Sleepwalking With the Bomb Read Online Free

mistake to think that it shares such an interest today, given growing nuclear threats from hostile states, some of whose leaders embrace a fanatical religious ideology that welcomes Armageddon. Such powers may not act on ideological imperatives, but we cannot assume they will decline to do so.
    Regrettably, many of Barack Obama’s policies make a war more likely. Rushing towards abolition of nuclear weapons will, on the fair historical evidence, not induce dangerous nuclear states to follow the U.S. lead. Instead, our adversaries will see greater benefit in increasing their own arsenals if America’s is pared to a few hundred.
    We make comfortable assumptions about how our adversaries will act at our potentially grave peril.
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    1. The text of the exchange appears in chapter 4 .

2.
T HE N UCLEAR A GE: F ROM “T RINITY ” TO T EHRAN
Then it may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.
     
    P RIME M INISTER W INSTON C HURCHILL , H OUSE OF C OMMONS , M ARCH 1, 1955
    O N S EPTEMBER 24, 1924, READERS OF THE B RITISH LITERARY MAGAZINE
Nash’s Pall Mall
opened its pages to a chilling article by Winston Churchill. In “Shall We All Commit Suicide?” Churchill—a statesman then out of political office—warned what was incubating in the embers of the recent world war. Beyond the horrors of the war he had observed on the Western Front, he wrote of the immense escalation the summer of 1919 would have seen had there been no armistice. With incredible prescience, Churchill intuited the direction towards which modern war technology was heading:
Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings—nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke? Could not explosives even of the existing type be guided automatically in flying machines by wireless or other rays, without a human pilot, in ceaseless procession upon a hostile city, arsenal, camp or dockyard?
     
… Such, then, is the peril with which mankind menaces itself. Means of destruction incalculable in their effects, wholesale and frightful in their character, and unrelated to any form of human merit: the march of Science unfolding ever more appalling possibilities; and the fires of hatred burning deep in the hearts of some of the greatest peoples of the world, fanned by continual provocation and unceasing fear and fed by the deepest sense of national wrong or national danger!
     
    Modern nuclear history began with discoveries by late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century physicists looking into certain strange elements and mapping out the internal structure of the atom. By the time the first physicist grasped the potential of unlocking the energy contained there, the world was already on the path to a second global conflict. But the statesman who saw the future came first.
    Churchill’s foreboding 1924 prophecy encompassed the three components of the greatest threat humankind has faced since 1945: nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and fanatics in possession of both. His remarks came when guided missiles were a pipe dream, rocketry consisted of sending tiny projectiles aloft for a few seconds or minutes to reach at most a few miles’ altitude, and scientists had yet to even discover the neutron particle, which made splitting the nucleus of an atom feasible. The element plutonium was still unknown, let alone the process of thermonuclear fusion that would ultimately allow the miniaturization of high-yield weapons. Though visionaries like the sci-fi writers Jules Verne and H. G. Wells had imaginatively seen ahead before Churchill spoke, among statesmen of his time Churchill’s prediction was uniquely farsighted.
The First Bomb: Earliest Research through the Trinity Test
    O N A drizzly London day in