The power of words
Powers, Thomas
Of several minds: Thomas Powers THE POWER OF WORDS WHY PESSIMISTS SCARE US, NOT CHANGE US In my youthful way I wondered, "If only some day a hundred years from now, a little street or even an...
...The senselessness of the episode will make it seem like a kind of accident...
...It was then that Stanislaw Ulam earned his right to a street...
...The Americans found this disconcerting...
...The Soviets know what war will mean, they say, and it has made them sober and cautious...
...Perhaps we should see the postwar world as a kind of laboratory, engaged in a major experiment to test the theories of the pessimists and those who trust in arms...
...In it Judson writes that the best confirmation of a scientific theory is a "strong prediction" which is borne out by observation...
...But the Russians were right behind us, and it has been that way ever since...
...There is not much to show for it...
...and when we envisage the whole series in a synoptic view, we discover that this is not only a series but a progression...
...Their theory is a simple one, although I have never seen it laid out in so many words...
...The evidence is certain to be fragmentary...
...In the late 1940s the pessimists seem to have seen everything in one blinding flash - a world armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons atop mighty missiles, engaged in a kind of pushbutton Buck Rogers war...
...In his theory of relativity, for example, Einstein predicted that the gravitational effect of stars would bend light rays...
...There is also another reason the pessimists have had so little effect on anything except our nightmares...
...The phrase seemed innocent enough at the time...
...We must keep on trying...
...My own view is that war is not something we launch deliberately, but something which happens to us...
...It used to take hours to retarget a Minuteman missile, for example...
...Preparation for war determines the sort of war it will be...
...We had been the victims of atrocities and did not shrink from inflicting them on our enemies...
...Heinlein had got it about right, but he was premature...
...So it was with other pessimists...
...They predicted disaster if we continued on our present course...
...The plan probably had small chance of success even in its original form...
...It was a slap, really, but it landed solidly and hard...
...Even before the end of the war a group at the Chicago Met Lab warned there would be such an arms race in the absence of international agreement...
...There war is seen as something which needlessly follows when the soldiers and statesmen haven't done their job right...
...It reads a good deal like a study done in 1975 by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment...
...That is a flat prediction...
...He probably intended to say that the potential scale of war in the future would prevent it from taking place...
...Thousand-plane raids had destroyed whole cities...
...and today it is already apparent that the war of 1939-45 was not the climax of this crescendo movement...
...Pity found no place in the hearts of the men.managing the war...
...Hiroshima could pass muster as a military act, but Nagasaki seemed gratuitous, vindictive, and vengeful...
...Leo Szilard, the physicist, describing a meeting with James Byrnes in May 1945 MR...
...Of several minds: Thomas Powers THE POWER OF WORDS WHY PESSIMISTS SCARE US, NOT CHANGE US In my youthful way I wondered, "If only some day a hundred years from now, a little street or even an alley could be named after me...
...Of course the Romans had wars in plenty in spite of their preparations, but this is only a debater's point and it lacks the power to convince...
...The consequences of Ulam's idea are certainly on a scale to justify naming a street after him, perhaps a whole plaza...
...Stanislaw Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician (1976...
...In the same decade Winston Churchill, possibly spurred by H.G...
...Our relations with the Soviet Union now are pretty much what they were in the early 1950s, with the sole exception that now we have thousands of nuclear weapons with which to threaten them, instead of hundreds...
...TIME WILL TELL us the meaning of Hitler's words...
...Japan had not yet surrendered but Truman issued orders that no more bombs were to be dropped...
...Arnold Toynbee, War and Civilization (1950) IN ancient times the gift of prophecy was held in something close to religious awe...
...If we have them, we will eventually use them...
...Whoever gets either one first will have the world by the tail with a downpull...
...Last year I read an interesting book by Horace Freeland Judson called The Search for Solutions...
...And of course there has been no war...
...It is an imaginative investigation of the scientific method...
...He opened by saying, "We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead...
...Let us not deceive ourselves: we must elect world peace, or world destruction...
...There has been no shortage of warnings about that...
...BYRNES was wrong...
...We have had no war...
...Now, fifty years later, when the great powers have thousands of such weapons, Churchill's idle wondering has taken on a prophetic cast...
...They may wreck the world, or only a part of it, or only a city or two...
...Even science, which bases its predictions on an understanding of the structure of things, has about it an awesome quality inspiring trust...
...In our recent Western history war has been following war in an ascending order of intensity...
...This is not coyness, but a healthy instinct for professional self-preservation...
...When it comes we shall be surprised...
...The curious thing is that this came as no surprise to the alarmed atomic scientists of the late 1940s...
...Everyone - just about everyone - concedes that nuclear weapons are dangerous...
