It can be useful to categorize nuclear weapons as a more virulent strain of plague, to consider man-made death as a phenomenon that parallels the older phenomenon of biological death that the people of all the nations, working in peaceful concert, have brought under a measure of control. Elliot draws this comparison productively:
Our societies are dedicated to the preservation and care of life… Public death was first recognized as a matter of civilized concern in the nineteenth century, when some health workers decided that untimely death was a question between men and society, not between men and God. Infant mortality and endemic disease became matters of social responsibility. Since then, and for that reason, millions of lives have been saved. They are not saved by accident or goodwill. Human life is daily deliberately protected from nature by accepted practices of hygiene and medical care, by the control of living conditions and the guidance of human relationships. Mortality statistics are constantly examined to see if the causes of death reveal any areas needing special attention. Because of the success of these practices, the area of public death has, in advanced societies, been taken over by man- made death — once an insignificant or “merged” part of the spectrum, now almost the whole.
When politicians, in tones of grave wonder, characterize our age as one of vast effort in saving human life, and enormous vigor in destroying it, they seem to feel they are indicating some mysterious paradox of the human spirit. There is no paradox and no mystery. The difference is that one area of public death has been tackled and secured by the forces of reason; the other has not. The pioneers of public health did not change nature, or men, but adjusted the active relationship of men to certain aspects of nature so that the relationship became one of watchful and healthy respect. In doing so they had to contend with and struggle against the suspicious opposition of those who believed that to interfere with nature was sinful, and even that disease and plague were the result of something sinful in the nature of man himself.
The pioneers of public health who proposed to secure the biological death machine for the forces of reason must have felt, at the beginning, a despair at the magnitude of the task like the despair many thoughtful citizens today feel at the magnitude of the task of similarly securing the man-made death machine. They persisted and triumphed.
Bohr's open world has already been negotiated and installed against the biological death machine. No one any longer considers disease a political issue and only modern primitives consider it a judgment of God. When the World Health Organization worked through the 1960s and 1970s to eradicate smallpox from the earth — a program the Soviet Union initiated — both the Soviet Union and the United States shared the cost of the campaign with the third-world countries involved. The Soviets were not charged with expansionism nor the Americans with imperialism. WHO health workers of diverse national origin usually found welcome; once they demonstrated progress and overcame skepticism that containment and then eradication of so pervasive a disease was possible they won enthusiastic local support. “The eradication of smallpox will represent a major milestone in the history of medicine,” the director of the campaign, the American physician Donald A. Henderson, wrote in its final phase. “It will have demonstrated what can be achieved when governments throughout the world join an international organization in a common purpose.” It did: the most devastating and feared natural pestilence in human history is gone, a great victory for mankind.
Man-made death is evidently more intractable than biological death. Whether the unarmed republic of science, dedicated to human felicity rather than to the accumulation of power, can force nation-states armed to the teeth to change before they destroy themselves remains to be seen. That no world wars have engulfed us since 1945 is our interim guarantee that the opening up of the world is well begun, though at any time accident or miscalculation could close it forever. That nuclear weapons proliferate and the superpowers exhaust their economies attempting to outmaneuver each other to unattainable dominance demonstrates how irrationally tenacious is our hold on traditional forms of control.
In the spring of 1957 former AEC chairman Gordon Dean asked Robert Oppenheimer to comment on Henry Kissinger's forthcoming book
Of course Kissinger is right in conceiving the problems of policy planning and strategy in terms of national power, in rough analogy to the national struggles of the 19th century; yet I have the impression that there are deep things abroad in the world, which in time are going to turn the flank of all struggles so conceived. This will not happen today, nor easily as long as Soviet power continues great and unaltered; but nevertheless I think in time the transnational communities in our culture will begin to play a prominent part in the political structure of the world, and even affect the exercise of power by the states.
The preeminent transnational community in our culture is science. With the release of nuclear energy in the first half of the twentieth century that model commonwealth decisively challenged the power of the nation-state. The confrontation is ongoing and inextricably embedded in mortal risk, but it offers at least a distant prospect of felicity.
The different country that still opens before us is Bohr's open world.
Acknowledgments
These men and women who participated in the events of this book generously made time for interviews and correspondence: Philip Abelson, Luis W. Alvarez, David L. Anderson, William A. Arnold, Hans Bethe, Rose Bethe, Eugene T. Booth, Sakae Itoh, Shigetoshi Iwamatsu, George Kistia-kowsky, Willis E. Lamb, Jr., Leon Love, Alfred O. C. Nier, 1.1. Rabi, Stefan Rozental, Glenn Seaborg, Emilio Segre, Edward Teller, Stanislaw Ulam, Eugene Wigner and Herbert York.
Michael Korda took the chance of sponsorship. David Halberstam, Geoffrey Ward and Edward O. Wilson vouched for me to the Ford Foundation. Arthur L. Singer, Jr., saved the day. The Cockefair Chair in Continuing Education at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and its director, Michael Mardikes, lent support. Louis Brown offered physics coaching and wise counsel far beyond the call of any duty and is not responsible for lapses in either regard. Egon Weiss went out of his way to arrange access to the Szilard Papers. The Linda Hall Library of Science and its former director, Larry X. Besant, and the UMKC Library and its former director, Kenneth LaBudde, never failed.
I visited or corresponded with a number of institutions; their staffs guided me with competence and courtesy: American Institute of Physics Niels Bohr Library; Argonne National Laboratory; Bibliothek und Archiv fur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Dahlem; Columbia University; Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution of Washington; Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation; J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Committee; Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory; Library of Congress; Los Alamos National Laboratory; National Archives; Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen; The Readers Digest of Japan; United States Air Force Museum, Wright-Patterson AFB; United States Military Academy Library; University of California — San Diego; University of Chicago Library.
Friends and colleagues helped with research, advice, encouragement, aid: Millicent Abell, Hans and Elisabeth Archenhold, John Aubrey, Dan Baca, Roy and Sandra Beatty, David Butler, Margaret Conyngham, Gil Elliot, Jon Else, Susie Evans, Peter Francis, Kimball Higgs, Jack Holl, Ulla Holm, Joan and Frank Hood, Jim and Reiko Ishikawa, Sigurd Johansson, Tadao Kaizuka, Edda and Rainer Konig, Barbro Lucas, Thomas Lyons, Karen McCarthy, Donald and Britta McNemar, Yasuo Miyazaki, Hiroyuki Nakagawa, Kimiko Nakai, Rolf Neuhaus, Issei Nishimori, Fredrik Nordenham, Patricia O'Connell, Gena Peyton, Edward Quattlebaum, P. Wayne Reagan, Edward Reese, Katherine Rhodes, Timothy Rhodes, Bill Jack Rodgers, Siegfried Ruschin, Robert G. Sachs, Silva Sandow, Sabine Schaffner, Ko Shioya, R. Jeffrey Smith, Robert Stewart, Lewis H. Strauss, Linda Talbot, Sharon Gibbs Thibodeau, Josiah Thompson, Kosta Tsipsis, Erma Valenti, Joan Warnow, Spencer Weart, Paul Williams, Edward Wolowiec, Mike Yoshida.
Luis Alvarez and Emilio Segre were kind enough to read the galleys and offered invaluable suggestions.
