The Advent of the Nuclear Age
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
On Monday 06 August 1945–79 years ago today — the Nuclear Age began suddenly, spectacularly, and catastrophically by the airburst of the Little Boy atomic bomb over Hiroshima. Three days later, on Thursday 09 August 1945, the Fat Man atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The Manhattan Project scientists were so confident in the design of the Little Boy bomb that they didn’t even test it. The Trinity test was a Plutonium implosion design, which was the design used for the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, which was more sophisticated than the gun-type design used in the Little Boy bomb.
Many special sciences and their technologies were involved in the conceptualization, design, construction, testing, and deployment of the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs, and it would be possible to argue for the any of the achievements of these sciences or technologies as a distinctive and unique threshold for the Nuclear Age. On what basis should be select an event to mark the beginning of the Nuclear Age? Here at Today in Philosophy of History I often discuss problems of periodization, and this is a particular example these problems.
Today we can say that an idea of the Nuclear Age isn’t really taken seriously by historians — it is more something for headline writers and popular culture, though Brazilian sociologist Darcy Ribero, in his The Civilizational Process, identified nuclear technology, which he called the Thermonuclear Revolution, as the last of eight technological revolutions. We can see this as a further elaboration of Marx’s cultural evolutionism, though in Marx the emphasis falls on the social formation, while in Ribero the emphasis falls on the technology that enables and is enabled by the social formation. A thousand years from now the crucial thresholds in the development of technology may be of greater utility, because they’re more obvious in retrospect, than more familiar political periodizations that seem obvious to us. Some future social formation may see our political machinations as being as irrelevant to them as the Investiture Controversy is to us today, but the technologies we development will still be present in some form.
With many thresholds in the development in nuclear science as potential dates for the advent of the Nuclear Age, why are we most likely to identify the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the beginning? We could date the nuclear age to the experiments of Ernest Rutherford who pioneered nuclear science, or to the Trinity test of the “Gadget” device, or some other date, like the first commercial nuclear power generation, or a threshold we have not yet achieved, like the first commercial fusion power generation. In the latter case, referencing a threshold of nuclear technology we have not yet attained, we are still in nuclear prehistory. This may sound strange, but from the perspective of some distant future time (again, a thousand years from now), it’s not unreasonable.
There doesn’t seem to be any question that nuclear weapons are the most dramatic and obvious developments in the use of nuclear technology, and that, if nothing else, guarantees their place in historical consciousness. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and are like two exclamation points with which the Second World War ends — the culmination and non plus ultra of the most violent upheaval of human history. We could say that the atomic weapons used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the Second World War. We could also say, alternatively, that the use of atomic weapons transformed the Second World War into the First Nuclear War, so that the Nuclear Age began with a nuclear war.
One of the reasons we may think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the beginning of the Nuclear Age is the awareness of existential risk that they forced upon us. Karl Jaspers called the realization that human beings now had the technical capacity to destroy ourselves the “New Fact” of history:
“Experts say definitely that it is now possible for life on earth to be wiped out by human action. The scientists who brought the new fact into being have also publicized it… It is not publicly known whether — if all bombs in stock were dropped — the radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere would suffice to end life on this planet. One may be right in doubting that the day has come when all life on earth can be annihilated. But in ten years or less the day will come. This slight difference in time does not diminish the urgent need for reflection.”
This realization is itself an event distinct from the actual bombing, and one could say that this realization would have dawned with or without the advent of nuclear technology at the end of the World War Two. Many cities were destroyed during the Second World War. During the war, it was demonstrated that saturation bombing could destroy a city in a single night. In my Valentine’s Day episode on the bombing of Dresden I discussed the technology and organization that went into the effort to destroy a major city with conventional explosives and incendiaries. Hamburg and Dresden and Tokyo are remembered as the most devastating examples of fire bombing. And Warsaw was systematically demolished after the defeat of the Warsaw Uprising.