...The pessimists' words elicit fear, but are too weak to achieve that final degree of conviction which might make them the basis of action...
...Byrnes's . . . view [was] that our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe...
...Both have made strong predictions...
...One group said these weapons were too dangerous for the old international structure which accepted war as a last resort...
...Only events can establish, after the fact, which was closest to the truth...
...All the anger drained out through my arm and hand...
...Economists, stock analysts, and the Central Intelligence Agency all forecast the future in language as obscure as the pronouncements of the Delphic Oracle...
...We all hope this will prove to be the case...
...Think of the resonance which time has given to that word "trouble...
...They will conduct a kind of perpetual electronic conversation, keeping up with their fellows...
...There is no street named after Ulam, but the day may still come...
...But perhaps the real meaning is that we won't be able to "bear" such a war when it comes...
...It will take gall to plead ignorance when the time comes...
...The bomb changed everything - everything," said Einstein, "except our modes of thinking...
...Getting them exactly right is close to miraculous, and it doesn't often happen...
...Wells, speculated about future wars using intercontinental missiles with warheads of tremendous force...
...But that is my view, and it is only an opinion...
...But what are we to do about it...
...In a letter to Eisenhower on February 6, 1956, Baruch said, "Whether we can-get the 1500-mile [rocket] or the 5000-mile first, I do not know, but we should try for both...
...Experiment showed it was so...
...The arms race has been a continually escalating spiral for nearly forty years, but neither side has gained a useful political advantage, much less one on a scale proportionate to the growing risk...
...The nuclear core for a fourth was being assembled at that very moment in Los Alamos...
...We move toward it at a glacial pace, responding to events...
...Now and in the future, Europe and the world are too small for a war...
...It is that preparation for war leads to war...
...This "strong prediction" - a flat, confident statement that something would happen, based on a theory - convinced the doubters of relativity...
...Then again, we might "bear" it - more or less - and Hitler's remark will take on a tinge of irony...
...With such weapons available war will become unbearable for the human race...
...It is a bit as if a. basketball team insisted they could keep the ball in the air forever, if they were only serious enough about the effort, kept in training, and regularly rotated players...
...One answer is that while the pessimists foresaw many things which have come to pass, their worst fears are not among them...
...The question of nuclear war is sometimes posed in very stark terms, as if there were only two possibilities: the sort of armed peace we have had since 1945, or Armageddon - a cataclysm involving thousands of warheads, leaving the Northern Hemisphere a kind of smoking ruin, with a pitiful remnant of ragged survivors left to sift the debris...
...If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima...
...From the point of view of both Moscow and Washington, "the other side" is building more weapons...
...Of course nobody can guess right every time, but even allowing for normal human error, the postwar military and political leaders of the United States seem to have got things wrong with uncanny persistence...
...Ulam, a Polish mathematician who came to the United States shortly before World War II, has spent most of his life at Los Alamos.There, in the early 1950s, he hit upon a clever way to create the temperatures - hot as the center of the sun - necessary for thermonuclear explosions...
...He seemed to dismiss it out of hand...
...It has to be asked why one group of predictions - for the most part accurate - has been ignored, while the failure of another group seems to have had so little effect...
...Now we know...
...Events rarely spring out of nowhere...
...The national security establishment insists it will never drop the ball, so long as we provide them with money, men, and arms, don't overreach, and soberly warn our opponents of the consequences if they push too hard...
...As early as 1921 the Austrian nuclear physicist Hans Thirring, brooding on the implications of Einstein's theories, wondered what "might happen in a town, if the dormant energy of a single brick were to be let free, say in the form of an explosion...
...People have been talking about nuclear weapons for some time now...
...In one sense his remark is already ironic...
...One result of their warnings was the Acheson-Lilienthal plan of 1946, presented to the UN - after certain modifications - by Bernard Baruch on June 14th of that year...
...The arms group claims it is fear which has done the trick...
...Their opponents will insist the case was a special one, that a change in strategy here, the rewording of a diplomatic note there, might have made all the difference...
...His vision of the post-attack world was grim in the extreme - total collapse of communications, transportation, medical services, industry, the capacity of the government to govern...
...Every passing year strengthens their position...
...But this may not-arrive until 1990, nearly half a century after the pessimists first saw it coming...
...In fact, they tend to think the proof is already in, and the case closed...
...We" can't afford to fall behind...
...It's not hard to see why...
...It will be the same with the predictions of Oppenheimer -and so many others...
...Eventually one or the other will be in a position to say they told us so...
...Baruch's words sound hollow now...
...It is a slow process...
...We go on building weapons today, and make plans to negotiate limits tomorrow, and allow ourselves to hope, encouraged by years of relative peace, that things will go on no worse than they have...
...Everyone pays lip service to arms control and "peace," but that is as far as it goes...
