"The world enters the nuclear era" by Antonino Spoto
Planning, use and consequences of the first atomic bombs.
The Historical Context before the explosion of the "A" Bomb
The years in which the science gives its great contribution to the discovery
of the nuclear energy and its exploitation include an arc of time of around twenty
years, even if, it is correct to underline it, the efforts for the search of a
new war weapon that exploited nuclear energy have been increased during the second
world conflict. United States that are considered as the country of the A bomb,
have not been, however, the only state to try to find a violent and rapid solution
to end the war: Also the Germans in fact had actively hocked in the search. After
December 7 1941, day when the Japanese troops sank large part of the American
fleet at Pearl Harbor, USA actively entered world conflict with two principal
objective: the first one was to defeat Italian and German nazifascist forces,
the second one to eliminate Japan militarily. Both the action, however, were revealed
anything else other than easy.
The situation in Europe was decidedly complex, even if, after 1942-43, the
troops of the Axis had suffered a hard defeat In Russia, in a venture that has
sadly passed to the history for the suffered final massacre of the Italian ARMIR
that lost thousand of soldiers during that winter. This defeat also had great
influence on the inside politics of the two states whose totalitarian regimes
didn't have anymore, especially in Italy, the full consent: It was opened so,
for the Allied troops, the road for the resolution of the conflict at least on
European level. After the defeats suffered in Africa from the British, the Italians
had to also see the American landing on the coasts of Sicily that would have open
the crisis of the fascist regime, finally defeated on April 25 1945 when the Allied
troops freed, also thanks to the Committees of Liberation of North Italy, the
so-called “Republic of Salò”, that represented the extreme attempt
of Mussolini to maintain the reins of the power.
On June 6 1944, the allied troops arranged another hard hit to the totalitarian
regimes: with the landing in Normandy the American troops, contemporarily helped
from the British and French troops that fought in name of De Gaulle, they were
able to free France from the German oppression. In the same time, the Russian
counteroffensive crushed Germany from east, freeing Poland and proceeding then
on Berlin: on March 7 1945, when the first English and Soviet units crossed the
confinements east and west of Germany, the regime of Hitler was definitely defeated
and the Führer committed suicide (April 30 1945).
For the USA, despite these decisive victories, the war, however, was not ended,
because it missed the second principal objective: Japan. In fact, contemporarily
to the military operations in Europe that constituted a great waste of money and
strengths, the USA had to think about the Asian front where Japan constituted
a threat. After the 1941 attack, the Americans answered in the ‘42 - ’43
with violent attacks at Midway, in the Coral Sea, at Guadalcanal and subsequently,
in New Guinea, conquered from the strengths of Roosevelt. Despite these attacks
and that following of 1944 in the island of Leyte that represents the largest
naval attack of the whole war, the Japanese did not surrender, indeed the desperate
action that was contemplated for the defense of the country, caused still thousand
of American victims (it is enough to remember the Kamikaze): it resulted clear
to new President Truman that an invasion of Japan by land would have been impossible,
because this would have meant the loss of numerous American lives. Just from this
situation almost of exasperation, the idea that the only possible solution would
have been the use of the new atomic bomb has born. On August 6 1945 the first
bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Subsequently, seen the resistance of the Japanese
that did not wanted to accept to the unconditional surrender, the second one was
dropped on Nagasaki with the following sign of the armistice on September 2. On
August 8 Russia had also declared war to Japan, and conquered the Manchukuò
and Korea.
The First Atomic Bomb
Behind the 6 and 9 August 1945 slaughters, there was a real “task force”
of scientific search financed from USA.
“Churchill has told me to have noticed yesterday, at the meeting of the three
men, that Truman was a lot in form for something that had to be happens to him,
that he had cast against the Russians in definite and emphatic way affirming how
certain their requests could not have been satisfied and that the United States
were absolutely contrary to them.” These are the words immediately pronounced
by the American War secretary Stimson on July 17 1945 after the vertex of Potsdam,
where Truman, Stalin and Churchill were deciding the formalities of continuation
of the war besides the political and juridical formalities for the carrying out
of the processes of Nuremberg.