Destruction on this scale required significant resources. Oppenheimer rightly pointed out after the war that the difference between Dresden and Hiroshima was a matter of cost:
“In this past war it cost the United States about $10 a pound to deliver explosive to an enemy target. Fifty-thousand tons of explosive would thus cost a billion dollars to deliver. Although no precise estimates of the costs of making an atomic bomb equivalent to 50,000 tons of ordinary explosive in energy release can now be given, it seems certain that such costs might be several hundred times less, possibly a thousand times less. Ton for equivalent ton, atomic explosives are vastly cheaper than ordinary explosives. Before conclusions can be drawn from this fact, a number of points must be looked at. But it will turn out that the immediate conclusion is right: Atomic explosives vastly increase the power of destruction per dollar spent, per man-hour invested; they profoundly upset the precarious balance between the effort necessary to destroy and the extent of the destruction.” (One World or None, p. 24)
For Oppenheimer, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were proof-of-concept that it was possible to destroy cities quickly and cheaply. Once the US had shown it was possible, other nation-states, knowing it was possible, would make the necessary investment to acquire the same capacity. He was right, and the arms race began.
The use of atomic weapons in warfare, followed by the Cold War and its arms race, fueled a form of apocalyptic thinking that was, at once, both familiar and unfamiliar, both ancient and modern. The apocalypticism of the second half of the twentieth century relied heavily on ancient conceptions of apocalypse, but added to them a novel technological dimension. There is a human fascination with the technology that we have managed to create, and the more advanced this technology becomes, the more entire populations are drawn into their construction and maintenance.
While Oppenheimer rightly observed that atomic weapons greatly reduced the cost of apocalyptic-scale destruction, it’s nevertheless true that it takes a society of a given degree of complexity, organization, and sophistication to build atomic weapons. The industrial infrastructure of a civilization entire is necessary to build a nuclear weapon. We can employ this industrial capacity to spend a billion dollars with conventional bombs and aircraft to destroy a city, or we can invest a proportional quantity of our resources into building the extensive infrastructure necessary for atomic weapons, and then deliver the blow with a single warhead.
In addition to the fascination with technology, there is a fascination with apocalypticism itself — the end of the world, as it were. We could say that human history truly began only when human beings imagined the possibility of its end, so that history grew out of the realization of its own provisional, temporary, and finite nature. To have this perennial apocalypticism revived in a newly grotesque technological form is something of a rebuke to modernity and technological society. The most modern among us have imagined that, in creating a modern society, we can simply leave behind the parts of our past best left undisturbed, but, as it turns out, we not only disinter the most troubling aspects of our past, we make them new again, giving them new life and a modern form. How we can identify progress in history when every advance appears in parallel with a proportional “advance” in our capability for destruction, terror, and death is the question unanswered by the Enlightenment.
Western history since the Enlightenment has been understood as a narrative of progress, but this obligatory reading of history in terms of progress comes at a cost. The Enlightenment throws a shroud over war, violence, pain, and death and proceeds to reform the world as if these things were an embarrassing afterthought, better left unspoken, rather than the central experiences of the human condition that they are. At most they are technical problems, someday to be solved by science when we possess the means to do so. In the meantime, they are abandoned to silence, being dead ends of Enlightenment thought that map to nothing else in the Enlightenment mentality. But after the Enlightenment reforms have been enacted, and the world has been transformed, the war and the violence and the pain and the death are still there, and in some cases they are worse than before, having been facilitated by the rationality prized by the Enlightenment. We have made the horrors of the paintings of Bosch and Breughel real — cities in flame from destruction rained down from above. We have manifested our nightmares in the actual world.
Given that human beings have had apocalyptic intimations since the ancient world at least, it would be interesting to attempt to find the ultimate source of apocalypticism. Perhaps it has its origins in what Freud called the “death drive.” That would make apocalypticism a human, all-too-human phenomenon — even a psychological phenomenon. It would be a worthwhile philosophical exercise to analyze the claims of the Freudian death drive, here employed as an historical explanation, in terms of Husserl’s critique of psychologism. For the moment, I will leave that as an exercise for the listener.
If one finds the psychological explanation inadequate, Edith Wyschogrod’s book Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death, which I mentioned in my episode on Dresden, gives a phenomenological and even an ontological account of the apocalyptic experiences of the twentieth century, which she called the death event and the death-world. Although I am sympathetic to an ontological explanation for the deeper human interest in apocalypticism, Wyschogrod’s thought is pervasively Heideggerian, and I would prefer a less Heideggerian ontology.
