Read The Scientist as Rebel Online
Authors: Freeman J. Dyson
The Scientist as Rebel (11 page)
1.
Random House, 2003.
2.
The lady who did not read Remarque until it was too late was my mother-in-law, Gisela Jung. She died in March 2003. A few sentences of this review have been rewritten to avoid overlap with the review of Yuri Manin’s
Mathematics and Physics
(
Chapter 14
).
War and Peace
BOMBS AND POTATOES
ON OCTOBER 16
,
1945
, General Leslie R. Groves presented J. Robert Oppenheimer with a certificate from the secretary of war, expressing the appreciation of the government for the work of the Los Alamos Laboratory. Oppenheimer responded with the following speech:
It is with appreciation and gratitude that I accept from you this scroll for the Los Alamos Laboratory, for the men and women whose work and whose hearts have made it. It is our hope that in years to come we may look at this scroll, and all that it signifies, with pride.
Today that pride must be tempered with a profound concern. If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.
The peoples of this world must unite, or they will perish. This war, that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand. Other men have spoken them, in other times, of other wars, of other weapons. They have not prevailed. There are some, misled by a false sense of human history, who hold
that they will not prevail today. It is not for us to believe that. By our works we are committed, committed to a world united, before this common peril, in law, and in humanity.
On the one side, these words of Oppenheimer. On the other side, memories of England in 1939. In 1939 in England, the younger generation was very sure that mankind must unite or perish. We had not the slightest confidence that anything worth preserving would survive the impending war against Hitler. The folk memory of England was dominated by the unendurable barbarities of World War I, and none of us could believe that World War II would be less brutal or less demoralizing. It was frequently predicted that as World War I had led to the collapse of society and the triumph of Bolshevism in Russia, so World War II would have the same effect in England.
When Neville Chamberlain declared war on Hitler in 1939, one of his first acts was to empty London hospitals of their patients. Chamberlain expected catastrophic air attacks to begin immediately; the hospitals were asked to be ready to handle 250,000 civilian casualties within the first two weeks, besides another 250,000 people who were expected to become permanently insane. These numbers were not based on fantasy; they were the estimates of military experts who extrapolated to the capability of the 1939 Luftwaffe the results achieved by much smaller forces in Spain and Ethiopia. The experts did not all agree on these numbers, but they agreed on the general order of magnitude. The public, fed by lurid newspaper and magazine articles, tended to view the approaching war in even more apocalyptic terms.
It was obvious to us young people in 1939 that war and surrender to Hitler were both unacceptable, both offering to us no substantial hope for the future. To escape from this dilemma, many of us took refuge in the gospel of Gandhi, believing that a nonviolent resistance to evil could defend our ideals without destroying them in the process.
The English pacifist movement of the late 1930s has not been kindly treated by history, but it was in fact neither cowardly nor muddleheaded. We made only one mistake; none of us in those days could imagine that England would survive six years of war against Hitler, achieve most of the political objectives for which the war had been fought, suffer only one third the casualties that we had had in World War I, avoid the massive and indiscriminate use of poison gas and biological weapons, and finally emerge into a world in which our moral and humane values were largely intact. When Chamberlain led us into war in 1939, his view of the outcome was probably as dark as ours, only he was sustained in his determination by the feeling that he had no honorable alternative.
I come at last to Tom Stonier’s book
Nuclear Disaster
,
1
which is a thorough and straightforward study of the consequences of nuclear war. Stonier is a biologist, and this fact gives his analysis breadth which has been lacking in earlier studies by physical scientists. His conclusions are not quantitative but are clear and stark. He asserts that the United States would not survive in anything resembling its present form after a major thermonuclear exchange. He documents his conclusion with detailed discussion of the medical, ecological, and social problems of survival in a physically mutilated and contaminated country. He finds that although each problem by itself might well be overcome by energetic action and organization, all the problems together are likely to present insuperable difficulties. The life of the surviving postwar population is pictured as being “nasty, brutish and short” for many generations.
Stonier’s knowledge of the physical and biological effects of nuclear explosions is solid and professional. His description of the economic and social effects is entirely plausible. Nevertheless, his total assessment of the long-range effect of nuclear war is necessarily
dependent on his personal judgment. Nobody can say for sure whether a population subjected to unprecedented horrors and privations would respond with apathetic despair or with heroic discipline. The problem here is to predict the psychological, moral, and spiritual reactions of people in circumstances for which we have no valid historical parallel.
Stonier describes at some length the reactions observed during and after the Irish potato famine of 1845–1848. This description is of absorbing interest, but its relevance to the problem of nuclear war is at best conjectural. In the end, readers of the book must decide for themselves, following their individual tastes or prejudices, whether they accept or reject Stonier’s gloomy prognosis for the long-range recovery of civilization.
Just because the conclusions of Stonier’s book depend so heavily on subjective judgment, it is important to view the book with a wider historical perspective. For this reason I began with Oppenheimer’s speech and with the lessons of the 1930s. In the 1930s we held views about war very similar to those of Stonier, and these views turned out to be wrong. The experts who so grossly overestimated the effectiveness of bombing in 1939 made many technical errors, but their major mistake was a psychological one. They failed completely to foresee that the direct involvement of civilian populations in warfare would strengthen their spirit and social cohesion. The unexpected toughness and discipline of populations under attack was seen not only in England but even more strikingly in Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union. Would the same qualities be shown in the United States after a nuclear attack? Stonier thinks not. I am not sure.
So we come back finally to the simple and profound words of Oppenheimer’s speech. What we said about war in 1939 did not prevail. We learned in 1939–1945 that a war could still be fought and won without destroying the soul of a country. We learned that yielding to threats is the greater evil, and this is the lesson that most of us
are now living by. When we in America apply this lesson to our dealings with the Soviet Union in the year 1964, are we misled by a false sense of human history? Is it a false sense of human history that teaches us that nationalism is still the strongest force in the world, stronger than the hydrogen bomb and stronger than humanity? These are some of the questions which Stonier’s book does not answer.
