The Making of the Atomic Bomb

discovered multiple structures of paradox; now he searched it again by the dark light of the energy it released and discovered profound political change.

Nations existed in a condition of international anarchy. No hierarchical authority defined their relations with one another. They negotiated voluntarily as self-interest moved them and took what they could get. War had been their final negotiation, brutally resolving their worst disputes.

Now an ultimate power had appeared. If Churchill failed to recognize it he did so because it was not a battle cry or a treaty or a committee of men. It was more like a god descending to the stage in a gilded car. It was a mechanism that nations could build and multiply that harnessed unlimited energy, a mechanism that many nations would build in self-defense as soon as they learned of its existence and acquired the technical means. It would seem to confer security upon its builders, but because there would be no sure protection against so powerful and portable a mechanism, in the course of time each additional unit added to the stockpiles would decrease security by adding to the general threat until insecurity finally revealed itself to be total at every hand.

By the necessity, commonly understood, to avoid triggering a nuclear holocaust, the deus ex machina would have accomplished then what men and nations had been unable to accomplish by negotiation or by conquest: the abolition of major war. Total security would be indistinguishable from total insecurity. A menacing standoff would be maintained suspiciously, precariously, at the brink of annihilation. Before the bomb, international relations had swung between war and peace. After the bomb, major war among nuclear powers would be self-defeating. No one could win. World war thus revealed itself to be historical, not universal, a manifestation of destructive technologies of limited scale. Its time would soon be past. The pendulum now would swing wider: between peace and national suicide; between peace and total death.

Bohr saw that far ahead — all the way to the present, when menacing standoff has been achieved and maintained for decades without formal agreement but at the price of smaller client wars and holocaustal nightmare and a good share of the wealth of nations — and stepped back. He wondered if such apocalyptic precariousness was necessary. He wondered if the war-weary statesmen of the day, taught the consequences of his revelation, could be induced to forestall those consequences, to adjourn the game when the stalemate revealed itself rather than illogically to play out the menacing later moves. It was clear at least that the new weapons would be appallingly dangerous. If the statesmen could be brought to understand that the danger of such weapons would be common and mutual, might they not negotiate commonly and mutually to ban them? If the end would be a warless world either way, but one way with the holocaustal machinery in place and the other way with its threat only considered and understood, what did they have to lose? Negotiating peace rather than allowing the deus ex machina inhumanly to impose standoff might show the common threat to contain within itself, complementarity, common promise. Much good might follow. “It appeared to me,” Bohr wrote in 1950 of his lonely wartime initiative, “that the very necessity of a concerted effort to forestall such ominous threats to civilization would offer quite unique opportunities to bridge international divergencies.” That, in a single sentence, was the revelation of the complementarity of the bomb.

“Much thought has naturally been given to the question of [arms] control,” Bohr nattered Franklin Roosevelt in his 1944 document, knowing that hardly any thought had yet been given, “but the further the exploration of the scientific problems concerned is proceeding” — to thermonuclear weapons, Bohr means — “the clearer it becomes that no kind of customary measures will suffice for this purpose and that especially the terrifying prospect of a future competition between nations about a weapon of such formidable character can only be avoided through a universal agreement in true confidence.”

Bohr was no fool. Obviously no nation could be expected to trust another nation's bare word about something so vital to survival. Each would want to see for itself that the other was not secretly building bombs. That meant the world would have to open up. He knew very well how suspicious the Soviet Union would be of such an idea; he hoped, however, that the dangers of a nuclear arms race might appear serious enough to make evident the compensating advantages:

The prevention of a competition prepared in secrecy will therefore demand such concessions regarding exchange of information and openness about industrial efforts including military preparations as would hardly be conceivable unless at the same time all partners were assured of a compensating guarantee of common security against dangers of unprecedented acuteness.

Nor was the urge to suspicious secrecy unique to the Soviets; the Americans and the British were even then risking an arms race by keeping their work on the atomic bomb secret from their Soviet allies. Oppenheimer elaborates:

[Bohr] was clear that one could not have an effective control of… atomic energy… without a very open world; and he made this quite absolute. He thought that one would have to have privacy, for he needed privacy, as we all do; we have to make mistakes and be charged with them only from time to time. One would have to have respect for individual quiet, and for the quiet process of government and management; but in principle everything that might be a threat to the security of the world would have to be open to the world.

Openness would accomplish more than forestalling an arms race. As it did in science, it would reveal error and expose abuse. Men performed in secrecy, behind closed doors and guarded borders and silenced printing presses, what they were ashamed or afraid to reveal to the world. Bohr talked to George Marshall after the war, when the Chief of Staff had advanced to Secretary of State. “What it would mean,” he told him, “if the whole picture of social conditions in every country were open for judgment and comparison, need hardly be enlarged upon.” The great and deep difficulty that contained within itself its own solution was not, finally, the bomb. It was the inequality of men and nations. The bomb in its ultimate manifestation, nuclear holocaust, would eliminate that inequality by destroying rich and poor, democratic and totalitarian alike in one final apocalypse. It followed complementarily that the opening up of the world necessary to prevent (or reverse) an arms race would also progressively expose and alleviate inequality, but in the direction of life, not death:

Within any community it is only possible for the citizens to strive together for common welfare on the basis of public knowledge of the general conditions of the country. Likewise, real co-operation between nations on problems of common concern presupposes free access to all information of importance for their relations. Any argument for upholding barriers of information and intercourse, based on concern for national ideals or interests, must be weighed against the beneficial effects of common enlightenment and the relieved tension resulting from such openness.

That statement, from an open letter Bohr wrote to the United Nations in 1950, is preceded by another, a vision of a world evolved to the relative harmony of the nations of Scandinavia that once confronted each other and the rest of Europe as aggressively and menacingly as the Soviet Union and the United States had come by 1950 to do. Notice that Bohr does not propose a world government of centralized authority but a consortium: “An open world where each nation can assert itself solely by the extent to which it can contribute to the common culture and is able to help others with experience and resources must be the goal to put above everything else.” And most generally and profoundly: “The very fact that knowledge is itself the basis for civilization points directly to openness as the way to overcome the present crisis.”

Such an effort would begin with the United States, Bohr suggested to Roosevelt in the summer of 1944, because the United States had achieved clear advantage: “The present situation would seem to offer a most favourable opportunity for an early initiative from the side which by good fortune has achieved a lead in the efforts of mastering mighty forces of nature hitherto beyond human reach.” Concessions would demonstrate goodwill; “indeed, it would appear that only when the question is taken up… of what concessions the various powers are prepared to make as their contribution to an adequate control arrangement, [will it] be possible for any one of the partners to assure themselves of the sincerity of the intentions of the others.”

The untitled memorandum Bohr prepared for Franklin Roosevelt in Washington in 1944 went to Felix Frankfurter for review on July 5 along with a cover letter apologizing for its inadequacies. Bohr worried through the