Einstein and Twentieth-Century Politics by Richard Crockatt;

Author:Richard Crockatt; [Crockatt, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198785491
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2016-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated a quantum leap in destructive power with unimaginable consequences for the human future. ‘It is a commonplace’, wrote George Orwell in an essay on the atom bomb written in October 1945, ‘that the history of civilization is the history of weapons.’33 But there was nothing commonplace about this innovation. Newspapers vied with each other to produce headlines matching the significance of the moment. What they had in common was a certainty that nothing would be the same again. ‘The Bomb that has Changed the World’, said the Daily Express (London). ‘New Age Ushered’, said the New York Times. ‘So Opens a New Era for Man’, said the Evening Standard (London). ‘Modern Man is Obsolete’ was the stark title of an editorial in the Saturday Review of Literature.34

Ideas about the direction of change varied enormously. Orwell himself thought it likely that, because the bomb was so expensive and difficult to produce, the surviving nations would make a tacit agreement never to use it, with the prospect therefore that things would go on much as before, ‘with two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them’.35 Something of that vision of endless stasis amid endless conflict made its way into his dystopian masterpiece 1984 (1949). Others envisioned more apocalyptic futures, believing that the use of the atomic bombs shattered assumptions about all realms of human life and indeed about the prospect for life itself. ‘For the first time for many centuries’, wrote the French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier at the founding UNESCO conference in 1946, ‘mankind is haunted by the idea that the end of the world is possible.’36 John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which filled an entire issue of the New Yorker in the summer of 1946, explored the direct human cost of the bomb in following the post-Hiroshima experiences of six survivors in minute and painful detail. Hersey’s account, a bestseller when published as a book the same year, reinforced at the human level the more abstract political and moral reflections of the journalists and philosophers.

Einstein is reported to have responded to the news of Hiroshima with a weary ‘O Weh’ (something like ‘alas’ without the antique overtones), but once he had gathered his thoughts it was evident that the bomb also served to crystallize ideas about world peace and his conception of the role of intellectuals that had been long in the making. His tone was markedly less apocalyptic than that of many commentators. ‘The release of atomic energy’, he wrote in an interview published in November 1945, ‘has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one’—namely, the existence of sovereign nation states, which ensured that war would remain inevitable. The solutions, however, must be radical. He too talked of revolutionary change. In a message to a Peace Congress of Intellectuals held in Wroclaw,

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