The Rise of Nuclear Fear

Spencer R. Weart

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674068667
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

After a tsunami destroyed the cooling system at Japan's Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, triggering a meltdown, protesters around the world challenged the use of nuclear power. Germany announced it would close its plants by 2022. Although the ills of fossil fuels are better understood than ever, the threat of climate change has never aroused the same visceral dread or swift action. Spencer Weart dissects this paradox, demonstrating that a powerful web of images surrounding nuclear energy holds us captive, allowing fear, rather than facts, to drive our thinking and public policy.Building on his classic, Nuclear Fear, Weart follows nuclear imagery from its origins in the symbolism of medieval alchemy to its appearance in film and fiction. Long before nuclear fission was discovered, fantasies of the destroyed planet, the transforming ray, and the white city of the future took root in the popular imagination. At the turn of the twentieth century when limited facts about radioactivity became known, they produced a blurred picture upon which scientists and the public projected their hopes and fears. These fears were magnified during the Cold War, when mushroom clouds no longer needed to be imagined; they appeared on the evening news. Weart examines nuclear anxiety in sources as diverse as Alain Resnais's film Hiroshima Mon Amour, Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, and the television show The Simpsons.Recognizing how much we remain in thrall to these setpieces of the imagination, Weart hopes, will help us resist manipulation from both sides of the nuclear debate.

1

RADIOACTIVE HOPES

Once there was a man who sought after hidden knowledge. The story says that he hoped to make human civilization more noble, and if there was an ugly, mad streak in him, as in all of us, he controlled it strictly. This man arduously studied not only modern science but also alchemy, and it was after pondering the arcane philosophers’ stone that he discovered the most prodigious secret of physics: the release of vast energy from within atoms. He knew at once that this energy would change the world. He feared vast explosions, but at the same time he hoped that atomic energy would save civilization, which he believed was otherwise destined to collapse when its fossil fuels ran out. A vision came to him of white towers rising from gardens, a peaceful and prosperous future city centered upon gleaming atomic power plants.

Up to here the story is historical fact, but the rest becomes increasingly like a dream. The man built a shining cylindrical device to project atomic rays. With delight he explored the astonishing effects of the radiation, finding it could cure cancer and other ills. However, in his experiments the rays sometimes did not cure people but gave them horrible cancers, or changed their very genes so that their children were monsters.

The destructive power of atomic rays might be useful, the man thought, for his nation was under deadly threat from enemies. If he could make an all-powerful weapon, surely nobody would dare to start a war. He went to a laboratory hidden down a shaft deep in the earth, and there he used his rays to construct a weird creature, a sort of living robot armed with irresistible energies.

In this story there was also a woman who might have been the scientist’s lover. He had found little time to court her when all his efforts were focused on knowledge and power, but she nevertheless visited his workroom. Just then he had been thinking of a ray that might render living creatures immortal. As the woman approached he aimed a ray device toward her and proposed an experiment; she fled in horror. Rage exploded in the man’s overtaxed brain, and he screamed that everyone had abandoned him, leaving him alone in the world. Climbing into a recess in his robotic creature, he rode it to the surface of the earth. But when he emerged the terrified authorities attacked him, and that automatically activated his weapons. Enormous clouds mushroomed into the sky; radioactive poisons swept life from the planet. In the ashen landscape lay the robot, blackened and deformed.

From an underground room where she had taken shelter, the woman emerged. When she tried to lift the ruined creature it cracked apart like a shell and the man crawled out, his madness purged away. The pair joined hands. A new world would rise on the ashes of the old, a purified and wiser race, perhaps with a white city after all …

There are some curious things about this legendary tale, which I have constructed as a composite of numberless familiar stories. The stories combine contradictory ideas, yet in an odd way the ideas fit neatly together. Still more remarkable, the images are plausible. Atom-powered city, potent ray, strange creature, blasted plain—each could happen, and to a degree each has happened. Images so plausible, and also so impressive, might have been expected to exert some kind of influence on the people who made the political, economic, and military decisions bound up with the history of nuclear energy.