...the most ominous thing about these wars is that they were not isolated or unprecedented calamities...
...In 1945 the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein predicted that Americans would have to school themselves in woodcraft and prepare to take to the wilderness in the event of nuclear war...
...The Russians rejected it...
...Adolf Hitler to Walter Dornberger, chief of the German V-2 rocket program, in July 1943...
...Now one plane could do the job...
...International agreements to limit arms seem to offer the only way out, so we have been trying to negotiate limits...
...The argument will not be settled dramatically and all at once...
...If the MX system is ever built the missiles will be able to retarget themselves...
...Maybe so, and maybe not...
...THOMAS POWERS...
...It left me at peace within...
...The problem seems to be that they still constitute no more than a theory, and others have other theories...
...It's too soon to tell...
...Thus the future is always hidden in the present, and yet it eludes us...
...If some are destroyed, the rest will reallocate the most important targets...
...A second group promised security through arms...
...They warned that others would soon build bombs, there would be no defense, America would have to disperse her cities...
...Others have their opinions...
...It is a curious business...
...Oppenheimer once referred to Ulam's idea as "technically sweet...
...Nations fight with the weapons they have...
...Warnings began to pour forth from the alarmed scientists...
...In this light the pessimists may properly see themselves as arguing before two audiences simultaneously - their contemporaries, whom they hope to warn in time, and the postwar survivors of the future, who will be in a position to test prewar theories against reality...
...Those who argue the matter afterwards will still tend to divide along the old lines...
...Nuclear weapons may be used in Europe, or in the Middle East, or between Pakistan and India...
...This view of war as a characteristic and habitual form of human behavior directly contradicts the more hopeful view of the national security establishment...
...But what do we do in the interim...
...If nations are ready for war and constantly push and test each other, eventually things will slip out of their control and war will follow...
...Baruch's modifications settled the matter...
...The warnings issued by the pessimists have been frequent, cogent, eloquent and persuasive - so it seems to me - but they have had little effect on anything except the rhetoric of national leaders...
...Accident, or fate, chooses the precise circumstances of the opening shot...
...If we had had this weapon in 1939, we would never have had this war...
...But if the pessimists can state their case clearly enough in advance - refining the terms of the experiment, if you will - then gradually events will confirm the authority of what they say, and men will begin to listen...
...Postwar history might be described as a contest of competing predictions...
...Getting things generally right is a major achievement...
...Why didn't I believe in the success of your work...
...Once things have happened, their origins are usually clear...
...But that is as far as they go...
...The arms race so often predicted duly followed...
...Things might turn out that way - there are weapons enough, certainly - but they might not...
...The time of which Oppenheimer spoke has not yet come...
...In the bomb-making community Nagasaki dissipated the mood of war overnight...
...Oppenheimer in a speech accepting an award at Los Alamos on October 16, 1945 THAT IS a flat prediction...
...What sort of war, when, how it will start, who will fight it - these things are all hidden from them...
...What the pessimists say is that nuclear weapons do not preclude a big war, and that when a big war comes nuclear weapons will be used in it...
...Now it can be done by punching numbers into a computer...
...As time goes by without a nuclear war, the national security community seems to be confirmed in its theory, summed up by the Roman military writer Vegetius, who said, "If you want peace, prepare for war...
...As it happened we got both first, but we did not get the world by the tail...
...Nagasaki seems to have had some such effect in Washington...
...I remember the sensation vividly...
...Thus the pessimists' warnings, merely persuasive as argument now, will acquire a new authority when borne out by events...
...Common sense says someone would eventually drop the ball...
...But the mood of war was too strong...
...IT IS TIME that gives power to words...
...The bomb, conceived as a weapon pure and simple so long as it belonged to us alone, had no apparent effect on Stalin at all...
...Even before Hiroshima the men who made the bomb were beginning to have second thoughts, especially at the Met Lab in Chicago...
...We have not even quite reached the Buck Rogers stage yet, but it is no longer far off...
...One group will say that these weapons threaten, not protect us...
...War may come again not once but many times...
...Mr...
...Without nuclear weapons we would have gone to war over Berlin in 1948, or over Cuba in 1962...
...They were two wars in a series...
...He died without knowing about the bomb...
...The pessimists predict disaster in the future, while we have got to decide what to ask for in the defense budget today...
...What was the difference...
...I once hit a kid in school...
...The level of arms they foresaw took years to come to pass...
...Now we are in for trouble," said Oppenheimer back in the spring of 1945, after he had been appointed to the Interim Committee set up to advise Truman about the bomb...
...After the first Russian bomb was detonated in August, 1949, the United States embarked on a crash program to build the H-bomb...
Vol. 109 • February 1982 • No. 3
