I stumbled across the 1943 novel The Last Secret, a mystery-adventure by Dana Chambers. In it, the Germans claim to develop an atomic weapon and call representatives of the U.S. government to witness a demonstration to make them understand that further battle is hopeless.
That’s so eerily similar to what some people suggested after Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the U.S. should have done that I’m stunned I’ve never heard of this book before. Everybody’s heard of the FBI investigating Cleve Cartmill because of his 1944 story “Deadline,” which contains debate about using the bomb along with more technical discussion. The science in The Last Secret is laughable, but there are explicit comments about cyclotrons and a secret project involving American scientists.
If left me wondering. Who else before 1945 publicly stated that any development of an atomic superweapon should be demonstrated so that it didn’t have to be used in war? It doesn’t have to be fiction. A newspaper or magazine article or a nonfiction book is just as good a cite.
A Heinlein story, The Dust or something like that, if I recall involved a demonstration. Not a bomb, but radioactive material, sort of a dirty bomb, though I’m scant on the details.
ETA: Nope, Solution Unsatisfactory. 1940
I don’t see a demonstration mentioned in the article. I recall something like a German officer going outside to see if the material was actually dangerous and then keeling over. As the article mentions, the story predicts the future politics of nuclear arms.
Eerie enough, it predicted the cold war, mutual assured destruction.
IIRC, there was also an episode where Astounding got a visit from the FBI investigating some SF story about atomic bombs, and whether the person who wrote it was leaking state secrets; no, it was simply a smart and educated person with a vivid imagination. (Although Asimov, with less imagination, mentioned in one story “atomic bombs eating unstoppable 30-foot holes in anything.”)
Exapno referred to the the FBI investigating the cleve Cartmill story in the OP. Reportedly, Campbell showed them articles from the open literature where they got their information.
If it comes to prediction, consider the H. G. Wells novel The World Set Free, which not only predicted atomic bombs, but actually used the term “atomic bomb”. Reportedly, Leo Szilard had read the book, and knew what the political implications of the bombs would be because of it.
Of course the science is completely off. Wells’ bombs were slow-acting, not instantaneous huge explosions. He wrote it, of course, before the idea of the chain reaction hads developed, although he has something similar, based on the work of Frederick Soddy, which ate away in a continuos “burn” rather than a sudden “boom”.
That said, I don’t know of any examples where people proposed warning potential bombees by performing a demonstration. There isn’t such a demonstration in Wells’ book, not in Heinlein’s Solution Unsatisfactory. I never heard of The Last Secret, but it looks like a worthwhile read, if only for historical reasons.
Clever guy, that Wells. especially in looking at implications of technology, if not predicting the right technology. His The Land Ironclads is uncannily accurate in predicting the utility of tanks, although his mechanism is completely different. Several of his works (such as The War in the Air) properly point out that aerial warfare would expand war beyond the front lines, involving citizens, cities, and areas thought immune to direct battle. And The World Set Free saw that combining airplanes with atomic bombs would prove devastating to the country invaded, with no way to defend themselves except shooting down the planes. He later got to see the practical applications of these when he became a war correspondent in WWI. He alternately said that he did and that he didn’t predict the tank, but The Land Ironclads is there in its pre-tank glory to dispute him.
Damn! I found one! Surprisingly early, too.
Frank R. Stockton’s* 1889 novel The Great War Syndicate describes a war that breaks out between the United States and Great Britain (!). 28 Leaders of Industry form The Great War Syndicate “with the object of taking entire charge of the War.” Their efforts result in a “motor bomb” of enormous destructive force. It is demonstrated, and Great Britain gives in, and is allowed to join the Syndicate
.
This is reported in “Fatal Fiction: A Weapon to End All Wars” by H. Bruce Franklin in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for November 1989, pp. 18+
It also mentions Hollis Godfrey’s 1908 The Man Who Ended War about an American scientist who invents a sort of disintegrator ray**, with which he destroys the world’s fleets until they agree to disarm, which is another sort of demonstration.
You can find the issue here:
*author of the short story “The Lady or the Tiger?”, among other things.
**I hadn’t come across this example in m y survey of Ray Guns, I’m ashamed to say.
Any citation that fit the criteria of the OP’s question would, by nature, be fictional. The Manhattan Project and the ensuing manufacture of “the bomb” was (as much as possible) a tightly held secret. The media was managed in such a way as to keep them in the dark, or, intentionally mislead.
There are perhaps, many instances of fictional characters proposing such a demonstration of a fictional death machine prior to 1945, but it would be… Fiction.
As was the one cited in the OP, you’ll note. That’s the point.
Two years later Leo Szilard circulated his Petition calling for the same thing – the first time AFAIK that such a thing was done in the Real World. But it so closely echoes what was suggested in the 1943 novel Exapno cites that his query is relevant.
H. Bruce Franklin, for those not familiar with the name, is one of great scholars of early SF. That’s a great find, Cal. Thanks. I’ll [del]steal[/del] make use of that.