The most curious and unsettling thing is that every theme in such tales was already at hand early in the twentieth century, decades before the discovery of nuclear fission showed how to actually release the energy within atoms. The imagery, then, did not come from experience with real bombs and power plants. It came from somewhere else.

Legends conceal grave truths, but not truths about nuclear physics. Such tales are about more important matters: the forces of human history, social structure, and psychology. In this book I explore these matters as seen in the interaction of imagery with the history of nuclear energy. In the first four chapters I deal with the years prior to the discovery of nuclear fission, focusing in turn on the white city, the destroyed planet, the transforming ray, and the monstrous creature—images that have exerted a surprising influence on the history of our times.

There really was a man who studied both science and alchemy, found the secret of atomic energy, and exclaimed that it would lead humanity to paradise or doomsday. His name was Frederick Soddy. As a youth at the turn of the century he had been bright, ambitious, quarrelsome, and lonely; photographs show his features set firmly and scornfully, like a gentleman boxer about to enter the ring. His chance to become famous came while he was teaching chemistry in Montreal and fell in with Ernest Rutherford. At thirty Rutherford was a hearty, well-liked, and well-established professor, all the things that Soddy was not. But the two men shared a gift for science, and they also shared an ambition: to crack the puzzle of radioactivity.

Radioactivity had attracted scant attention when it was discovered in 1896. It seemed only a curiosity that a few minerals such as thorium and uranium emitted feeble rays resembling a sort of invisible light. Then Marie Curie discovered the new metal radium, whose rays, compared with the whisper from uranium, were like a piercing shout. When the cream of the world’s physicists gathered in Paris for a congress in 1900, Marie and her husband, Pierre, proudly displayed little vials of radium compounds so active that they glowed with a pearly light. The newspapers began to pay attention to radioactivity, and so did Soddy and Rutherford.

Late in 1901 the pair discovered that radioactivity is a sign of fundamental changes within matter. A pulse of radiation signals that an atom is changing into a different kind of atom, a different element with its own chemical properties. At the moment he realized this, Soddy recalled, “I was overwhelmed with something greater than joy—I cannot very well express it—a kind of exaltation.” He blurted out, “Rutherford, this is transmutation!”

“For Mike’s sake, Soddy,” his companion shot back, “don’t call it transmutation. They’ll have our heads off as alchemists.” Already at the instant the new science was born, it stirred both joy and anxiety.1

What did it mean, this word “transmutation,” which elated Soddy and gave Rutherford pause? To most people the word was associated only with gold-making charlatans and crackpots. But in fact the concept of transmutation had once been the central strand of a far-reaching and ancient web of thought. It gives us a clue that can help to explain almost every strange image that would later appear in nuclear energy tales.

At first Soddy and Rutherford could not quite say why atomic transmutation was important, but during 1902 they found one of the reasons: energy. The pair, and meanwhile Pierre Curie in Paris, showed that radioactivity released vastly more energy, atom for atom, than any other process known. Soddy explained the discovery to the public promptly in May 1903 in a British magazine read by cultivated ladies and gentlemen. Radioactivity, he said, pointed to “inexhaustible” power; henceforth matter must be considered not just as inert stuff but as a storehouse of energy. A year later, while taking a long journey by steamship to Australia where he was to lecture on radium, he made a more specific calculation, the kind of tangible example that an audience would not forget: a pint bottle of uranium contained enough energy to drive an ocean liner from London to Sydney and back!

Soddy had more in mind than such mundane tricks. Writing in an American magazine, he said that if we could manage to tap the energy within atoms, “the future would bear as little relation to the past as the life of a dragonfly does to that of its aquatic prototype.” He summed up his ideas in 1908 in a widely read book, The Interpretation of Radium. “A race which could transmute matter would have little need to earn its bread by the sweat of its brow,” he declared. “Such a race could transform a desert continent, thaw the frozen poles, and make the whole world one smiling Garden of Eden.”2

Eden restored, the dragonfly springing from its pupa—where did Soddy find these extraordinary images? The few facts then known about radioactivity gave no support for such language. Rather, these were images that the solitary chemist had already cherished before nuclear energy was discovered.