What had inclined Truman to change his attitude towards Russia and of England
it was something that would not only have changed immediately the fates of the
war, but of the whole world in the following years. Something, still unknown to
the other Countries, that would have caused death and destruction on a side and
the future of the world energetic production on the other. Few before the vertex,
the particular secretary of Truman had passed him a leaflet with which the president
was informed of the fact that “children have normally born”: a message
in code that meant that on July 16 1945 had been let explode, in the experimental
way, the first atomic bomb of the history of the man, a weapon of a destructive
power even distantly comparable to the traditional weapons. Truman felt by now
the war in his fist. He seemed almost excited by the new military potentialities
acquired by the USA and he Japan at his feet without even the loss of an American
soldier. The atomic bomb was for the United States the crowning of their military,
economic, organizational and political efforts that had given start in past a
“task force” of scientific search to which scientists of the whole world
collaborated, as, Einstein and Fermi, escaped for instance, from their countries
because of the German and Fascist anti-Semitism.
But the history that has brought on August 6 1945 to the tragic event is long
and complex. The idea of the possibility to exploit the chain reaction to produce
huge quantities of energy had born in 1939 for work of Szilard, after that Bohr
had brought in the USA the news of the fission theory elaborated by Frish. Szilard
was a Hungarian scientist that was working in the United States because he had
to escape from Europe to avoid the Nazi persecutions. The same thing happened
to Fermi that had married a Jewess and used the occasion of his trip to Sweden
for taking the Nobel Prize not to make return anymore in his country. In this
way, all these scientists found a sure protection in the United States of America
that now had at disposition a great potential of “minds” to exploit
for the scientific search. Nevertheless, until1941-42, this is to say until the
entrance in war of the United States, neither the President Roosevelt neither
his nearer collaborators took in consideration these scientists for the real possibility
to build a nuclear weapon. After the beginning of the war, however, it seemed
that the words of belief of Einstein and Szilard, around the unbelievable project
of the A bomb, they had assumed in the mind of Roosevelt a different consideration.
In 1943 it had born in Los Alamos the first community of scientists entrusted
to study the problem of the assemblage of the bomb. This project had certainly
to remain the most secret possible but at the same time it had to be effective
and maximally fast in the attainment of the final objective to avoid that the
Nazi beat on the time the American scientists and they found a weapon that would
have been able to twist the equilibrium of the war. The project of Los Alamos
was defined by Truman, in the official discourse on August 81945 immediately after
the dropping of the bomb, as “the greatest scientific hazard of the history”,
a project of two an half year duration, with the employment of 125.000 men that
worked night and day to make sure the so-called “atomic supremacy”.
Although what held united the scientists in Los Alamos and what spurred them to
give the best of themselves was the fear to be anticipated in the discovery by
scientists of other nations, this same fear was revealed self-defeating when,
around 1944, the American spies assured the government that the Germans were very
distant from building a bomb. It disappeared so the leading motivation that had
pushed the scientists to work frantically.
Fortunately for the USA, by now the project driven by the soldier Groves and
by the scientist Oppenheimer had reached a good point and all seemed ready for
the first real experimentation, punctually happened on July 16 1945. The historical
criticism, however, has always been careful to put in evidence as, few months
before this date, at Los Alamos it was grown a first opposition to the employment
of the nuclear device among the promoting scientists of the project themselves.
