (Eyre & Spottiswoode. 16s.) to possess the bomb. It was very unpleasant at various times‘' during the war to hear that they might. For our scientists, there was no alternative : the only imperative was to make the bomb first. They knew, of course, what the results of an atomic explosion would be upon human flesh and bone. Few of them expected that it would happen without a demonstra- tion to show the enemy the effects of the new weapon before annihilating a townful of people. Actually; to judge from the Hopkins Papers and the Prime Minister's memoirs, the decision to use the bomb appears to have been almost automatic, as though taken by men just swept along by events, with some scientists protesting ineffectually outside the closed rooms. Certainly far less time and argument was given to this decision than to whether, for example, the young knife-user on Clapham Common should or should not be reprieved.
When the bombs were dropped the scientists I knew were even more horrified than the rest of us. Their horror was not simple; it contained the outrage of conscience, but it also contained an edge of fear. They were not so shocked as persons less technically sophisticated that no one spoke any more of military objectives, that the attacks, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were random; the scientists had been forced to know that all `strategic' bombing throughout the war had been an attempt to kill men, women and children; the chief difference was that, by the size of the atomic explosion, its users had to give up any pretence. No, they were sickened by a more professional horror. The release of atomic energy was the greatest single triumph of applied science : applied science had, even despite total wars, done far more good than harm to men's material existence : but now the first use of its greatest triumph was to bring about the largest slaughter of any day in human history. Further, they knew better than anyone that it would not be long before other countries possessed atomic bombs. Since the West had thrown off the last scrap of moral restraint from the beginning, what could she expect in her turn ? Looking forward fifteen years, perhaps less, they assumed that both halves of the world would own large numbers of bombs. And, for English scientists, in the most crowded of the major countries, what did that promise ?
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, atomic scientists had to make a choice. Should they go on working at the atomic project? In this, the third stage, there was for the first time a real division in attitude, A good many felt, like Oppenheimer, that they had " offended against the spirit of science." Nearly all of these went back to pure science. The rest, and numeric- ally the majority, stayed with the project. Some of them, as responsible and humane as men can manage to be, felt that they were going through a tunnel, but that, in such a time when no one could see ahead, the best thing was to plug away from one day to another and ensure that, at the worst, your own society had the means to defend itself. It is easy to sympathise with either of,these responses, and most of us might be grateful that we are spared making such a choice. Curiously enough, it begins to look as though the humble course of plugging away through the tunnel may give better results than- most of our actions. We had all ,seen so much madness and so much horror that we had tended to forget that there is any sense of self-preservation or prudence in the world. We forgot that we might reasonably put a little trust in fear. If everyone knows that, should a war begin, the major towns on both sides are reasonably certain to be turned into lava, with a large proportion of their inhabitants, then it is possible there will not be a war at all. Further, to produce this equili- brium, it does not need anything like equal productive capacity on the two sides. It has recently been estimated by American journalists that America now possesses a few thousand bombs, and Russia a number in the very small hundreds. Mr. Dean gives the same hint, and these rough figures are good enough for the argument. Russia does not need to level out this disparity; with something like one thousand bombs she could destroy the major towns of America and England; and she will presumably have made that number soon. If this mutual fear is the tranquillising force, as it now seems to be, it is a singular irony. The laugh is against both sides and against all of us; and yet perhaps we can put up with the laugh if we have muddled our way through to this unexpected bit of uneasy peace, to this provisionally (and disreputably) happy ending. My own guess is that this kind of peace is now much more likely than not and mainly for those reasons. But I also believe ,that moral forces • have not been quite negligible. I believe that the horror which most men felt when the two bombs dropped, the horror which left on so many scientists a moral scar, has had an effect which is small by the scale of world events but neither altogether contemptible nor altogether selfish. I think it possible that a good many men, certainly in the 'West and maybe elsewhere, have asked ithemselves a question—for what purposes are we justified in doing these things to other. men ?
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