The World Set Free Read online

  particularism, and belligerency, were incompatible with the

  monstrous destructive power of the new appliances the inhuman

  logic of science had produced. The equilibrium could be restored

  only by civilisation destroying itself down to a level at which

  modern apparatus could no longer be produced, or by human nature

  adapting itself in its institutions to the new conditions. It was

  for the latter alternative that the assembly existed.

  Sooner or later this choice would have confronted mankind. The

  sudden development of atomic science did but precipitate and

  render rapid and dramatic a clash between the new and the

  customary that had been gathering since ever the first flint was

  chipped or the first fire built together. From the day when man

  contrived himself a tool and suffered another male to draw near

  him, he ceased to be altogether a thing of instinct and

  untroubled convictions. From that day forth a widening breach can

  be traced between his egotistical passions and the social need.

  Slowly he adapted himself to the life of the homestead, and his

  passionate impulses widened out to the demands of the clan and

  the tribe. But widen though his impulses might, the latent hunter

  and wanderer and wonderer in his imagination outstripped their

  development. He was never quite subdued to the soil nor quite

  tamed to the home. Everywhere it needed teaching and the priest

  to keep him within the bounds of the plough-life and the

  beast-tending. Slowly a vast system of traditional imperatives

  superposed itself upon his instincts, imperatives that were

  admirably fitted to make him that cultivator, that cattle-mincer,

  who was for twice ten thousand years the normal man.

  And, unpremeditated, undesired, out of the accumulations of his

  tilling came civilisation. Civilisation was the agricultural

  surplus. It appeared as trade and tracks and roads, it pushed

  boats out upon the rivers and presently invaded the seas, and

  within its primitive courts, within temples grown rich and

  leisurely and amidst the gathering medley of the seaport towns

  rose speculation and philosophy and science, and the beginning of

  the new order that has at last established itself as human life.

  Slowly at first, as we traced it, and then with an accumulating

  velocity, the new powers were fabricated. Man as a whole did not

  seek them nor desire them; they were thrust into his hand. For a

  time men took up and used these new things and the new powers

  inadvertently as they came to him, recking nothing of the

  consequences. For endless generations change led him very

  gently. But when he had been led far enough, change quickened the

  pace. It was with a series of shocks that he realised at last

  that he was living the old life less and less and a new life more

  and more.

  Already before the release of atomic energy the tensions between

  the old way of living and the new were intense. They were far

  intenser than they had been even at the collapse of the Roman

  imperial system. On the one hand was the ancient life of the

  family and the small community and the petty industry, on the

  other was a new life on a larger scale, with remoter horizons and

  a strange sense of purpose. Already it was growing clear that men

  must live on one side or the other. One could not have little

  tradespeople and syndicated businesses in the same market,

  sleeping carters and motor trolleys on the same road, bows and

  arrows and aeroplane sharpshooters in the same army, or

  illiterate peasant industries and power-driven factories in the

  same world. And still less it was possible that one could have

  the ideas and ambitions and greed and jealousy of peasants

  equipped with the vast appliances of the new age. If there had

  been no atomic bombs to bring together most of the directing

  intelligence of the world to that hasty conference at Brissago,

  there would still have been, extended over great areas and a

  considerable space of time perhaps, a less formal conference of

  responsible and understanding people upon the perplexities of

  this world-wide opposition. If the work of Holsten had been

  spread over centuries and imparted to the world by imperceptible

  degrees, it would nevertheless have made it necessary for men to

  take counsel upon and set a plan for the future. Indeed already

  there had been accumulating for a hundred years before the crisis

  a literature of foresight; there was a whole mass of 'Modern

  State' scheming available for the conference to go upon. These

  bombs did but accentuate and dramatise an already developing

  problem.

  Section 2

  This assembly was no leap of exceptional minds and

  super-intelligences into the control of affairs. It was

  teachable, its members trailed ideas with them to the gathering,

  but these were the consequences of the 'moral shock' the bombs

  had given humanity, and there is no reason for supposing its

  individual personalities were greatly above the average. It

  would be possible to cite a thousand instances of error and

  inefficiency in its proceedings due to the forgetfulness,

  irritability, or fatigue of its members. It experimented

  considerably and blundered often. Excepting Holsten, whose gift

  was highly specialised, it is questionable whether there was a

  single man of the first order of human quality in the gathering.

  But it had a modest fear of itself, and a consequent directness

  that gave it a general distinction. There was, of course, a

  noble simplicity about Leblanc, but even of him it may be asked

  whether he was not rather good and honest-minded than in the

  fuller sense great.