Szilard tried to oppose the employment of the bomb making lever on Roosevelt,
first, and then on Truman. Nevertheless the latter seemed to quiver for the employment
of the bomb in Japan and decided therefore to summon a special Committee in which
Fermi, Oppenheimer, Compton and Lawrence participated. They had to express an
opinion on the possibilities to use the nuclear energy as military weapon and
the consequences of such use either on the scientific level either on the practical
level. (The presence of Fermi had to add to the Committee a person of high level,
because he had won the Nobel prize just in 1938)
Indeed, however, the Committee that Truman formed served only to oppose and
therefore to abolish the proposal of the group of Szilard who, in the Frank's
report, proposed to employ the A bomb only with demonstrative purpose on a desert
area not distant from Japan to show what was the real strength of the Americans
and to avoid a future and hypothetical “nuclear holocaust”. So Szilard
expressed himself: “The nuclear bombs cannot absolutely remain a secret weapon
to exclusive use of our Country for more than some year. The scientific presuppositions
on which their construction is founded are well known to the scientists of other
Countries. If an effective international control is not realized on the military
explosives, it is certain that immediately after the first revelation to the whole
world of our possession of nuclear weapons, a general rearmament will begin. Within
ten years other Countries can also possess nuclear weapons, each of which, without
not even reaching the weight of a ton, it can destroy a city for more than ten
square miles.” But these words that represent the last and desperate attempt
to stop a massacre, had thrown literally to the wind.
Truman rejected the Frank's report and began the operations that on August
6 1945 brought the bomber Enola Gay, commanded by Paul W. Tibbets jr. with on
board other twelve men of crew, to drop on Hiroshima the first atomic bomb made
by uranium 235 called Little Boy. The destruction of Hiroshima was immediate,
but Japan didn't mention to the surrender, and, while American people was remaining
enchanted by the words of the president who had fully shown the whole military
power of the USA, Truman himself, three days later, on August 9, gave the order
to drop another device on Nagasaki: the bomb, Fat Man, was based on the reaction
of the plutonium 239, but the result of the explosion was the same of Hiroshima.
After the second slaughter, Japan was forced to the surrender accepting all the
points imposed by the ultimatum of Postdam, saving only the sovereignty of the
emperor.
From the Discourse of Truman to the Modern use Of the Nuclear energy
On August 6, the president of the United States, Truman, spreads his statement
about the attack with the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
It was a synthetic discourse that aims at showing the country's will to put
an end to a war that by now had been extended for a lot of time and that it impended
as a constant threat on the destiny and on the life of numerous American soldiers.
This way, to avoid an invasion of Japan by land, that would have caused the loss
of too American lives, Truman plays the card of the atomic bomb that results to
be a real “success” to the eyes of the allies. The guilts logically
are poured again on the Japanese: “Sixteen hours ago, an American airplane
has dropped a bomb on Hiroshima, important base of the Japanese army. This bomb
possessed a superior power to that of 20 thousand tons of TNT. It is an atomic
bomb. The strength from which the sun draws energy has been dropped against those
people that have provoked the war in the Extreme East” (Harry Truman, broadcast
announcement, August 6 1945).
Since this moment the whole world knew about the bomb and its secret, as we
know them today. In the official declarations of the White House and the Pentagon,
in the articles and in the news deriving from the laboratories and from the plant
of production and then, later, in the famous Smyth Report, truth started to come
floating. It was a dramatic history of prodigious efforts, of bright conquests,
of attachment to the duty, of generous cooperation among the groups of the government,
of the industry and of the scientific laboratories.
It is necessary to underline, however, that the atomic era, started in tragic
manner, had great developments on industrial level, so that today it is considered
as the only alternative reality to the oil, by now scarce, more and more dear
and more difficult to extract, firstly for the enormous quantity of energy that
the atomic reaction can produce in comparison to the quantity of Uranium or Plutonium
employed and, secondarily, for the lower rate of pollution that produces. But
since the times of the discovery of the atomic battery of iron, it was thought
about the possibility to use all that energy to start the industrial machine,
as in 1942, under the light of the discovery of the atomic battery, the president
of the DuPont, Burney Russel, a Fermi's friend, already hypothesized.
What it is and how it works an atomic Bomb. Its Evolutions during the History.
The A bombs are explosive devices projected to free nuclear energy on large
scale. Before July 16 1945, all the explosives derived their power from the express
process of combustion or decomposition of determined chemical mixtures and therefore
they exploited the energy that is freed because of the transitions of the electrons
that orbit among the peripheral energetic levels, or more outside, of the atom.
