Pandora's box

Published 18 July 2005

Before the Fallout: the human chain reaction from Marie Curie to Hiroshima Diana Preston Doubleday, 438pp, £20 ISBN 0802714455

Maria Sklodowska, better known as Marie Curie, had no idea that she was at the beginning of a story which could have such a culmination as Hiroshima. Nor did she pay any heed to the possibility that the forces she was exploring would bring her own story to a premature end. The burned hands were the price of hard scientific labour, and the wounds that didn’t heal were self-inflicted in experiments that induced her husband, Pierre, to see radiation as a possible cure for cancer, rather than a cause. Marie herself died of leukaemia.

The Curies were among a number of European scientists, around the turn of the 20th century, who began to reveal the atomic dimension of nature. Although these researchers came to realise that tremendous energies might be released if atoms could be split, they regarded these forces as unattainable. In 1923 J B S Haldane, beginning his career as a popular scientist by lecturing holidaymakers on the merits of chemical warfare, predicted that a successor of his would be addressing a party of tourists on the moon before practical atom-smashing was achieved. The physicist Ernest Rutherford had in fact split the atom experimentally in 1919, but in 1933 even he was still dismissing the possibility of exploiting atomic energy as "moonshine".

By then Hitler was in power and history became compressed. Early in 1939, German scientists worked out - with the help of two exiled Jewish colleagues, Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch - that they had split the uranium atom. Within a couple of months, Leo Szilard demonstrated that fission, as Meitner and Frisch had called it, could set off a chain reaction that would open Pandora’s box with unimaginable force. Once the war was under way, Britain urged the project on the Americans, who had the intellectual and industrial resources to carry it through. In 1945, the uranium fission bomb "Little Boy"destroyed Hiroshima and 140,000 of its inhabitants.

The story could not be anything other than compelling, and it is told with great skill by Diana Preston. There are personalities and discoveries, enterprises and adventures, colour and detail, and naturally there are moral dilemmas. But the lasting impression, implied in the sub-

title and enhanced by the fluency of the tale, is of inevitability. The most dreadful instance was Nagasaki, where "Fat Man" took another 40,000 lives without giving the Japanese regime a chance to grasp what had hit it three days earlier. It is a sense that pervades nuclear discussions, such

as those over Britain’s nuclear weapons, which everyone knows will be renewed despite having no conceivable use.

Preston closes with a string of what-ifs, but even these leave little sense that things might have been otherwise. The open questions are those of timing. Had Britain not cajoled the US so effectively, she suggests, the bomb might not have been ready until 1946. On the other hand, it might not have been dropped if Roosevelt had survived a little longer. And what if Hiroshima had not been bombed? What then would the nuclear era have become?

The world would have known of the power of the bomb - governments through intelligence and publics through the newsreels of those colossal mushroom monuments, filmed from circling warplanes. The Soviet Union already knew by the first means, so its plans would not have been affected. It exploded its first bomb in 1949, in time to deter the Americans from using theirs in the Korean war. The two blocs would still have proceeded to the mutual assurance of destruction. Geopolitically, the world might have been much the same.

We would not have understood it so well, though. The instantaneous extermination, the clocks stopped at 8.15am, the survivors hurrying through the levelled acres, the flayed skin, the ghastly pause before death by radiation sickness: this is what the world came to know through Hiroshima. Without these images, the cold war would have been a phoney war; the prospect of a world-destroying exchange of nuclear weapons would have been abstract, verging on the absurd.

Marie Curie’s drive to extract occult substances, incurring risks that would have given pause to a medieval alchemist, would have become an awful warning anyway. So would the fates of the young women who perished from painting numbers on watch dials, using luminous paint based on the radium Curie discovered. But such stories would have been just sidebars to the popular history of science, if the historical fact of nuclear annihilation had not impressed on people what kind of a force is now abroad in the world.

Marek Kohn’s most recent book is A Reason for Everything (Faber & Faber)

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