  The ex-king had wisdom and a certain romantic dash, he was a man

  among thousands, even if he was not a man among millions, but his

  memoirs, and indeed his decision to write memoirs, give the

  quality of himself and his associates. The book makes admirable

  but astonishing reading. Therein he takes the great work the

  council was doing for granted as a little child takes God. It is

  as if he had no sense of it at all. He tells amusing trivialities

  about his cousin Wilhelm and his secretary Firmin, he pokes fun

  at the American president, who was, indeed, rather a little

  accident of the political machine than a representative American,

  and he gives a long description of how he was lost for three days

  in the mountains in the company of the only Japanese member, a

  loss that seems to have caused no serious interruption of the

  work of the council…

  The Brissago conference has been written about time after time,

  as though it were a gathering of the very flower of humanity.

  Perched up there by the freak or wisdom of Leblanc, it had a

  certain Olympian quality, and the natural tendency of the human

  mind to elaborate such a resemblance would have us give its

  members the likenesses of gods. It would be equally reasonable

  to compare it to one of those enforced meetings upon the

  mountain-tops that must have occur
red in the opening phases of

  the Deluge. The strength of the council lay not in itself but in

  the circumstances that had quickened its intelligence, dispelled

  its vanities, and emancipated it from traditional ambitions and

  antagonisms. It was stripped of the accumulation of centuries, a

  naked government with all that freedom of action that nakedness

  affords. And its problems were set before it with a plainness

  that was out of all comparison with the complicated and

  perplexing intimations of the former time.

  Section 3

  The world on which the council looked did indeed present a task

  quite sufficiently immense and altogether too urgent for any

  wanton indulgence in internal dissension. It may be interesting

  to sketch in a few phrases the condition of mankind at the close

  of the period of warring states, in the year of crisis that

  followed the release of atomic power. It was a world

  extraordinarily limited when one measures it by later standards,

  and it was now in a state of the direst confusion and distress.

  It must be remembered that at this time men had still to spread

  into enormous areas of the land surface of the globe. There were

  vast mountain wildernesses, forest wildernesses, sandy deserts,

  and frozen lands. Men still clung closely to water and arable

  soil in temperate or sub-tropical climates, they lived abundantly

  only in river valleys, and all their great cities had grown upon

  large navigable rivers or close to ports upon the sea. Over great

  areas even of this suitable land flies and mosquitoes, armed with

  infection, had so far defeated human invasion, and under their

  protection the virgin forests remained untouched. Indeed, the

  whole world even in its most crowded districts was filthy with

  flies and swarming with needless insect life to an extent which

  is now almost incredible. A population map of the world in 1950

  would have followed seashore and river course so closely in its

  darker shading as to give an impression that homo sapiens was an

  amphibious animal. His roads and railways lay also along the

  lower contours, only here and there to pierce some mountain

  barrier or reach some holiday resort did they clamber above 3000

  feet. And across the ocean his traffic passed in definite lines;

  there were hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean no ship

  ever traversed except by mischance.

  Into the mysteries of the solid globe under his feet he had not

  yet pierced for five miles, and it was still not forty years

  since, with a tragic pertinacity, he had clambered to the poles

  of the earth. The limitless mineral wealth of the Arctic and

  Antarctic circles was still buried beneath vast accumulations of

  immemorial ice, and the secret riches of the inner zones of the

  crust were untapped and indeed unsuspected. The higher mountain

  regions were known only to a sprinkling of guide-led climbers and

  the frequenters of a few gaunt hotels, and the vast rainless

  belts of land that lay across the continental masses, from Gobi

  to Sahara and along the backbone of America, with their perfect

  air, their daily baths of blazing sunshine, their nights of cool

  serenity and glowing stars, and their reservoirs of deep-lying

  water, were as yet only desolations of fear and death to the

  common imagination.