Otherwise, the nuclear explosives free energy contained in the atomic nucleus:
the A bomb develops its dreadful power for the breakup or fission, of the nucleuses
contained in some plutonium kilograms or uranium 235. A sphere of uranium or plutonium
from the dimensions similar to those of a baseball ball determines an explosion
comparable to that produced by 20.000 tons of high potential explosive, as for
instance the trinitrotoluene, known as TNT. After the war, the US Atomic Energy
Commission became responsible of the supervision of all the projects of the exploitation
of the nuclear energy, included the search for weapons. They had developed new
types of bombs with the purpose to extract energy from more light elements as
the hydrogen, exploiting the process of nuclear fusion, in which nucleuses of
isotopes of the hydrogen, deuterium or tritio are united for forming a more heavy
nucleus of helium. This search produced bombs of varying power between a fraction
of kiloton (equivalent to 1000 tons of TNT) and many megatons (1 megatons = 1
million tons of TNT). Besides, the physical dimension of the bomb had been drastically
reduced, allowing the development of tactical nuclear bullets for artillery and
of missile launched from the ground, from the air and usable also under water.
The big missiles can bring multiple nuclear warheads addressable on different
type of targets in the same moment.
The principle on which the atomic bomb is founded has its roots in the search
developed in 1905 by Albert Einstein who published the theory of the narrow relativity,
that contains the famous relationship of equivalence between mass and energy,
expressed by the equation E=mc2. The relationship of Einstein affirms that a mass
m can be transformed in a quantity of energy equal to the product of the same
mass for the square of the speed of the light in the void, c. Given the elevated
value of c, a very small portion of matter is equivalent to an enormous quantity
of energy. For instance, a kilogram of matter converted completely in energy is
equivalent to the energy freed by the explosion of 22 thousand tons of TNT. In
1939, following the experiments of the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann
who succeeded in nearly dividing a nucleus of uranium in two equal parts through
bombardment with neutrons, Austrian physician Lise Meitners and her nephew Otto
Frisch explained the process of the nuclear fission. It was this the first step
toward the liberation of energy from the atom.
In a reaction of fission, a nucleus of uranium or another heavy element is
separated, because of the bombardment with neutrons, forming a couple of fragments
of nucleus and freeing a notable quantity of energy. The process is accompanied
by a rapid emission of fast neutrons, equal to what have baited the fission of
the nucleus of uranium; this allows the beginning of the so-called chain reaction,
that consists in a selfeeded series of nuclear fissions: the neutrons that are
uttered in the process of fission are able to continue the same process with development
of energy. The light isotope of the uranium, the uranium 235, is easily separated
because of the neutrons produced during the reaction of fission and, separating
each other, emits in average 2,5 neutrons. To sustain the chain reaction chain
a neutron is necessary for every generation of nuclear fission; the surplus neutrons
can escape from the mass of the material or they can be absorbed from impurity
or from the heavy isotope uranium 238, in the case in which this is present. It
is necessary besides to add that a small sphere of pure fissile material, as for
instance the uranium 235, around of the dimensions of a golf ball, cannot sustain
a chain reaction; too many neutrons escape in fact from the surface of the sphere
that is big relatively in comparison to the volume, and they will be in this way
subtracted to the reaction. In a mass of uranium 235 of the dimensions of a baseball
ball, instead, the number of lost neutrons through the surface is compensated
by the neutrons produced in the fission that happen inside the sphere.
The least quantity of fissile material (of a determined form) necessary to
maintain a chain reaction is said critical mass. Increasing subsequently the dimension
of the sphere a supercritical mass is gotten, in which the following generations
of fission increase very quickly, conducting to an explosion as a result of some
extremely rapid development of an enormous quantity of energy. In an atomic bomb,
therefore, a mass of fissile material of large dimensions of the critical value
is divided in two or more not critical parts, that are brought closer and held
together for around a millionth of second, so that to constitute the critical
mass instantly. This allows that the chain reaction is propagated before the explosion
of the bomb. A heavy material, said tamper, surrounds the fissile mass in way
to prevent its premature disintegration and to reduce the number of neutrons that
succeed in escaping.