Oppenheimer was certainly right in his basic perception, that history changed its course in 1945. Never again can a major war be fought in the style of World War II. And yet, international politics are being conducted on all sides as if the lessons of World War II still applied. History proceeds at its old slow pace, even if the course is changed. The transition from virulent nationalism to a world united must be stretched out over centuries. Meanwhile, we have to live in a precarious balance, between the apocalyptic warnings of Stonier on the one side and a possibly false sense of human history on the other. In spite of all uncertainties, it remains true that the catastrophes envisaged by Stonier may happen. It is well that we should be reminded of these dangers, and we must be grateful to Stonier for having reminded us of them, with his sober, thoughtful and eloquent book.
2
1.
Meridian Books, 1963.
2.
This is the oldest piece in the collection, written in 1964. I have included it because the dilemma that it describes is still as real today as it was in 1964.
GENERALS
AT 2:30
PM ON
August 31, 1946, the former chief of the Operations Staff of the German armed forces, Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, made his final statement to the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal:
Mr. President and Justices of the court. It is my unshakable belief that history will later pronounce an objective and fair judgment on the senior military commanders and their subordinates. They, and with them the German armed forces as a whole, faced an insoluble problem, namely, to wage a war which they had not wanted, under a supreme commander who did not trust them and whom they only partially trusted, with methods which often contradicted their doctrines and their traditional beliefs, with troops and police forces not fully subject to their command, and with an intelligence service which was partly working for the enemy. And all this with the clear knowledge that the war would decide the existence or nonexistence of the beloved fatherland. They were not servants of Hell or of a criminal. They served their people and their fatherland.
For myself, I believe that no man can do better than to struggle for the highest goal which he is in a position to achieve. That and nothing else was the guiding principle of my actions all
along. And that is why, no matter what verdict you may pass on me, I shall leave this court with my head held as high as when I entered it many months ago. If anyone calls me a traitor to the honorable tradition of the German army, or if anyone says that I stayed at my post for reasons of personal ambition, I say he is a traitor to the truth.
In this war, hundreds of thousands of women and children were destroyed by carpet-bombing, and partisans used without scruple whatever methods they found effective. In such a war, severe measures, even if they are questionable according to international law, are not crimes against morality and conscience. For I believe and profess: duty toward people and fatherland stands above every other. To do that duty was my honor and highest law. I am proud to have done it. May that duty be replaced in a happier future by an even higher one: duty toward humanity.
On October 10 he wrote a final letter to his friends in the German army:
Dear friends and comrades. In the months of the Nuremberg trial I have borne witness for Germany, for her soldiers, and for history. The dead and the living crowded around me, giving me strength and courage. The verdict of the court went against me. That came as no surprise. The words which I heard from you were for me the true verdict. I was never proud in my life until now. Today I can and I will be proud. I thank you, and one day Germany will thank you, because you did not run away from one of her truest sons in his hour of need and death. Your future lives must not be filled with sadness and hate. Think of me only with respect and pride, just as you think of all the soldiers who died on the battlefields of this cruel war as they were required to do by law. Their lives were sacrificed to make Germany more
powerful, but you should believe that they died to make Germany better. Hold fast to this belief and work for it all your lives.
On October 15 he wrote his last letter to his wife:
And so I tell you at the end, you must live and overcome your grief. You must spread love around you and give help to those who need it. You must not make more of me than I was, or than I wanted to be. You must believe and make it known that I worked and fought for Germany and not for her politicians. Oh, I could go on writing like this forever, but now in my ears I hear the bugles playing taps, and the old familiar song—do you hear it, my love?—Soldiers must go home.
At 2 AM the next morning he was hanged.
Alfred Jodl was a Bavarian, not a Prussian. Probably that was one of the reasons Hitler chose him as chief of staff and kept him at his side throughout the war. Jodl nevertheless embodied the old Prussian tradition of military professionalism, with all its virtues and vices. Albert Speer, who sat with him in the dock at Nuremberg, wrote of him afterward: “Jodl’s precise and sober defense was rather imposing. He seemed to be one of the few men who stood above the situation.” For six years Jodl had worked, day after day and night after night, planning and organizing the campaigns in which millions died. He begged Hitler many times to relieve him of this responsibility, to give him a subordinate command at one of the fighting fronts. Hitler refused, and Jodl obeyed, steadfast up to the end. Jodl had sworn an oath, on his honor as a soldier, to obey Hitler as supreme commander. This oath of soldierly loyalty was for Jodl the unbreakable bond, holier than the Catholic faith in which he had been raised, stronger than his obligation to the welfare of the German people which he believed himself to be serving. On the day that he came to Berlin to
take up his duties as chief of staff, a week before the German armies marched into Poland, he said to his wife: “This time I am afraid it looks like the real thing. I don’t yet know for sure. But thank God, that is a problem for the politicians and not for us soldiers. I know only one thing; if we once get on board this boat there won’t be any climbing out of it.”
Jodl’s personal religion and code of ethics were summed up in one word,
Soldatentum
, a German word which fortunately cannot be translated into English. The literal equivalent in English is “soldierliness,” but the English word altogether misses the tone of solemnity which belongs to the German, and thereby misses the greater part of the meaning. The English word “militarism” means something else entirely. An accurate translation of
Soldatentum
would have to be a paraphrase: the profession of soldiering considered as a quasi-religious vocation. The emotional flavor of it is well conveyed in the writings of Jodl which I have quoted. In English, the word “chivalry” had once a similar aroma, but it became archaic and metaphorical after knights ceased to fight on horseback.
