Chapter XIX The Nuclear Age
The future depends on people. People are unpredictable. Therefore, the future is unpredictable. However, some general conditions of mankind depend on things like the development of technology, the control won by man over nature and the limitations of natural resources. These can be predicted with a little greater confidence. The future is unknown but in some respects its general outline can be guessed.
Such guesses are important. They influence our present outlook and our present actions.
The nuclear age has not yet started. Our sources of energy are not yet nuclear sources. Even in the military field, where development has been most rapid, the structure of the armed forces has not yet adjusted itself to the facts of the nuclear age in a realistic manner. In politics the atomic nucleus has entered as a promise and as a menace—not as a fact on which we can build and with which we can reckon.
Some technical predictions seem safe:
Nuclear energy will not render our older power plants obsolete in the near future. But nuclear energy will make it possible to maintain the pace—even the acceleration—of the industrial revolution. It will be possible to produce all the energy we need at a moderate cost. Furthermore—and this is the important point—this energy will be available at any place on the globe at a cost which is fairly uniform. The greater the need for power, the sooner will it be feasible to satisfy the need with the help of nuclear reactors.
Nuclear energy can be made available at the most outlandish places. It can be used on the Antarctic continent. It can be made to work on the bottom of the ocean.
The expanding front of industrialization has been called the “revolution of rising expectations.” That nuclear energy should be involved in the current and in the turbulence of this expanding front, is inevitable.
One can say a little more about the effects of scientific and technological discoveries on the relations among the people of the globe. With added discoveries raw materials will no longer be needed with the old urgency. For most substances substitutes are being found. This may make for greater economic independence.
On the other hand, new possibilities will present themselves. We shall learn how to control the air and how to cultivate the oceans. This will call for cooperation and more interdependence.
The dangers from radioactive by-products will act in a similar direction. The radioactive cloud released from a reactor accident may be more dangerous than a nuclear explosion. Such a cloud will not stop at national boundaries. Some proper form of international responsibility will have to be developed.
What effect the existence of nuclear weapons will have upon the coexistence of nations is a question less understood and less explored than any other affecting our future. Most people turn away from it with a feeling of terror. It is not easy to look at the question with calm reason and with little emotion.
A few predictions seem disturbing but are highly probable:
Nuclear secrets will not keep. Knowledge of nuclear weapons will spread among nations—at least as long as independent nations exist.
Prohibition will not work. Laws or agreements which start with the word “don’t” can be broken and will always be broken. If there is hope, it must lie in the direction of agreements which start with the word “do.” The idea of “Atoms for Peace” succeeded because it resulted in concrete action.
An all-out nuclear war between the major powers could occur but we may have good hope that it will not occur if we remain prepared to strike back. No one will want to provoke the devastation of his own country.
Atomic bombs may be used against cities. But there will be no military advantage in destroying cities. In a short and highly mobile war neither centers of supply and communication nor massive means of production will count. If cities are bombed, this will be done primarily for reasons of psychological warfare. We must be and we are prepared for this kind of war but only as a measure of retaliation. There is good reason to believe that as long as we are prepared for all-out war, our civilian population will not suffer from a nuclear attack.
The certainty of a counterblow gives real protection against all-out war. No such protection exists against wars limited in territory and in aims. In the history of mankind such wars have been most frequent. There is no indication that these limited wars have ended. We must be prepared for these conflicts with effective and mobile units, and this requires the use of nuclear firepower.
Nuclear weapons will certainly have a profound effect upon such limited warfare. Not all of this effect need be and indeed it must not be in the direction of greater devastation.
In a nuclear war it will not make sense to use massed manpower. Any such concentration will provide too good a target for atomic weapons. To use big, costly and conspicuous machines of war will be unwise. Such machines will be defeated by nuclear explosions in the same way as the mailed knight went down before firearms.
Any fighting unit in a nuclear war will have to be small, mobile, inconspicuous and capable of independent action. Such units whether on sea, land or in the air cannot rely and will not rely on fixed lines of supply. There will be no possibility and no need to occupy territory and to fight at fixed and definite fronts. If a war should be fought for military reasons and for military advantage, it will consist of short and sharp local engagements involving skill and advanced techniques and not involving masses that slaughter and are being slaughtered.
If an invader adopts extreme dispersion, it will become impossible to defeat him with atomic weapons. But a very highly dispersed army can be defeated by a determined local population. Therefore the main role of nuclear weapons might well be to disperse any striking force so that the resistance of people defending their homes can become decisive. Nuclear weapons may well become the answer to massed armies and may put back the power into the hands where we believe it belongs: the hands of the people.
At this point we are brought back to the main topic of this book: radioactivity. In a limited nuclear war the radioactive fallout will probably kill many of the innocent bystanders. We have seen that the testing program gives rise to a danger which is much smaller than many risks which we take in our stride without any worry. In a nuclear war, even in a limited one, the situation will probably be quite different. That noncombatants suffer in wars is not new. In a nuclear war, this suffering may well be increased further due to the radioactive poisons which kill friend and foe, soldier and civilian alike.
Fortunately there exists a way out. Our early nuclear explosives have used fission. In the fission process a great array of radioactive products are formed, some of them intensely poisonous. More recently we have learned how to produce energy by fusion. Fusion produces fewer and very much less dangerous radioactivities. Actually the neutrons which are a by-product of the fusion reaction may be absorbed in almost any material and may again produce an assortment of radioactive nuclei. However, by placing only certain materials near the thermonuclear explosion, one may obtain a weapon in which the radioactivity is harmless. Thus the possibility of clean nuclear explosions lies before us.
Clean, flexible and easily delivered weapons of all sizes would make it possible to use these bombs as we want to use them: as tools of defense. When stopping an aggressor we would not let loose great quantities of radioactive atoms which would spread death where we wanted to defend freedom. Clean nuclear weapons would be the same as conveniently packaged high explosives. They would be nothing more.
The possibility of clean explosions opens up another development: the use of nuclear explosives for the purposes of peace. Conventional high explosives have been used in peace fully as much as in war. From mining to the building of dams there is a great variety of important jobs that dynamite has performed. Nuclear explosives have not been used in a similar way. The reason is the danger from radioactivity. Once we fully master the art of clean explosions peaceful applications will follow and another step will be made in controlling the forces of nature.
All this is of course only a small part in the process of the increasing power of man and the increasing responsibility of man. As the impossible of yesterday becomes the accomplished fact of today we have to be more and more aware of our neighbors on this shrinking planet. The arts of peace may lead to conflicting interest as easily as they may lead to fruitful cooperation. If we ever learn to control the climate of the world, a nation may find itself in the same relation to another nation as two farmers who have to use the waters of the same river.
Rivals are men who fight over the control of a river. When the same word “rivals” comes to mean cooperation for the best common use of the river or any other resource—that will be the time of law and of peace. Surely this sounds like Utopia and no one sees the way. But the general direction in which we should go is not to consider atomic explosives and radioactivity as the inventions of the devil. On the contrary, we must more fully explore all the consequences and possibilities that lie in nature, even when these possibilities seem frightening at first. In the end this is the way toward a better life. It may sound unusually optimistic in the atomic age, but we believe that the human race is tough and in the long run the human race is reasonable.