If in half kilogram of uranium every atom had to split up, the energy produced
will be equal to the explosive power of 10.000 tons of TNT. In this hypothetical
case, the efficiency of the explosion would be of 100%; in the first tests of
the A bomb, this efficiency was never reached. For the detonation of the atomic
bombs have been set more or less sophisticated launchings systems. In the simplest
system, a bullet of fissile material is shot against a target of the same material,
in way that the two masses are united in a supercritical whole. The atomic bomb
exploded in Hiroshima on August 6 1945 was a weapon of this type, of the power
of around 20 kilotons.
A most complex method, said "implosion", is used in a weapon of spherical
conformation. The most external part of the sphere consists of a layer of lenses
of common high potential explosive, prepared in way to assemble the explosion
toward the center of the bomb (implosion). At the center, there is a core of fissile
material that is compressed to the inside by the powerful wave of direct pressure;
the density of the metal results increased with consequent production of a supercritical
configuration. The bomb of the test of Alamogordo and also that dropped over Nagasaki
on August 9 1945, both with a power of 20 kilotons, they were of the implosion
type. Independently from the method used for getting a supercritical whole, the
chain reaction proceeds for around a millionth of second, freeing enormous quantities
of thermal energy. The so rapid liberation of such energy in a small volume increases
instantly the temperature to about ten million of degrees. The rapid expansion
and vaporization of the material that constitutes the bomb gives origin to an
explosion of extreme power.
The Few Survivors speaks
The testimonies of the tragical facts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that are furnished
by the few survivors were far from the center of the city are numerous. One of
these has been furnished by Michio Morishima in an interview granted to the “Corriere
della Sera” (an important Italian newspaper) on August 4 1985. The terrible
morning on August 9 in Nagasaki is described through the eyes of a Navy officer
that was completing his own duty, while the American airplanes were letting fall
clusters of bombs on the Japanese army. Just for this motive the new anti-aircraft
alarm of the morning on August 9 was almost underestimated and the greatest part
of the army and the population was quietly having lunch while, unexpectedly, the
bomb exploded emanating a blinding light, thousand times brighter of that of the
sun: the second catastrophe in three days was demolishing Japan.
Soon, he understood that it was dealt with the atomic bomb, everything was
razed to the ground, hundreds of persons pulverized in an instant, and others
wounded so seriously to be unrecognizable. A hell in which they were revolved,
absorbed in the dust, “shadows” of men whose lesions were “so horrible
that whom has not seen them, he cannot imagine them.” Such description is
also very similar to what Hara furnishes in “the UNESCO messenger ”
(November1975) speaking about the morning on August 6 in Hiroshima. A little after
8 o'clock, the bomb exploded without that nobody waited for it. With the general
amazement in front of the terrible burst, nobody succeeded in giving an explanation
to what had happened: the only certainty they were persons' thousand of persons
burnt that were along the river that crosses Hiroshima to look for a shelter and
for water to drink. The scenery became even more terrible the immediately following
mornings, when columns of wheelbarrows took away hundreds of dead bodies: women,
men, old men and children indiscriminately, everybody burnt, disfigured and crippled.
Some days after, the situation became uncontrollable, the corpses were too many
and nobody succeeded in taking them away: “the persons died one after the
other and nobody came to take the dead bodies away. With the upset air, the alive
erred among the corpses. All the ruins in the principal roads were seen in that
moment. An empty and gray space extended under a leaden sky.”
Unfortunately, these are not the only direct testimonies of the damages caused
by the atomic bomb. Also in more recent times, as Ettore Mo testifies us in the
Corriere della Sera on September 6 1995, the experiments effected from Russia
in Kazakhstan between ’49 and ’90 have caused the annihilation of part
of the local population, used as guinea-pig and condemned to death without any
guilt. Mo tells us of mutilated children, totally stunned boys, men and women
without ability to intend and will, real human larvas burnt by the radiation that,
one by one, they die in the silence of a dark hospital corridor. All this for
the simple and useless experiments that served only to assure the nuclear supremacy
to Russia on the United States. Now the inheritance of that sad past is difficult
to cancel since the sick men, still many, are amassed in the hospitals and they
dies day by day as Mo testifies us: “in the hospital that I saw, at least
in two rooms, there is no hope of life. They are stacked as poor beasts and I
imagine that on the evening something to drink and to eat is given them (…).
