This book can be best described as a chain reaction of a chain reaction. The order of chronology is seldom followed, as the writer moves through history, autobiography, gazetteer, tragedy, romance, melodrama and even possibly fantasy? Mostly questions are put forth, and answers left behind. It’s a very genre-less format, not sitting neatly into any particular category, while also being category-defining in its own accord.
The writer stitches together a series of events spread across several 100 years, a chain reaction of events which culminated in the atomic chain reaction, through the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Flanagan starts talking about the H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics era, to Flanagan’s father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die.
The writer describes also the process of writing this very book, and narrates all the experiences that he has lived while writing it. That’s also why it’s so genre-less in it’s nature.
In the winter of 2012, against my better judgement and for reasons that were not entirely to do with writing—much as I said they were—and which even now are not clear to me, I visited the site of Ohama Camp, Japan, where my father had once been interned. It was very cold, a bitter day, and an iron sky threw a foreboding cast on the Inland Sea beneath which my father had once worked in a coal mine as a slave labourer. Nothing remained. Though I had no wish to be bothered with it, I was taken to a local museum where a very helpful woman found numerous photographs documenting a detailed history of the coal mine from the early twentieth century—its growth, its processes, its Japanese workers. There was no photograph of slave labourers. The woman was kind and, as they say, a fount of knowledge about local history. She had never heard of slave labourers working at the Ohama coal mine. It was as if it had never happened, as if no one had ever been beaten or killed or made to stand naked in the snow until they died. I remember the woman’s tolerant smile: a smile of pity for me thinking there had ever been slave labourers at the Ohama coal mine.
What surprised me by reading this book was that H G Wells had already vividly imagined what an atomic bomb might have looked like in the early 20th century. In his science fiction fantasy, he goes to lengths to even describe how the mushroom clouds spread after the bomb was dropped — “the bomb ‘spread itself out into a monstrous cavern of fiery energy at the base of what became a miniature active volcano … a boiling confusion of molten soil and superheated steam’, a description eerily close to that made by Thomas Ferebee decades later. ‘I saw this boiling on the ground and the stem of the mushroom cloud was going up and you could see buildings going up in the steam.’ Bob Caron recalled how the cloud ‘was white on the outside and it was sort of a purplish black towards the interior, and it had a fiery red core, and it just kept boiling up.’ It in a way, reminded me of how laptops where originally conceived in Star Wars, and then gets later manifested in reality, the same goes also with geostationary satellites originally conceived in Isaac Asimovs sci-Fi series, but all these were utopian, benevolent technologies that the fiction envisioned, and H G Wells had unfortunately imagined a dystopian one.
The Americans never invaded. Instead, they dropped the atom bomb. Sixty thousand people died in an instant, many more died slowly, agonisingly, over the succeeding hours and days, and they kept dying in the months and years that followed. Three days later the Americans dropped a second atomic bomb. Forty thousand people died in an instant, many more died slowly, agonisingly, over the succeeding hours and days, and they kept dying in the months and years that followed.
We might even have an after thought that this was all inevitable, and what had to happen would happen anyways.
Some say that if atom bomb was not dropped then, it would have potentially dropped later with 100x as much magnitude and impact. And Flanagan argues here that this was not the case, because for the Manhattan Project to have succeeded the entire country turned into a workshop with a single intent of making the bomb possible.
It could be argued that science was inexorably heading towards the discovery of nuclear fission and therefore the invention of the atomic bomb and thus Hiroshima. But nothing is ever inevitable, least of all the atomic bomb in the mid-twentieth century, a project which, as one of its key theorists, Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist, noted, would only happen if someone could turn a country into a single workshop devoted to that task.
Manhattan project was no joke. And this required the entire will power of the entire nation to have executed this. This was in fact an arms race as there was a far more serious imagined threat that pushed gravity of force into this. Germany under the Third Reich was experimenting with the atomic bomb too. What would have happened if the Nazis made the atomic bomb before the Americans.. would we have ended up on an alternate ending to history?