Blieler’s description of Stockton’s story indicates that the Syndicate attacks Great Britain, so I’ll have to chase it down to check on the demonstration part. Godfrey is also in Bleiler (Science Fiction: The Early Years) and I wouldn’t have read the summary as including a disintegrator ray, though the story is referenced under that heading in the index.
People had been talking openly about atomic weapons since Wells, as Cal notes. Throughout the period, but especially after WWI, gazillions of inventors announced they were working on weapons that would make war so terrible that another war couldn’t be fought. Death rays were on the top of that list, but the power of the atom was a given for the future. It would shock me to my socks if people had not discussed it in nonfiction.
What is far more amazing to me is the extent to which the government managed to clamp down on discussions of atomic weapons *during *WWII. The dropping of the bomb seemed to surprise everyone even though it had been a commonplace in popular media before the war. My interest isn’t so much the earlier mention of atomic weapons, although I’m collecting those, as the way the government successfully got a curtain to fall on subjects that everyone in the 30s talked about, including rockets.
The book from which that Franklin excerpt is taken, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination, is available on Amazon for three cents. Yes, plus postage, but still. It would cost more in gas and parking to go to a library that had it.
Your comment (point) directed at me appears to be formulated on what you have derived from the OP’s question, based on what you seemingly understand to be his thoughts… I was merely responding to what he SAID.
Apparently, you and he have an established relationship that precludes inter locution.
I was attempting to make the point that: Prior to 1945, there is no evidence of any argument for the pre-emtive display of the REALISTIC, (re: non fictional), power of the “atom”.
I’m a historian. I try to understand history, and then explain it to others. I can’t imagine any other position. What the general public thought about the future and its challenges is a much-neglected field, and I’ve spent the last several years working through it. I have a playful website on it, Flying Cars and Food Pills, but I also plan a large book on aspects that have never been properly studied.
This particular bit of history is not merely American. Many people wrote before WWI that another war between major countries was impossible, both because of economic ties and because weapons had gotten too horrible (the Boer War being notably ugly). After the war, with its aerial bombing, poison gases, tank warfare, and machine gun slaughter, commentators were torn between denouncing war’s horrors and advocating even more advanced weaponry so that their side didn’t get bogged down in a body-grinding stalemate again.
Once a real atomic weapon was available, people immediately began arguing over the merits of a surprise attack vs. a demonstration. Why wouldn’t others thinking ahead do the same thing? Your assertion that no one did outside of fiction assumes the answer I was asking people to research. Why should I believe your assertion when you clearly haven’t done any work on the question? Science Fiction writers don’t simply make this stuff up, you know. Virtually every single idea that we now ascribe to science fiction can be found earlier in nonfiction; which should be obvious since that’s the way sf writers still work today.
Which is why I’m confident that something triggered Mortimer Weisinger’s imagination when he wrote his first story, “The Price of Peace,” which appeared in the November 1933 Amazing. In Gernsback Days, Mike Ashley writes:
Weisinger’s story was never reprinted and he is a very minor name in pulps, but he later became the head honcho at DC comics in the Silver Age.
Now I’m wondering which those later two stories are.
Yes, that’s what happens when one has been on a messageboard for a while. These guys make an effort to help others follow and engage in the conversation, or at least learn something. I’ve seen much worse.
Happy New Year to you, too, Bob. But, for the life of me, I don’t understand your post.
Exapno and I sure as heck don’t have an understanding that precludes inter locution. Look at our earlier interactions for proof of this. And none was necessary for me to make my comment, which was essentially that you seemed to be making the argument that OF COURSE any account pre-1945 would have to be fiction. This seemed to me a pretty pointless comment, and one pretty obvious to anyone who read the OP, since atomic bombs didn’t exist before then.
If your claim is that no one could have objected to the real-world possibility of the uses of atomic power, though, then you should have a look at both fiction and non-fiction magazines and books from before 1945. People were speculating about the possibilities and capabilities of atomic energy for decades before the first bomb was demonstrated.
One possible lead might be Harold Nicolson’s 1932 novel Public Faces. It’s out of print and I haven’t read it, but it does seem to have been widely read in the Thirties and it was then re-issued post-1945 (with Churchill as one of its readers).
Secondary accounts of the novel differ in their details, but it seems to involve Britain secretly developing nuclear weapons, though with this just a plot device so that Nicolson (recently of the Foreign Office) could explore the political consequences. The climax involves one of the weapons detonating off-shore in the Caribbean, but the secondary sources disagree as to whether this is accidental or an unauthorised demonstration by the military. Either way, the result is a tidal wave that kills lots of people, but which ushers in a new age of universal peace.
At worst, this seems fairly close to the “all it will require is a peaceful demo of a single weapon” trope. Certainly close enough to be relevant. A reading of the novel would obviously be required to pin it down the exact relation. Or whether a harmless demo is considered.
Incidentally, Farmelo’s recent Churchill’s Bomb claims that Szilard ensured that the wartime library at Los Alamos carried a copy of the novel.
