George Orwell
You and the Atomic Bomb
Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next
five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have
been expected. The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very
helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff, and
there has been much reiteration of the useless statement that the bomb ‘ought
to be put under international control.’ But curiously little has been said, at any
rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us,
namely: ‘How difficult are these things to manufacture?’
Such information as we — that is, the big public — possess on this subject
has come to us in a rather indirect way, apropos of President Truman's
decision not to hand over certain secrets to the USSR. Some months ago, when
the bomb was still only a rumour, there was a widespread belief that splitting
the atom was merely a problem for the physicists, and that when they had
solved it a new and devastating weapon would be within reach of almost
everybody. (At any moment, so the rumour went, some lonely lunatic in a
laboratory might blow civilisation to smithereens, as easily as touching off a
firework.)
Had that been true, the whole trend of history would have been abruptly
altered. The distinction between great states and small states would have been
wiped out, and the power of the State over the individual would have been
greatly weakened. However, it appears from President Truman's remarks, and
various comments that have been made on them, that the bomb is fantastically
expensive and that its manufacture demands an enormous industrial effort,
such as only three or four countries in the world are capable of making. This
point is of cardinal importance, because it may mean that the discovery of the
atomic bomb, so far from reversing history, will simply intensify the trends
which have been apparent for a dozen years past.
It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of
weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder
and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over
and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought
forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in
which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be
ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple,
the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and
bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-
bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex
weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there
is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.
The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the
age of the musket and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock, and before
the invention of the percussion cap, the musket was a fairly efficient weapon,
and at the same time so simple that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its
combination of qualities made possible the success of the American and
French revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more serious business
than it could be in our own day. After the musket came the breech-loading
rifle. This was a comparatively complex thing, but it could still be produced in
scores of countries, and it was cheap, easily smuggled and economical of
ammunition. Even the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles
from one source or another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccans —
even Tibetans — could put up a fight for their independence, sometimes with
success. But thereafter every development in military technique has favoured
the State as against the individual, and the industrialised country as against
the backward one. There are fewer and fewer foci of power. Already, in 1939,
there were only five states capable of waging war on the grand scale, and now
there are only three — ultimately, perhaps, only two. This trend has been
obvious for years, and was pointed out by a few observers even before 1914.
The one thing that might reverse it is the discovery of a weapon — or, to put it
more broadly, of a method of fighting — not dependent on huge
concentrations of industrial plant.
From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet
possess the secret of making the atomic bomb; on the other hand, the
consensus of opinion seems to be that they will possess it within a few years.
So we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states,
each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a
few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily
assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end
to the machine civilisation. But suppose — and really this the likeliest
development — that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never
to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the
threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate? In that case we are
back where we were before, the only difference being that power is
concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and
oppressed classes is still more hopeless.
When James Burnham wrote
The Managerial Revolution
it seemed
probable to many Americans that the Germans would win the European end
of the war, and it was therefore natural to assume that Germany and not
Russia would dominate the Eurasian land mass, while Japan would remain
master of East Asia. This was a miscalculation, but it does not affect the main
argument. For Burnham's geographical picture of the new world has turned
out to be correct. More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being
parceled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from
contact with the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or another,
by a self-elected oligarchy. The haggling as to where the frontiers are to be
drawn is still going on, and will continue for some years, and the third of the
three super-states — East Asia, dominated by China — is still potential rather
than actual. But the general drift is unmistakable, and every scientific
discovery of recent years has accelerated it.
We were once told that the aeroplane had ‘
abolished frontiers
’; actually it
is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have
become definitely impassable. The radio was once expected to promote
international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a means
of insulating one nation from another. The atomic bomb may complete the
process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt, and
at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis of military
equality. Unable to conquer one another, they are likely to continue ruling the
world between them, and it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset
except by slow and unpredictable demographic changes.
For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been
warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons,
leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who
has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable.
Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has
been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be
heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the
slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed,
but few people have yet considered its ideological implications — that is, the
kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would
probably prevail in a state which was at once
unconquerable
and in a
permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.
Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily
manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us
back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of
national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police state. If, as seems to
be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship,
it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging
indefinitely a ‘
peace that is no peace
’.
1945
T H E E N D
This George Orwell piece was originally published by the
Tribune
on October 19, 1945 within
two months after atomic bombs were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan by the only
country ever to have used them to kill people and destroy cities, viz., the U.S.A. Orwell had
written enough about the same (re: A. Bomb) but this particular piece was exceptional for the
insights it shared about the world dispensation that lay ahead in the age of atomic weaponry. In
addition, it was clear that the groundwork for his novel,
Nineteen Eighty-Four
had been
completed by this writing.
