Abstract
Never foregoing hope, the scientists who built the Bomb sought to secure the world from itself.
A scientist with a poet's soul, Eugene Rabinowitch provided eloquent context for the atomic age. He articulated what his fellow scientists thought, expressively capturing the era's milieu and the moral dilemmas that consumed it. To Rabinowitch, a scientist's duty was clear–serve as an independent arbiter for a public that did not understand the physics that threatened it. These ideas manifested themselves in the Bulletin, which Rabinowitch cofounded in 1945 with fellow Manhattan Project scientist Hyman Goldsmith. For almost 30 years, he provided an unwavering editorial voice of pragmatism and hope. A decade after the dawn of the atomic era, Rabinowitch reflected on the mission of the magazine he created. His views still resonate today, as the Bulletin enters its sixtieth year of publication:
Ten years ago, on december 2, 1942, atomic energy was first made available to man. The anniversary of the first self-supporting nuclear chain reaction was celebrated, in a rather subdued spirit, by the veterans of the historic experiment. The gathering was held in the squash court of the University of Chicago, where the first atomic pile had stood. Many newspapers carried editorials marking the anniversary–none too jubilant. No wonder–the celebration of the tenth anniversary of atomic energy had been ushered in, a month earlier, by a “shot heard around the world”! (With radiation counters, this is no longer a poetic exaggeration.) The first hydrogen bomb, or a reasonable prototype of such a bomb, went off at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
Ten years after the first chain reaction got under way in a makeshift laboratory, the country is dotted with new wonderful research laboratories. Their enormous buildings, equipped with all the modern facilities, where hundreds of well-paid PhD's are flanked by assistants and technicians, draftsmen, and machinists, and their giant atom-smashing machinery, make the scientist who grew up in the austerity of pre-bomb laboratories blink and rub his eyes in a mixture of admiration, envy, and misgivings. Most of the work done in these laboratories is good scientific work, inspired by the same urge to delve into the secrets of natural phenomena that has moved science throughout its history. But these laboratories exist not because the American people and the American government have learned to appreciate the material promise and spiritual value of broad, disinterested scientific research, but because a scared nation and a frightened Congress look to them for the production of ever better and ever bigger atomic weapons. One asks oneself: Would these great national research centers survive the shock of a sudden peace, or would they become ghost towns?
As piles of atomic bombs grow higher and more threatening, the quest for unattainable military security increasingly dominates political life everywhere. The dictatorships turn ever tighter the screws of oppression, destroying even the scant remnants of the freedom of movement and exchange of ideas that existed before 1945. Democratic states sacrifice many long-cherished freedoms. They introduce passport and visa restrictions and inquiries into opinions and associations, of government and private employees. Police files accumulate on practically every citizen. Security zealots call for more and more purges and for conformism instead of dissent, which is the spice of democracy. This reversion to a past that free nations seemed to have left behind long ago, is, to a very large extent, the consequence of the fateful discovery of atomic energy.
It is a sad and terrifying picture. There is little satisfaction in the knowledge that this development was anticipated in 1944 by those who had tried, then, to weigh soberly the probable effects on human affairs of the release of atomic energy. In recording the early political discussions between scientists on the Manhattan Project, in rereading the memoranda directed by them in 1944 and 1945 to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, one is painfully aware of how useless the foreknowledge of disaster has been.
When the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was started in December 1945, there was still hope that the shock of the first atomic explosions, and the threat of their repetition on an enormously enlarged scale, could induce all political systems to adopt a policy of rational cooperation. Was not the threat of atomic destruction clear and obvious enough to make even the most hidebound or passion-blinded politician forget his pet hates and preconceived beliefs? The international control of atomic energy, and its development in the interest of all mankind, appeared then as a possible wedge to open the door into a new era. The chances for success were never high, but they were real, and the scientists were those who were most ardently hopeful.
Scientists are not entirely rational, not even in their own work, but among all professional groups, they are the ones most consistently forced to use rational thinking as the main guide of their activity. Their professional success depends on keeping all other influences under check. When scientists enter the public sphere, many of them become as emotional as the next man and equally susceptible to hatred or prejudice. Yet, on the average, scientists as a professional group are likely to bring into public affairs a little more rationality than is common to people whose very success in life more often than not depends on following irrational urges and exploiting irrational tendencies in human nature. The belief in the power of reason to influence the behavior of nations made scientists hopeful of a successful solution to the problem of atomic energy control.
The hope has failed. Nearly 10 years after Hiroshima the world presents a picture, not of progress toward cooperation, but of tremendous strife, fanned by the primitive lust for power, and by mass passions of nationalism, class and race hatred, envy, and suspicion.
As this situation developed, many scientists lost their belief in the usefulness of continuously educating the world to the realities of the atomic age. Some among the friends of the Bulletin have counseled it to quit, and to leave mankind to its folly. Others–the majority–have urged it to go on. Where sudden shock treatment has failed, slow education might yet bring unspectacular, but important success. The fear of atomic destruction, while it gives no hope for permanent avoidance of an all-out war, at least raises what chemists might call “the activation energy” needed to begin a war, and permits an unstable state of world tension to exist much longer than would have seemed possible in the past. We may thus have more time for reflection, and for the slow building up of a rational society, than many people are inclined to believe.
A closer look at the developments of the last 10 years shows that the lessons of the atomic bomb have not been entirely lost on mankind. A trend toward unification, toward leaving behind age-old national hatred and rivalries, is apparent among the nations of the West. In America, the first wave of an easy internationalism, which expressed itself in the many resolutions for world government passed by numerous state legislatures immediately after the war, has been dissipated, but a widespread progress in thinking on international matters, and a growing realization of American responsibility for the rational reorganization of the world, have remained. An understanding of the decisive role of science and technology in national and international developments, and of the possibility of utilizing the methods of science in public policy, is slowly emerging, even if it is continuously threatened by the wave of anti-scientific prejudice released by the fear of atomic war and the loss of American atomic secrets.
The advances are small and far from secure. If the scientists, in general, and the Bulletin editors in particular, can contribute toward protecting and enlarging them, they have, perhaps, no right to retire in resignation and despair to their laboratories.