Perhaps the only country capable of inventing and producing a workable bomb in the mid-twentieth century was the only country that could manage such a massive diversion of its economy—the United States of America. Over the course of the war, under the auspices of the highly secret Manhattan Project, it turned much of its resources—the equivalent of what was flowing into the car industry at the time in terms of investment, the labour of more than half a million workers and the genius of thousands of scientists—into a single workshop with a single goal: the creation of the atom bomb.
Fortunately the Germans were less enthusiastic about the atomic bomb and its development and weren’t unified enough to push resources and manpower into it as much..
By the time Heisenberg was describing the possibility of pineapple-size atomic bombs, the war was turning against the Nazis in Russia, and any project needed to be able to promise certainty of benefit. Because Hitler remained convinced he would defeat both the Soviet Union and Britain by 1943, there was a standing rule that only weaponry that could be battle-ready within an eighteen-month window be supported. Presented with the possibility of an atom bomb, Germany turned away from it, believing it would take too long to develop, particularly when the result—an atom bomb that actually worked—was by no means guaranteed. After the Nazis abandoned research on the bomb, they devoted limited resources to developing a ‘uranium motor’, which would become known in the US as a nuclear reactor. They failed in this also. At war’s end the leading German nuclear scientists were nevertheless captured and put in an English manor house near Cambridge to discover what they did and didn’t know. Treated as guests and shown every courtesy, they were unaware that all the bedrooms and living rooms had been bugged. Shortly before dinner on 6 August 1945 they were told that an atom bomb had been built and exploded by the Allies over Hiroshima.
Another personality who I now have renowned appreciation for is Leo Szilard. He should have been more recognized, I only came to know of him through this book.
Flanagan describes him as a “troubled philosopher troubadour”, and he is well known for his long baths where he slowly immersed himself in his ideas. He is important to this story owing to his scientific contribution in making a nuclear chain reaction sustain.
Leo Szilard was too a sort of scientist, but one of an independent cast. He felt his talents were not always helped by the torpor and ardour of a laboratory. His favoured method of scientific research had at its apex the habit of long walks and longer baths, baths necessarily replete with daydreaming reveries, baths so long that a chambermaid once thought he had drowned. It was said that ideas flowed from him as water from a fountain. Certainly it was immersed in water that Leo Szilard felt he had his best ideas. Many years later he would write a story in which dolphins with minds like his, and an irrational belief in the power of rationality like his, remade the world as a peaceful place. He lowered his doughy body into the tub. As he sank back into the hot water it felt, as it always did, that water was his true, natural medium.
He was the one who saw through what H G Wells described in his book on atomic bomb. In one of his long states of torpor while meditating on ideas in the middle of a hot water bath, Szilard woke up thinking of the destruction that could be carried out by the monstrosity of the atomic bomb.
The idea of a nuclear chain reaction was only the beginning of the revelations Leo Szilard had as the lights changed. If a nuclear chain reaction was possible it would be possible to create atomic energy on an industrial scale. And if atomic energy were possible then an atomic bomb was also possible. But his vision didn’t stop there, for it was simultaneously theoretical and political, at once ecstatic and agonising. A crack opened in his mind and in the universe and immediately began widening. What the owlish young man saw as he found himself falling through it was terrifying. Fiction was transforming into physics and physics into the future in front of the Southampton Row traffic lights, and he saw that future as the abyss that exists before birth and after death, an oblivion at the beginning and end of all human consciousness. If it was possible to build an atomic bomb then it was possible that Hitler could build an atomic bomb and, not only that, given German pre-eminence in physics, be the first to build it and use it to enslave the world.
This led him, indirectly to the forecasting that the Germans could have an edge in making the atomic bomb, and had this strong impulse to then flee Europe and come to United States.
And so when Hitler was made German chancellor in January 1933 Leo Szilard once more foresaw Europe’s fate at a time when many others could not. His desperate entreaties to his friends and family to leave before it was too late were for the most part ignored. He fled Germany in March 1933 and, several months later, in the Imperial’s dining room, over a cup of risible English coffee, breakfasting on several spoons of orange marmalade while reading The Times, his dreaming eyes alighted on something that interested him more than several depressing articles about the current world situation: a report of the talk he had missed in Leicester the day before. Owlish face expressionless, he absent-mindedly alternated sips of coffee with spoons of the sticky orange rind as he read how Lord Rutherford, discussing the recent success of two British scientists in splitting the atom through particle bombardment, dismissed any talk of such discoveries leading to ‘the release of atomic energy on an industrial scale’ as ‘moonshine’.
