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Our Friend, the Atom
turned 50 early Sunday
morning. I wanted to celebrate, but I didn't know how.
Perhaps a visit to his birthplace in nearby New Mexico? Driving into a desert during a record heat wave would not put me into a celebratory frame of mind.
Invite Mr. Atom over for cake and ice cream? He may try to behave, but he's accident-prone: Chernobyl, Three-Mile Island, Hanford, Rocky Flats.
Besides, I couldn't have relied on Mr. Atom to arrive. He has, shall we say, a tendency to stretch the truth.
For instance, Mr. Atom once promised to deliver
electricity too cheap to meter,
and yet we got
fiascoes like Fort St. Vrain. Mr. Atom also promised
peace through strength,
and we got Vietnam, Korea,
Panama, Grenada, Iraq.
I thought of sending a card, but then I realized that if we put Mr. Atom in historic perspective, he's hardly worth a postage stamp.
Start with the military aspect. The deadliest bombing raids in history were not over Hiroshima (100,000 killed) and Nagasaki (70,000). The fire-bombing of Tokyo on March 9, 1945, killed at least 100,000 people. The fire-bombing of Dresden on Feb. 13, 1945, holds the record: 130,000 dead.
Thus we were perfectly capable of killing myriads of civilians with conventional weapons. The atomic bomb may have simplified the process, but it really didn't change the fundamentals of the modern warfare devised in 1864 by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman: terrorize civilian populations and destroy the enemy's means of production.
Sherman warfare doesn't work. Our own strategic bombing survey after World War II concluded that neither German morale nor German production suffered on account of all that bombing. Japan, despite all those bombs, will soon pass the United States as the world's largest economy. We dropped record tonnages on Vietnam, and still lost the war.
As for the Civil War, the federal forces defeated the rebels on the battlefield, but who really won?
Good ol' boys who fly the stars and bars -- the emblem of treason -- are deemed four-square patriots. The president of the United States is from Arkansas. His predecessor found it expedient to be from Texas. The speaker of the House of Representatives is from Georgia. The senate of the United States tiptoes around the whims of Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Phil Gramm of Texas. The old Confederacy clearly runs America, even if Lee surrendered to Grant.
As to whether the atomic bomb shortened the war with Japan, no one will ever be able to prove it one way or another. We can't conduct a scientific experiment to roll back the clock and find out whether Japan would have surrendered without the atomic bombs.
If I had been in President Truman's shoes, though, I'd have done exactly what he did. It would be unconscionable for an American president to have an expensive weapon at hand that could conceivably shorten a war and save American lives, and not deploy that weapon.
But as to the atomic bomb's effect on history in general, Japan was already defeated by the summer of 1945. The end might have come later without the bomb, but it still would have come.
What of the other blessings of the Atomic Age? Well, the
put your head beneath the desk
drills in grade
school were a welcome distraction from the routine
classroom tedium, but they're hardly the stuff of historic
transformation. After all, kids elsewhere enjoyed the same
exercise for tornado alerts.
In late 1942, the brilliant physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi turned down an offer to be associate director of the Los Alamos laboratory, where the atomic bomb would take form under Robert Oppenheimer.
Although he would do some consulting for Los Alamos,
Rabi stayed at MIT to work on electronics. I'm very
serious about this war,
he told Oppenheimer. We
could lose it with insufficient radar.
Perhaps Rabi, who won a Nobel prize in 1944, saw the future more clearly than the bomb physicists. There's a piece of radar -- a microwave oven -- in most American households, and hardly anybody routinely operates anything of a thermonuclear nature.
The real dawning was not the Atomic Age in 1945, but the Electronic Age with the invention of the transistor in 1948. That, rather than the first nuclear bomb, has radically changed the way we live and work.
Our homes are full of electronic tools and toys -- television sets, compact disk players, audio and video cassette recorders, microwave ovens, smart thermostats, game machines. Our workplaces teem with computers, laser printers, fax machines, modems, scanners.
They communicate almost instantaneously all over the world; no industrial economy can be a closed society any more. The Soviet Union could arm itself to the teeth to defend against a nuclear threat, but it was defenseless against this electronic threat.
Granted, some of the billions spent on Our Friend the Atom assisted this revolution. But that was accidental. The mighty atomic bomb is a footnote next to the humble transistor, and so I'm just as glad that I didn't celebrate Mr. Atom's birthday. It wasn't worth the trouble.
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