They will never recoverthe manager of the hospital tells mehere they enter and
they die. They are seven years that I live here and I have never seen anybody
go out alive and healthy from this hospital. I'm not a doctor; I'm the administrator
of a cemetery. There are not sick men, there is only people condemned to the extinction.”
No Repentance of the Enola Gay's Pilot
A meaningful fact of the tragic experience on August 6 1945, emerged some years
later in an interview to the pilot of the Enola Gay, Paul Tibbets, appeared in
the Corriere della Sera on evening August 4 1985. Tibbets reconstructs with unbelievable
coldness and with serene and imperturbable mind what it appeared him at 8 and
17 o'clock in that tragic morning, when, with his bomber, he veered of 160°
to see what remained of Hiroshima. “There was nothing more - Tibbets says
- but a black and boiling fog that seemed a kind of tar. In truth it was smoke,
wrecks, dust. It seemed that all bubbled in the air….” At that time
Tibbets was 29 years old and was the only one as commander, to know, since the
beginning, the true purpose of the mission. The others twelve men of the crew
had only a vague idea of what was about to happen. Nevertheless from that tragic
morning, Tibbets never had doubts or remorse, feelings as the anguish or the sense
of the horror because he is firmly convinced to have served his own country.
He also lets notice that the news diffused from the Russians about the possibility
that the crew of the Enola was composed by crazy persons is not anything else
other than gossips invented to discredit the pilots. Tibbets concluded his interview
with some meaningful words that let us understand what was, at that time, the
love toward the American country by the American soldiers: “I'm not a warlike
man. I don't like the idea of the nuclear war. If you want to know truth, I don't
like any war (…) The commander of air raid at Pearl Harbor on December 7
1941 lets notice me that I had saved more life of how many I had destroyed. Without
the atomic bomb, we would have had to invade Japan and there would have been a
long slaughter: the Japanese would have fought until the end, house by house,
also with the stones and the batons. I tell you a thing: if today existed the
same conditions that there were in ’45, I would not hesitate an instant to
drop the bomb.”
The Problem Of the Atomic Bomb doesn't stop in 1945
After the explosion of the two bombs in Japan, World War 2 finished. It was
now necessary to reestablish the order and to reorganize the world after the terrible
political-military upsetting caused by the conflict. The adventure revealed itself
not easy, above all for the division of Germany that remained a threat either
for French to west, either for the Russians to east.
It is also necessary to add that between the winning powers there were Russia
and the United States, two nations united during the conflict to destroy the Nazism,
but diametrically separated by opposite political ideologies. It was therefore
inevitable the “breakup” of the alliance between the two superpowers
at the end of the war. The end of the good relationships between USA and USSR
had inevitable repercussions on the division of Germany. The Soviet Union held
under control the east part (that became in the ‘49 German Democratic Republic
with capital Pankow); the USA, France and England dominated the west sector (future
German Federal Republic with capital Bonn). Europe and the whole world had divided
in two and it was inevitable that the tensions between the two blocks increased,
especially when, in 1949, Russia performed his first nuclear experiment. The ghost
of a third world war impended threatening because it would have meant, very probably,
the annihilation of the human kind, because of the dimensions that the nuclear
conflict would have been able to reach. There was a real armaments rush, followed
by an unbridled search for military alliances that concretized themselves in 1949
with the signature of the Atlantic Pact among the countries of the west: it has
born so the NATO that was composed by eleven countries among which Italy. To this
movement, Russia responded in 1955 with the signature of the Pact of Warsaw, undersigned
by great part of the countries of the east.
But the struggle in Europe was also developed on an economic plan from the
moment that it was approved, in the USA, the so-called plain Marshall, a system
of economic helps granted from the United States to the allied countries in Europe
to change the fates of their economy. Such project brought sure benefits to Europe
even if the risk was to remain tightly bound to the American power losing European
autonomy. Therefore, it was tried to form some associations of economic collaboration
that guaranteed the independence of the single allied countries: it was born so
the OECE, the CECA, the EURATOM and, finally in 1957, the EEC. To these economic
unions among the countries of the west, Russia responded with the formation of
the COMECOM, a council for the mutual economic assistance among the countries
of the east.
