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.
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”:
“Atomic” shows up six times, including this one:
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.
The Crack of Doom is available through gutenberg.org. 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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 that contains much fuller descriptions on all four known cases of intervention.
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.
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.
