# Who first put forth the idea that splitting atoms would make a powerful weapon **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 26, 2024, 3:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367 "2024-06-26T15:52:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Llama\_Llogophile](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/49beb7/32.png) [@Llama\_Llogophile](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Llama_Llogophile)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2024, 11:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367/21 "2024-06-26T23:03:08Z")
> [@Lucas\_Jackson](#): > > The Nuremberg Laws were disgustingly ugly. They were also incredibly stupid. Many of the best scientific minds fled to countries that would eventually be allied against Germany. And lots of Jewish scientists worked on the Manhattan Project. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2024, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367/22 "2024-06-26T23:06:51Z")
John Cromie’s _The Crack of Doom_ is available to read on line. I searched it for the word “nuclear,” and didn’t get any hits, but did get one for “nucleus”: > [@](#): > > “When I last addressed this Society,” he began, "I laboured under a difficulty in arriving at ultimate truth which was of my own manufacture. I presupposed, as you will remember, the indestructibility of the atom, and, in logical consequence I was bound to admit the conservation of suffering, the eternity of misery. But on that evening many of my audience were untaught in the rudiments of ultimate thought, and some were still sceptical of the _bona fides_ of our purpose, and our power to achieve its object. To them, in their then ineptitude, what I shall say now would have been unintelligible. For in the same way that the waves of light or sound exceeding a certain maximum can not be transferred to the brain by dull eyes and ears, my thought pulsations would have escaped those auditors by virtue of their own[116] irresponsiveness. To-night I am free from the limitation which I then suffered, because there are none around me now who have not sufficient knowledge to grasp what I shall present. > > "You remember that I traced for you the story of evolution in its journey from the atom to the star. And I showed you that the hypothesis of the indestructibility of the atom was simply a creed of cruelty writ large. I now proceed on the lines of true science to show you how that hypothesis is false; that as the atom _is_ destructible—as you have seen by our experiments (the last of which resulted in a climax not intended by me)—the whole scheme of what is called creation falls to pieces. As the atom was the first etheric blunder, so the material Universe is the grand etheric mistake. > > "In considering the marvellous and miserable succession of errors resulting from the meretricious atomic remedy adopted by the ether to cure its local sores, it must first be said of the ether itself that there is too much of it. Space is not sufficient for it. Thus, the particles of ether—those imponderable entities which vibrate through a block of marble or a disc of hammered steel with only a dulled, not an annihilated motion, are by their[117] own tumultuous plenty packed closer together than they wish. I say wish, for if all material consciousness and sentiency be founded on atomic consciousness, then in its turn atomic consciousness is founded upon, and dependent on, etheric consciousness. These particles of ether, therefore, when too closely impinged upon by their neighbours, resent the impact, and in doing so initiate etheric whirlwinds, from whose vast perturbances stupendous drifts set out. In their gigantic power these avalanches crush the particles which impede them, force the resisting medium out of its normal stage, destroy the homogeneity of its constituents, and mass them into individualistic communities whose vibrations play with greater freedom when they synchronise. The homogeneous etheric tendencies recede and finally determine. > > “Behold a miracle! An atom is born!” “Atomic” shows up six times, including this one: > [@](#): > > "Back, then, from this ill-balanced and unfair long-suffering, this insufficient existence. Back to Nirvana—the ether! And I will lead the way. > > "The agent I will employ has cost me all life to discover. **It will release the vast stores of etheric energy locked up in the huge atomic warehouse of this planet.** I shall remedy the grand mistake only to a degree which it would be preposterous to call even microscopic; but when I have done what I can, I am blameless for the rest. In due season the whole blunder will be cured by the same means that I shall use, and all the hideous experiment will be over, and everlasting rest or _quasi_-rest will supersede the magnificent failure of[122] material existence. This earth, at least, and, I am encouraged to hope, the whole solar system, will by my instrumentality be restored to the ether from which it never should have emerged. Once before, in the history of our system, an effort similar to mine was made, unhappily without success. Bolding mine. Sounds like he was on point with the idea that breaking apart an atom would release huge amounts of energy, but obviously off base with the etheric stuff, and even more so with “all matter is conscious.” But that last bit might be the ravings of a madman who’s plotting to blow up the Earth, and not meant to be taken as objectively correct in the novel’s reality. Also, this bit amused me for unrelated reasons: > [@](#): > > “Before I go, Marcel, I will say this.” There were tears in his eyes. “These people do not really know you, with all their telepathic power. You are not—not—” Sure he did, Mr. President. Sure he did. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2024, 11:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367/23 "2024-06-26T23:11:17Z")