In this climate of so great tension, assembled above all on the old continent,
also the less important international affairs become the pretext to embitter the
struggle and to increase the attrition between the two superpowers. A case, that
has constituted motive for great tension all over the world, because it was grazed
the use of the nuclear bomb, it is constituted by the war of Korea. Until that
moment Korea had been divided in the two zones: Korea of the north, under Russian
control and Korea of the South, under American control. The casus foederis has
been the violation of the border, placed in 38th parallel, from the troops of
the North considered as “invaders” by the Security Council of the UN
(in that session there was not the Russian representative for a protest against
the exclusion of Popular China replaced from Nationalistic China of Chiang Kai-shek,
in the assembly of the united nations). It begins so, with the approval of the
UN, a bloody war that was extended for over 3 years and it didn't bring to any
result: the confinements remained nearly the same, the two superpowers preserved
their influence, even if the war got a half million corpses between the civilians.
The risk that the world had during this war it has been of enormous proportions
because that some documents found in a second time have testified as some American
and Russian military groups would have pushed their governments to the use of
the atomic bomb. Probably, what has avoided the catastrophe it has been the mutual
fear of the two superpowers, because after ’49, nobody of two possessed the
“atomic monopoly”, and therefore it would have been developed an equal
struggle that would have destroyed the world.
The Bomb: There is also an ethic problem
Since when the first device has been invented, the experiments on nuclear bombs
have multiplied and, accordingly it has increased the risk of a total destruction
of the planet in case of a thick employment of such weapons. The problem has been
immediately understood by the scientific community that directly worked in the
realization of the bomb and, already in ’45, some scientists as Einstein
and Heisemberg showed their disappointment and their real fear in front of so
big threat. One of the key points underlined by Einstein "in the appeal for
the peace" of 1955 it is that "to put political feelings aside and to
consider ourselves only as members of a biological kind that have had an important
history and of which nobody of us can desire the disappearance." Einstein
more times insisted on the fact that the A bomb and the new H bomb, if employed
in elevated number they would provoke a general death of every form of life, not
only for direct cause of the burst, but also, and above all for the "death
rain" that would invest the planet. The human kind would have been "tortured
from the illnesses and from the disintegration." It results therefore obvious
the final question that the scientists set each other: " …should we
put an end to the human race, or will the humanity have to give up the war?”
In front of this question it returns of actuality a theme remembered by Hegel
at the beginnings of 19th century. In fact he sustained in his "Encyclopedia
of the philosophical sciences in abridged edition" that not only the war
was inevitable and necessary (when there are not conditions for an arrangement
of the controversies among the states), but also highly moral. To defend this
thesis he made an example, become famous, with which compared the war to the "movement
of the winds that preserves the sea from the putrefaction, in which it would have
transformed from a durable quiet." Besides Hegel sustained the impossibility
of the existence of an international law that could regulate the controversies
among states, even if this has been partly denied by the history after the creation
of the UN (It is necessary however to say that the philosophy of Hegel is rather
old and surely at the beginnings of 19th century nobody would be been able to
imagine the big transformations of the following centuries). This is to sat that
according to the German philosopher, the only judge is the History, that is the
Spirit, that founds mainly upon the war and it uses the great characters (as Napoleon
or Caesar) to reach its goal that is to know itself.
Sources:
N. Abbagnano, G. Fornero, Protagonists and texts of the philosophy, Paravia, Turin,
1196
A. Desideri, M. Themelly, History and historiography, D'Anna publishing house,
Florence, 1997
F. Cavino Olivieri, History: 1900, N.E.G., Genoa, 1998
C. Bonanno, Critical history:1900, Liviana, Turin, 1997
R. Maiocchi, The Atomic era, Giunti, 1998
Edited by the Corriere della Sera, One century in first page: The atomic bomb,
RCS publishing , 2000
AA.VV., Encyclopedia Garzanti of philosophy, Garzanti, 1995
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