Making of the Abomb

The machine gun mechanized war. Artillery and gas mechanized war. They were the hardware of the war, the tools. But they were

only proximately the mechanism of the slaughter. The ultimate mechanism was a method of organization-anachronistically speaking, a

software package. "The basic lever," the writer Gil Elliot comments, "was the conscription law, which made vast numbers of men

available for military service. The civil machinery which ensured the carrying out of this law, and the military organization which turned

numbers of men into battalions and divisions, were each founded on a bureaucracy. The production of resources, in particular guns and

ammunition, was a matter for civil organization. The movement of men and resources to the front, and the trench system of defence,

were military concerns." Each interlocking system was logical in itself and each system could be rationalized by those who worked it

and moved through it. Thus Elliot demonstrates, "It is reasonable to obey the law, it is good to organize well, it is ingenious to devise

guns of high technical capacity, it is sensible to shelter human beings against massive firepower by putting them in protective trenches."

What was the purpose of this complex organization? Officially it was supposed to save civilization, protect the rights of small

democracies, demonstrate the superiority of Teutonic culture, beat the dirty Hun, beat the arrogant British, what have you. But the men

caught in the middle came to glimpse a darker truth. "The War had become undisguisedly mechanical and inhuman," Siegfried Sasson

allows a fictional infantry officer to see. "What in earlier days had been drafts of volunteers were now droves of victims." Men on every

front independently discovered their victimization. Awareness intensified as the war dragged on. In Russia it exploded in revolution. In

Germany it motivated desertions and surrenders. Among the French it led to mutinies in the front lines. Among the British it fostered

malingering.

Whatever its ostensible purpose, the end result of the complex organization that was the efficient software of the Great War was the

manufacture of corpses. This essentially industrial operation was fantasized by the generals as a "strategy of attrition." The British tried

to kill Germans, the Germans tried to kill British and French and so on, a "strategy" so familiar by now that it almost sounds normal. It

was not normal in Europe before 1914 and no one in authority expected it to evolve, despite the pioneering lessons of the American

Civil War. Once the trenches were in place, the long grave already dug (John Masefield's bitterly ironic phrase), then the war stalemated

and death-making overwhelmed any rational response. "The war machine," concludes Elliot, "rooted in law, organization, production,

movement, science, technical ingunuity, with its product of six thousand deaths a day over a period of 1,500 days, was the permanent

and realistic factor, impervious to fantasy, only slightly altered by human variation."

No human institution, Elliot stresses, was sufficiently strong to resist the death machine. A new mechanism, the tank, ended the

stalement. An old mechanism, the blockade, choked off the German supply of food and matйriel. The incresing rebelliousness of the foot

soldiers threatened the security of the bureaucrats. Or the death machine worked too well, as against France, and began to run out of

raw material. The Yanks came over with their sleeves rolled up, an untrenched continent behind them where the trees were not hung

with entrails. The war putrified to a close.

But the death machine had only sampled a vast new source of raw material: the civilians behind the lines. It had not yet evolved

equipment efficient to process them, only big guns and clumsy biplane bombers. It had not yet evolved the necessary rationale that old

people and women and children are combatants equally with armed and uniformed young men. That is why, despite its sickening

squalor and brutality, the Great War looks so innocent to modern eyes.

We must be curious to learn how such a set of objects-hundreds of power plants, thousands of bombs, tens of thousands of people

massed in national establishements--can be traced back to a few people sitting at laboratory benches discussing the pecular behavior

of one type of atom. -- Spencer R. Weart

"Alex," Roosevelt hailed him, "what are you up to?"

Sachs liked to warm up the President with jokes. His sense of humor tended to learned parables. Now he told Roosevelt the story of

this young American inventor who wrote a letter to Napoleon. The inventor proposed