At the start of the twentieth century, many felt that science would lead humanity to an abundance not only of material goods but of brotherhood and wisdom. The greatest enthusiasts were scientists themselves, such as the eminent French chemist Marcellin Berthelot, who fascinated people with his books. By the year 2000, he declared, the earth would be a garden where a kinder and happier humanity would live amid the abundance of a Golden Age. He explained that it was the discoveries of scientists like himself that would bring this to pass, for example, by providing a limitless source of energy. Many of Soddy’s declarations could have been taken straight from Berthelot’s discourses, or others like them. In 1893 a simulacrum of the perfected city had actually been constructed, if only for a summer. The fairgrounds of the Chicago International Exposition, dubbed the “White City,” were a fairyland of broad avenues and sparkling fountains, incandescent at night under the new electric lamps, with steel dynamos gleaming alongside alabaster sculptures.

Reasons for enthusiasm in the scientific future were seen even in the planet Mars. A few astronomers convinced themselves that they saw spidery lines across the blurred disk in their telescopes. Camille Flammarion, a French astronomy popularizer, said in 1892 that the lines were probably canals, the grand engineering projects of an elder race. Percival Lowell of Boston explained that Mars must represent a later stage of evolution than the Earth, a planet grown dry over the ages. Thus the future of our planet was written upon our neighbor. Not only did the colossal scale promise astounding technical prowess, but the way the canals spanned the entire planet proved that the Martians had outgrown war. Although most professional astronomers scoffed at such ideas, the public was half convinced that the Martian engineers existed.

Of course Flammarion and Lowell had simply projected onto the ambiguous disk an image of future civilization that existed only in their heads. I say this to emphasize a mechanism that is central to any history of images: ideas already held in the mind tend to creep into the picture that people think they perceive.

By the start of the twentieth century the image of a White City, expanded to planetary scale and projected onto the blurred screen of the future, was at a peak of popularity, well positioned to become the first symbol associated with the energy of atoms. After all, modern civilization was founded on energy. Coal and electricity were visibly transforming nations, a change more rapid than has happened to any generation before or since. As a child Soddy had read by smoking oil lamps and traveled behind plodding horses, technologies little different from those used by the ancient Romans; by the time he joined Rutherford, electric trams were humming down brilliantly illuminated avenues.

Much remained to be done. Industry was carried on the stooped backs of coal miners, working in the dark until their health broke. Coal smoke choked the cities, yet millions preferred the soot and tuberculosis of industrial slums to the traditional rural life of ignorance, exhausting labor, and malnutrition. Progressive thinkers had good reason to say that civilization would lift itself far higher—provided it continued to replace human muscle with the energies manipulated by scientists.

Experts warned, however, that the planet’s finite stock of fossil fuels must eventually be exhausted. Soddy was only repeating familiar ideas when he wrote that “the world’s demand for energy is ever increasing and will continue to increase, while the available supply of fuel is ever diminishing.” Other scientists promised that before the coal gave out they would find other sources of energy—most likely sunlight. Visionaries wrote of a sun-powered civilization in which slums would become true white cities. Or perhaps, since sunlight is everywhere, people would abandon cities altogether for a prospering countryside. Soddy, however, saw poor prospects for solar power (investors in schemes for solar boilers were in fact regularly disappointed). He warned that the “inevitable coming struggle” over dwindling fuel supplies might hurl the world into poverty sooner than people guessed. But if we could exploit the energy within atoms? Then all the wonders predicted for humanity’s future would indeed unfold.3

There was ample reason for scientists to tell the public their dream for making a better future, as Soddy and other prominent scientists did in numerous lectures, writings, and newspaper interviews. The obvious motive was pride in their profession and in their personal discoveries. Beyond that, they could hope to find money for their laboratories, and students for their classes, only if the public joined in their belief in the value of science. What is more interesting is how avidly journalists took up the same belief.