Szilard’s worst fears quickly proved correct. There was indeed a Nazi secret atomic research program, and they were also seeing early results:
On 29 April 1939 a secret conference in Berlin resulted in the commencement of a Nazi atomic research program, a ban on German uranium exports and the provision for the supply of radium from Czechoslovakian mines to the Third Reich with the aim of developing an atom bomb. Nazi Germany had become the first country in the world to begin actively working to develop nuclear weapons.
Szilard then comes knocking to the doorstep of Einstein who is then situated in the US. He then manages to convince the pacifist professor on the perils of this power in the hands of evil, and pushes Einstein to write a letter to President Roosevelt with a plea to kickstart similar such atomic research..
Einstein, who hadn’t followed atomic research for some years, was shocked. A pacifist, he nevertheless saw the extraordinary danger of a nuclear-armed Nazi Germany. It was agreed that Einstein would sign a letter that would be personally delivered by an intermediary to President Roosevelt, alerting him to the danger and seeking support for research into an atomic bomb. The letter was principally Szilard’s work, Einstein later saying he ‘really only acted as a mailbox’ for his former student.
Szilard discovered—typically not in the lab but over lunch in conversation with some contractors—that commercial grade graphite contained boron. Szilard knew boron absorbed neutrons, thus preventing a chain reaction. This was instrumental mainly in controlling the nuclear fission process. With the nuclear arms race in full swing, the Nazis were also attempting to do it via deuterium, but there shortage got cut short as the Allies sabotaged the hydro-electricity plant at Vermont which was their only source of deuterium through hard water.
Lacking that knowledge and lacking a Szilard, unaware of the problem of boron contamination, the German scientists had wrongly concluded in January 1940 that graphite would not work as a moderator. The Germans turned to the use of heavy water in its place, a far rarer substance that required extensive electrolysis to isolate it from normal water. The principal source of heavy water in Europe was a Norwegian hydro-electricity plant at Vemork which the Allies were able to successfully cripple through partisan sabotage and aerial bombing. In consequence, the Germans never succeeded in building a successful nuclear reactor. Even before Germany’s unconditional surrender in May 1945 it was clear that the Nazis had no nuclear weaponry. The target for the bomb was now to be Japan which the US knew had no capacity to build an atomic bomb.
Especially after the war has ended, and Japan surrendered, Flanagan reflects on his own personal experience, where his father who was a Tasmanian POW suddenly had a free life without any drudgery or slavery.
Do possibly more corpses tomorrow justify possibly fewer corpses today? We pretend to have the answers to this sort of thing. We pretend we know. We pretend there is a moral calculus in war. We pretend so many things. In war, though, not even simple arithmetic is possible. In recent times we have become prisoners of the idea that life is infinitely measurable, that all human wanting and torment and laughter, all hate and all love, can be reduced to that contemporary word metrics. That there is, in other words, an answer for all things that can be found in numbers.
Some beautiful fragments in here, his father finding solace even in the most isolated unhabitated of all places in Tasmania.. “in the scrag ends of an island at the end of the world, in its unhonoured and unknown wonder, broken men rediscovered how to live”..
One of the first things my father did when he made it home after the war ended was to take a train trip around all of Tasmania that he could visit. Perhaps he wanted to see people and places he had thought he would never see again. Perhaps it was an immeasurable comfort to him to be allowed to sit in their homes, their kitchens, their lounges, their backyards and say little or nothing, warmed by the human goodness of others, to be astonished by the small everyday acts of kindness too easily dismissed as everyday. He went to the rainforest, he went to the beaches. He went alone, touching his earth once more as if it were some sacrament necessary to live. None of these places had any value to the larger world, deemed without worth to commerce or justification by European art. But in the scrag ends of an island at the end of the world, in its unhonoured and unknown wonder, broken men rediscovered how to live.