_The Crack of Doom_ is available through [gutenberg.org](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26563/pg26563-images.html). I didn’t read it all but I found a telling sentence. > “If you will consult a common text-book on the physics of the ether,” he replied, “you will find that one grain of matter contains sufficient energy, if etherised, to raise a hundred thousand tons nearly two miles. In face of such potentiality it is not wise to wreck incautiously even the atoms of a molecule.” Nothing is the rest of the text indicates anything more than this base for extrapolation. ETA: Simulposted with Miller. ---
**Author:** ![Lucas\_Jackson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lucas_jackson/32/303_2.png) [@Lucas\_Jackson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lucas_Jackson)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2024, 11:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367/24 "2024-06-26T23:13:48Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > wreck incautiously There’s a term that smacks of my youthful follies. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2024, 11:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367/25 "2024-06-26T23:26:29Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > John Cromie’s _The Crack of Doom_ is available to read on line. I searched it for the word “nuclear,” and didn’t get any hits, but did get one for “nucleus”: The word “nucleus” doesn’t actually appear in that quote. > [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > _The Crack of Doom_ is available through [gutenberg.org](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26563/pg26563-images.html). I didn’t read it all but I found a telling sentence. > > > “If you will consult a common text-book on the physics of the ether,” he replied, “you will find that one grain of matter contains sufficient energy, if etherised, to raise a hundred thousand tons nearly two miles. In face of such potentiality it is not wise to wreck incautiously even the atoms of a molecule.” > > Nothing is the rest of the text indicates anything more than this base for extrapolation. Not bad… That’s the result you’d get from E = 1/2 mc^2, as one might guess from the Newtonian formula for kinetic energy. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2024, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367/26 "2024-06-26T23:45:04Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > The word “nucleus” doesn’t actually appear in that quote. Sorry, cut the quote off too soon. The next paragraph after “An atom is born!” is: > [@](#): > > "By a similar process—which I may liken to that of putting off an evil day which some time must be endured—the atoms group themselves into molecules. In their turn the molecules go forth to war, capturing or being captured; the vibrations of the slaves always being forced to synchronise with those of their conquerors. The nucleus of the gas of a primal metal is now complete, and the[118] foundation of a solar system—paltry molecule of the Universe as it is—is laid. Thereafter, the rest is easily followed. It is described in your school books, and must not occupy me now. ---
**Author:** ![md-2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9d8465/32.png) [@md-2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md-2000)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2024, 3:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367/27 "2024-06-27T03:19:22Z")
One of the golden age science fiction writers or editors (John Campbell?) has an anecdote in his memirs about the FBI being intensely concerned about science fiction magazines during the war publishing stories about “atomic bombs” (he mentioned a visit after a story reference to bombs that “inexorably destroyed an entire block at a time”). However, it seems the authorities decided that awareness of any imposition of censorship about fictional “nuclear bombs” might excite more foreign curiosity than ignoring the issue, for strictly fictional publications. ---
**Author:** ![ASL\_v2.0](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asl_v2.0/32/3525_2.png) [@ASL\_v2.0](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ASL_v2.0)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2024, 4:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367/28 "2024-06-27T04:53:06Z")
It’s worth noting that all the ingredients necessary to propose, at least speculatively, the potential for a nuclear bomb of sorts existed when Einstein described the mass-energy equivalence, E = mc^2, way back in 1905, if not sooner. Atomic mass, and by extension the phenomenon of mass defect, had already been understood and reasonably quantified for several decades by that point. Thus, armed with Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence, it should have been fairly trivial after 1905 to do the math and and posit that if only it were possible to split, say, a Uranium atom in half, it would release a lot more energy than a chemical reaction between a collection of atoms or molecules of comparable total mass (and vice versa, and then some, for fusing hydrogen atoms). Such an idea would have been well within the grasp of a perceptive high school chemistry student with passable arithmetic. The only thing really speculative at that point was whether it would prove to be physically possible to not only split such heavy a atom, but to do so in sufficient quantity over an appropriately brief period of time as to make something go boom. Which doesn’t answer the OP directly, but I hope will help to contextualize how the idea of an atomic bomb in science fiction might plausibly have predated the observed splitting of Uranium in a laboratory setting. ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2024, 5:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367/29 "2024-06-27T05:01:10Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > “When I last addressed this Society,” he began, "I laboured under a difficulty in arriving at ultimate truth which was of my own manufacture. I presupposed, as you will remember, the indestructibility of the atom, and, in logical consequence I was bound to admit the conservation of suffering, the eternity of misery. But on that evening many of my audience were untaught in the rudiments of ultimate thought, and some were still sceptical of the _bona fides_ of our purpose, and our power to achieve its object. To them, in their then ineptitude, what I shall say now would have been unintelligible. For in the same way that the waves of light or sound exceeding a certain maximum can not be transferred to the brain by dull eyes and ears, my thought pulsations would have escaped those auditors by virtue of their own[116] irresponsiveness. To-night I am free from the limitation which I then suffered, because there are none around me now who have not sufficient knowledge to grasp what I shall present. > > "You remember that I traced for you the story of evolution in its journey from the atom to the star. And I showed you that the hypothesis of the indestructibility of the atom was simply a creed of cruelty writ large. I now proceed on the lines of true science to show you how that hypothesis is false; that as the atom _is_ destructible—as you have seen by our experiments (the last of which resulted in a climax not intended by me)—the whole scheme of what is called creation falls to pieces. As the atom was the first etheric blunder, so the material Universe is the grand etheric mistake. > > "In considering the marvellous and miserable succession of errors resulting from the meretricious atomic remedy adopted by the ether to cure its local sores, it must first be said of the ether itself that there is too much of it. Space is not sufficient for it. Thus, the particles of ether—those imponderable entities which vibrate through a block of marble or a disc of hammered steel with only a dulled, not an annihilated motion, are by their[117] own tumultuous plenty packed closer together than they wish. I say wish, for if all material consciousness and sentiency be founded on atomic consciousness, then in its turn atomic consciousness is founded upon, and dependent on, etheric consciousness. These particles of ether, therefore, when too closely impinged upon by their neighbours, resent the impact, and in doing so initiate etheric whirlwinds, from whose vast perturbances stupendous drifts set out. In their gigantic power these avalanches crush the particles which impede them, force the resisting medium out of its normal stage, destroy the homogeneity of its constituents, and mass them into individualistic communities whose vibrations play with greater freedom when they synchronise. The homogeneous etheric tendencies recede and finally determine. > > “Behold a miracle! An atom is born!” My God. And here I thought Clark Ashton Smith was the ultimate in purple prose. This stuff is _ultraviolet_ in comparison. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2024, 5:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367/30 "2024-06-27T05:24:54Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > That’s the result you’d get from E = 1/2 mc^2, as one might guess from the Newtonian formula for kinetic energy. Indeed. I get 2.86 TJ to lift 100,000 tons two miles. And one grain via mc^2 gives 5.8 TJ. So nearly two miles is right, given an extra factor of 0.5. The Wikipedia entry on mass-energy equivalence says this: > In 1873 the Russian physicist and mathematician [Nikolay Umov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Umov) pointed out a relation between mass and energy for ether in the form of Е = kmc^2, where 0.5 ≤ _k_ ≤ 1. Perhaps that is the very “text-book on the physics of the ether” that was cited. Also possible is just getting lucky with some unit analysis. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2024, 10:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367/31 "2024-06-27T10:43:40Z")
So rather like the situation today with matter/antimatter drives. A layman knows the relatively simple high level math that says there’s vast energy available if we can cause (control really) matter/antimatter annihilation. And a layman can quantify that energy, net of any efficiency drags in our machinery. But nobody, and certainly not a layman, can design or build such a machine. Yet. But if one were an author, one could “imagineer” up such a machine today and plenty readily enough to carry the story forward. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2024, 12:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367/32 "2024-06-27T12:40:06Z")