Newspapers and magazines zealously praised science in general and atomic science in particular. After Rutherford and Soddy’s discovery of what everyone soon called transmutation, every medium from newspapers to public lecturers exclaimed that it gave scientists a tool that could revolutionize civilization. Radium might be harnessed to illuminate cities, create new metals, and do almost anything else imaginable. By the 1920s, when one or another magazine remarked that a bottle of uranium might propel a steamship across an ocean, it was repeating a tired cliché known to schoolchildren around the world.

An obvious reason that journalists said so much about radium was that it was a fine source for sensational tales that could attract a paying audience. Besides, as the twentieth century wore on, not only Sunday supplement curiosities but more and more of the front page had a connection with science. The trend posed a problem for the rising mass press of the 1920s. It was no longer enough to snip the most striking remarks from an eminent scientist’s pronouncements, or ignore them altogether in favor of sensational claims by some pseudoscientist. Specially trained journalists were needed to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Science journalists, a new breed of writers with a solid background of scientific training, rose to the challenge. In their work as reporters these young men (never women) spent many hours in the company of leading scientists, remarkable people whom they admired, and upon whom they relied for their information. These journalists had come to their specialty in the first place because they saw science as a force for progress, and saw themselves as missionaries for the scientific viewpoint. The public must be taught to admire science, for the support of society was needed to sustain the scientific endeavor (and, to be sure, science journalism).

The dean of these writers was Waldemar Kaempffert. In 1927, when he became science editor of the New York Times, Kaempffert had already been reporting for a quarter-century in clear, enticing prose on subjects like radium. Over the years he came to resemble the famous professors he reported on, robust and impressive, by turns charming and pompous. Agreeing with his scientist friends, Kaempffert wrote that they had brought amazing benefits to society, and we could look forward to yet greater marvels: rockets to the moon, precooked meals, and towns with “plenty of garden space … and a finer outlook on life.” In 1934 he wrote, “Probably one building no larger than a small-town post office of our time will contain all the apparatus required to obtain enough atomic energy for the entire United States.” With transmutation under control, gold might be a waste by-product of the new industry, used for roofing material.4

Buildings roofed with gold? The social forces that brought atomic physics into association with the utopian scientific White City may seem plain enough, but these moved alongside deeper forces of still greater power. The concept of “transmutation” was a doorway through which archaic images would make their way into nuclear energy tales.

Physicists and the press loved to compare atomic scientists with the medieval alchemists who had sought to turn lead into gold. By the 1930s even level-headed Rutherford titled his popularizing book on atomic physics The Newer Alchemy. It became a cliché that “the famous problem of the alchemists has been solved.” But in reality the problem of the alchemists was a wholly different kind of tran...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Copyright
• 1. Radioactive Hopes
• 2. Radioactive Fears
• 3. Radium: Elixir or Poison?
• 4. The Secret, the Master, and the Monster
• 5. The Destroyer of Worlds
• 6. The News from Hiroshima
• 7. National Defenses
• 8. Atoms for Peace
• 9. Good and Bad Atoms
• 10. The New Blasphemy
• 11. Death Dust
• 12. The Imagination of Survival
• 13. The Politics of Survival
• 14. Seeking Shelter
• 15. Fail/Safe
• 16. Reactor Promises and Poisons
• 17. The Debate Explodes
• 18. Energy Choices
• 19. Civilization or Liberation?
• 20. Watersheds
• 21. The Second Nuclear Age
• 22. Deconstructing Nuclear Weapons
• 23. Tyrants and Terrorists
• 24. The Modern Arcanum
• 25. Artistic Transmutations
• A Personal Note
• Nuclear History Timeline
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Index