  And now under the shock of the atomic bombs, the great masses of

  population which had gathered into the enormous dingy town

  centres of that period were dispossessed and scattered

  disastrously over the surrounding rural areas. It was as if some

  brutal force, grown impatient at last at man's blindness, had

  with the deliberate intention of a rearrangement of population

  upon more wholesome lines, shaken the world. The great

  industrial regions and the large cities that had escaped the

  bombs were, because of their complete economic collapse, in

  almost as tragic plight as those that blazed, and the

  country-side was disordered by a multitude of wandering and

  lawless strangers. In some parts of the world famine raged, and

  in many regions there was plague… The plains of north India,

  which had become more and more dependent for the general welfare

  on the railways and that great system of irrigation canals which

  the malignant section of the patriots had destroyed, were in a

  state of peculiar distress, whole villages lay dead together, no

  man heeding, and the very tigers and panthers that preyed upon

  the emaciated survivors crawled back infected into the jungle to

  perish. Large areas of China were a prey to brigand bands…

  It is a remarkable thing that no complete contemporary account of

  the explosion of the atomic bombs survives. There are, of

  course, innumerable allusions and partial records, and it is from

  these that subsequent ages must piece together the image of these

  devastations.

  The phenomena, it must be remembered, changed greatly from day to

  day, and even from hour to hour, as the exploding bomb shifted

  its position, threw off fragments or came into contact with water

  or a fresh texture of soil. Barnet, who came within forty miles

  of Paris early in October, is concerned chiefly with his account

  of the social confusion of the country-side and the problems of

  his command, but he speaks of heaped cloud masses of steam. 'All

  along the sky to the south-west' and of a red glare beneath these

  at night. Parts of Paris were still burning, and numbers of

  people were camped in the fields even at this distance watching

  over treasured heaps of salvaged loot. He speaks too of the

  distant rumbling of the explosion-'like trains going over iron

  bridges.'

  Other descriptions agree with this; they all speak of the

  'continuous reverberations,' or of the 'thudding and hammering,'

  or some such phrase; and they all testify to a huge pall of

  steam, from which rain would fall suddenly in torrents and amidst

  which lightning played. Drawing nearer to Paris an observer

  would have found the salvage camps increasing in number and

  blocking up the villages, and large numbers of people, often

  starving and ailing, camping under improvised tents because there

  was no place for them to go. The sky became more and more

  densely overcast until at last it blotted out the light of day

  and left nothing but a dull red glare 'extraordinarily depressing

  to the spirit.' In this dull glare, great numbers of people were

  still living, clinging to their houses and in many cases

  subsisting in a state of partial famine upon the produce in their

  gardens and the stores in the shops of the provision dealers.

  Coming in still closer, the investigator would have reached the

  police cordon, which was trying to check the desperate enterprise

  of those who would return to their homes or rescue their more

  valuable possessions within the 'zone of imminent danger.'

  That zone was rather arbitrarily defined. If our spectator could

  have got permission to enter it, he would have entered also a

  zone of uproar, a zon
e of perpetual thunderings, lit by a strange

  purplish-red light, and quivering and swaying with the incessant

  explosion of the radio-active substance. Whole blocks of

  buildings were alight and burning fiercely, the trembling, ragged

  flames looking pale and ghastly and attenuated in comparison with

  the full-bodied crimson glare beyond. The shells of other

  edifices already burnt rose, pierced by rows of window sockets

  against the red-lit mist.

  Every step farther would have been as dangerous as a descent

  within the crater of an active volcano. These spinning, boiling

  bomb centres would shift or break unexpectedly into new regions,

  great fragments of earth or drain or masonry suddenly caught by a

  jet of disruptive force might come flying by the explorer's head,

  or the ground yawn a fiery grave beneath his feet. Few who

  adventured into these areas of destruction and survived attempted

  any repetition of their experiences. There are stories of puffs

  of luminous, radio-active vapour drifting sometimes scores of

  miles from the bomb centre and killing and scorching all they

  overtook. And the first conflagrations from the Paris centre

  spread westward half-way to the sea.

  Moreover, the air in this infernal inner circle of red-lit ruins

  had a peculiar dryness and a blistering quality, so that it set

  up a soreness of the skin and lungs that was very difficult to

  heal…

  Such was the last state of Paris, and such on a larger scale was

  the condition of affairs in Chicago, and the same fate had

  overtaken Berlin, Moscow, Tokio, the eastern half of London,

  Toulon, Kiel, and two hundred and eighteen other centres of

  population or armament. Each was a flaming centre of radiant

  destruction that only time could quench, that indeed in many

  instances time has still to quench. To this day, though indeed

  with a constantly diminishing uproar and vigour, these explosions

  continue. In the map of nearly every country of the world three

  or four or more red circles, a score of miles in diameter, mark

  the position of the dying atomic bombs and the death areas that

  men have been forced to abandon around them. Within these areas

  perished museums, cathedrals, palaces, libraries, galleries of

  masterpieces, and a vast accumulation of human achievement, whose

  charred remains lie buried, a legacy of curious material that