With the full quotes, I would say that neither The Crack of Doom nor Last and First Men is describing nuclear weapons. Both of them seem to instead be describing (in different ways) annihilation weapons, which would be well beyond nuclear weapons (and also not depend on details of the nucleus). ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2024, 1:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367/33 "2024-06-27T13:44:55Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > etheric energy > [@Dr.Strangelove](#): > > “… the physics of the ether” So people were thinking about energy from the ether. Which doesn’t exist. Oh, well. ---
**Author:** ![Lucas\_Jackson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lucas_jackson/32/303_2.png) [@Lucas\_Jackson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lucas_Jackson)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2024, 3:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367/34 "2024-06-27T15:35:45Z")
> [@ASL\_v2.0](#): > > Thus, armed with Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence, it should have been fairly trivial after 1905 to do the math and and posit that if only it were possible to split, say, a Uranium atom in half, it would release a lot more energy than a chemical reaction between a collection of atoms or molecules of comparable total mass (and vice versa, and then some, for fusing hydrogen atoms). Such an idea would have been well within the grasp of a perceptive high school chemistry student with passable arithmetic. > {snip} > Which doesn’t answer the OP directly… I appreciate your response. And it does answer an unasked question. What actually started me on this was thinking about existential threats. I was musing over the idea that around the turn of the century almost no one could have imagined that within a few years a threat to humanity would come into being that no one saw coming. And what discoveries in our future could be an exponential step in that existential threat direction. Something that no one today sees coming. But then, as I was studying about the about the atom-splitting aspect, that became my focus and interest. > [@ftg](#): > > … people were thinking about energy from the ether. Which doesn’t exist. Ether it does or it doesn’t. ---
**Author:** ![Pasta](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecccb3/32.png) [@Pasta](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pasta)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2024, 6:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367/35 "2024-06-27T18:04:33Z")
> [@Lucas\_Jackson](#): > > Ether it does or it doesn’t. I _c_ what you did there. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2024, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367/36 "2024-06-27T18:16:37Z")
This sort of silly off-topic wordplay just makes me sooooo … I don’t know … luminiferously angry!! Knock it off y’all!! Stick to the question! 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2024, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367/37 "2024-06-27T18:34:02Z")
The FBI visited him and author Cleve Cartmill because his story “Deadline” contained too many accurate descriptions of an atomic weapon (along with some lousy ones that nobody mentions). Campbell had fed him the physics and told him to go off and write a story. He set it on an alien planet with the Sixa against the good-guy Seilla. Read 'em backwards. Not real hidden subversion there. The government tried to prohibit all mention of atomic bombs and anything related to them down to individual elements. They were both spectacularly successful at times and frighteningly inept at other times. I wrote “Beyond Deadline,” an article for the _New York Review of Science Fiction_ about the government censorship of atomic-based fiction during the war that is [available on my website with the images included](https://www.flyingcarsandfoodpills.com/beyond-deadline-1) that contains much fuller descriptions on all four known cases of intervention. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2024, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367/38 "2024-06-27T18:53:45Z")
> [@PastTense](#): > > What book is this? It’s called “From War Room to Living Room” written with my wife, coming out from Bloomsbury Academic in November. It’s 46 sections on how things developed for the military got used in the civilian world. Rockets, radar, drones of course, but also Cheetos and Kotex. ---
**Author:** ![Lucas\_Jackson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lucas_jackson/32/303_2.png) [@Lucas\_Jackson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lucas_Jackson)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2024, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367/39 "2024-06-27T18:56:04Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > The FBI visited him and author Cleve Cartmill because his story “Deadline” contained too many accurate descriptions of an atomic weapon You could provide full schematics to 99.999 % of the population and they couldn’t come close to making it work. Seems silly, a few accurate descriptions does not a nuclear device make. Surely anyone with the capability has knowledge already. ---
**Author:** ![Lucas\_Jackson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lucas_jackson/32/303_2.png) [@Lucas\_Jackson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lucas_Jackson)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2024, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367/40 "2024-06-27T18:58:44Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Cheetos and Kotex Band name! ( apologies to [LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy) ) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-first-put-forth-the-idea-that-splitting-atoms-would-make-a-powerful-weapon/1003367.md?page=3)