Trying to account for the impression left by the horrors of the twentieth century leaves us grasping for concepts that can do them justice. Our conventional ways of thinking don’t seem to be adequate to the task of conceptualizing and communicating the unprecedented. One unconventional way of thinking of such things is suggested by Walter Benjamin. In my episode on Walter Benjamin I was rather critical of Benjamin, but that doesn’t mean that I’m blind to the interesting ideas he formulated. One of Benjamin’s interesting ideas I discussed was that of Jetztzeit, which literally translates as now-time, but if I were translating Benjamin I would use an entirely different term from any of those used in translations to date, so as to suggest the distinct conception he was trying get across — for example, something like transcendent moment, or universal moment.
In my Benjamin episode I quoted Benjamin’s friend Ernst Bloch, who gave a better exposition of Jetztzeit than Benjamin, because he did actually attempt an exposition. Benjamin just throws it out there and it’s up to the reader to make sense of it. Benjamin wrote:
“Now-time, which as the model of messianic time, summarizes the entire history of humanity into a monstrous abbreviation, coincides to a hair with the figure, which the history of humanity makes in the universe.”
And Benjamin wrote that the historian:
“…records the constellation in which his own epoch comes into contact with that of an earlier one. He thereby establishes a concept of the present as that of the now-time, in which splinters of messianic time are shot through.”
Benjamin also calls now-time “messianic time.” These are more in the way of gnomic utterances than philosophical claims, but if we extract Benjamin’s now-time from his theology of history we can derive something valuable from his rant.
For my example I turn to a man as temperamentally distinct from Benjamin as can be imagined. Jacob Bronowski described a universal or transcendent moment, but he did so in a way that was paradoxically idiographic. Bronowski piled on the idiographic details of his experience of visiting Nagasaki shortly after the city was destroyed:
“On a fine November day in 1945, late in the afternoon, I was landed on an airstrip in southern Japan. From there a jeep was to take me over the mountains to join a ship which lay in Nagasaki Harbor. I knew nothing of the country or the distance before us. We drove off; dusk fell; the road rose and fell away, the pine woods came down to the road, straggled on and opened again. I did not know that we had left the open country until unexpectedly I heard the ship’s loudspeakers broadcasting dance music. Then suddenly I was aware that we were already at the center of damage in Nagasaki. The shadows behind me were the skeletons of the Mitsubishi factory buildings, pushed backwards and sideways as if by a giant hand. What I had thought to be broken rocks was a concrete power house with its roof punched in. I could now make out the outline of two crumpled gasometers; there was a cold furnace festooned with service pipes; otherwise nothing but cockeyed telegraph poles and loops of wire in a bare waste of ashes. I had blundered into this desolate landscape as instantly as one might wake among the craters of the moon. The moment of recognition when I realized that I was already in Nagasaki is present to me as I write, as vividly as when I lived it. I see the warm night and the meaningless shapes; I can even remember the tune that was coming from the ship. It was a dance tune which had been popular in 1945, and it was called ‘Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t Ma Baby?’”
After recounting these highly particularistic details, in the very next paragraph Bronowski says,
“…the moment I have recalled was a universal moment; what I met was, almost as abruptly, the experience of mankind.”
What exactly did Bronowski mean when he said that his experience of arriving at Nagasaki, and the moment of recognition, expressed in idiographic terms, was a universal moment? I think he meant what Walter Benjamin called Jetztzeit. Benjamin had written:
“History is the object of a construction whose place is formed not in homogenous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by the now-time [Jetztzeit].”
We could argue that history that has been broken up by periodization is no longer homogenous and empty time, but time shot through the meanings that connect it to other times. And we select as our turning points in history, as the junctures of periodization, the most dramatic universal moments that connect history with something larger, something that transcends the steady drip of time.
But a universal moment doesn’t have to be Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Reading Bronowski’s account of his arrival at Nagasaki I am reminded of a well-known passage from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science:
“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine’.”
Here we have the same idiographic detail used to illustrate a universal moment, what Nietzsche called a tremendous moment, a moment of recognition and realization. This is how we divide up history, by recognition and realization. The universal moment connects the past to ourselves and to all future generations who will experience recognition and realization for themselves.
I did not live through the events that Nietzsche, Benjamin, or Bronowski experienced, and even Benjamin and Bronowski, who were contemporaries, probably would have agreed upon very little in terms of common experience. But in moments of recognition and realization, we feel a contact with past time, as we even experience in our own lives, as when Bronowski wrote that the moment he described was present to him as vividly as when he lived it. Moments like this define our lives and define our history.
