On a frigid winter’s afternoon in 1942, in a dingy squash court beneath the stands of University of Chicago’s football stadium, a shivering group of scientists watched as Enrico Fermi coaxed the world’s first controlled nuclear chain reaction from an unpromising pile of dusty carbon bricks. Arguably the most consequential scientific moment since Isaac Newton’s cranial encounter with an apple, those four minutes not only unlocked the enormous energetic possibilities of the atom’s nucleus, they also opened the door to the fulfilment of the Manhattan Project’s mission: the construction of a war-winning atom bomb.
Not all those present felt a sense of triumph. As the clicks from the Geiger counter turned into a single unbroken roar, physicist Eugene Wigner described an “eerie feeling” descending on the group. “We felt as I presume everyone does who has done something that he knows will have very far-reaching consequences which he cannot foresee,” he wrote.
The era of Fermi’s great breakthrough lies closer to that of Queen Victoria than it does to our own. Modern nuclear reactors bear little, if any, resemblance to his primitive, unshielded device. Much more is known about the consequences — and risks — of fission. But nuclear power still has the capacity to make us distinctly uneasy. Like Wigner, we thrill nervously at our own presumption in tinkering with elemental forces that we should perhaps have left alone.
As I write this, the world is lurching towards a new nuclear age; one pregnant both with old perils and new possibilities. US and Israeli bombs have been dropped on nuclear installations in Iran; a reminder of the atom’s long association with conflict. And yet never has the potential of nuclear power been so central to the world’s energy needs.
After its long post-Chornobyl retreat, the pace of reactor-building is picking up. More than 60 are under construction around the world, and a further 100 are planned. Yet while many now believe that net zero carbon emissions — if achievable at all — simply won’t be possible without substantial help from the atom, others remain equally firmly convinced that this is the wrong direction. It is against this contested backdrop — amid fierce arguments about the safety, cost and practicality of relying on atomic reactors — that three new books serve to highlight both the history and evolution of the nuclear debate.
For something so momentous, atomic power had modest beginnings. “The first inkling . . . was so trifling that it was almost missed,” writes Frank Close in Destroyer of Worlds, his account of the breakthroughs that led to the atom bomb. The significance of Henri Becquerel’s accidental 1896 discovery of a “foggy smudge” on a photographic plate that he’d left in a dark drawer next to some uranium salts could easily have been overlooked. After all, Willhelm Röntgen had blithely accepted the mysterious X-rays he’d discovered the previous year. “The ‘X’ symbolised that no one knew what these rays were and Röntgen seems to have shown little interest in finding out,” Close writes.
Becquerel was made of more inquiring stuff, and his example inspired the scientific community to explore the strange phenomenon. It led to an astonishing cascade of discoveries as Marie and Pierre Curie first revealed new elements and then coined the term “radioactivity” to describe the mysterious emanations they produced. Others, such as the brilliant New Zealander Ernest Rutherford, probed the atom’s surprisingly spacious interior and started to unravel the mysteries of the nucleus, which he could neither observe directly nor seemed to obey the Newtonian laws of the perceivable world.
A professor of theoretical physics at Oxford, Close writes with elegance and lucidity about the resulting experiments and investigations — each nudging humanity a step closer to what he calls the “third [industrial] revolution” (the first two being steam and electricity). Lay readers may sometimes struggle (as I did) to follow all the details, or the subtleties of the underlying theories, but what shines through is the sense of wonderment and awe that drives the quest.
When his collaboration with the British chemist Frederick Soddy uncovered the mind-boggling fact that radioactive decay changed the atom of one element into another, Rutherford worried that “they will accuse us of being alchemists”. Soddy was no less awestruck: “We stand today where primitive man first stood [upon discovering] the energy liberated by fire.”
As the 1920s shaded into the 1930s, the mood darkened: with discoveries such as the neutron it became clearer that this energy might have unimaginable explosive properties. The accelerating race towards the chain reaction and the Manhattan Project are stories that have been told before, but Close adds his own mordant asides and observations which enliven the journey.
Close also turns the spotlight on figures often forgotten, such as Ettore Majorana, a young Sicilian physicist, whom Fermi rated as a genius to rank alongside Newton and who did much to unravel the mysteries of atomic structure. Wracked by doubts, he disappeared from the Palermo-to-Naples ferry in 1938 at the age of 31. “Physics has taken a bad turn,” he told a colleague shortly before. “We have all taken a bad turn”.
A pupil of Rudolf Peierls — one of Britain’s representatives at Los Alamos and co-author of the 1940 paper that revealed a bomb was possible — Close is more philosophical about the atom’s weaponisation, seeing it as inevitable given the unknowability of Hitler’s intentions. He does, however, bemoan the futility and waste of the arms race, culminating in the 1961 test of Russia’s 50-megaton Tsar Bomba, a “machine of genocide, a city destroyer, an impossible and pointless weapon”.
The terror such devices inspired also helped turn people against the vision of a third industrial revolution. “Postwar, Frederick Soddy’s vision of nuclear energy ‘making the desert bloom’ and the early postwar hopes of energy ‘too cheap to meter’ turned sour as fears of catastrophe spoiled public confidence in the promised utopian nuclear age,” Close writes.
The cold war “balance of terror” is a sterile wasteland to Close. But to Ankit Panda, author of The New Nuclear Age, it presents a more comforting face. A nuclear policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Panda contrasts favourably the relative stability of the first nuclear era (“the period between the United States’ Trinity test in July 1945 and the moment of Soviet collapse”) with the more complex and less stable picture that has developed over the past quarter century.
Panda’s critique will land like a bucket of cold water on those who view nuclear as humanity’s last best hope for energy and see atomic confrontation as a thing of the past. While it’s true that John F Kennedy’s fear that there would be 25 nuclear-weapon states by the 1970s has not materialised (there remain only nine), that’s hardly cause for congratulation.
Instead of just two nuclear-armed superpowers that matter — with a telephone hotline connecting their leaders — we now have (at best) a tripartite world, in which China is an increasingly assertive player. There is also the emergence of India and Pakistan as mutually antagonistic nuclear powers willing to launch air strikes on each other’s territory, and the ever-present destabilising conundrum of North Korea. Israel has just gone to war to thwart Iran’s nuclear pretensions.
These tensions present a challenge to any civil nuclear revival: could anyone in good conscience advocate spreading reactor technology around the world if a thermonuclear exchange was a conceivable outcome? The problem, as Panda notes, is that we are not yet very good at managing this new post-post-cold war disorder. Most of the pre-1992 security architecture has been permitted to weed over.
The resulting vacuum has led to some Dr Strangelove-like moments. Panda cites a 2022 US intelligence assessment of the likelihood of a Russian nuclear strike on Ukraine at “coin-flip odds” — a “crazily high” readout that obliged the Biden administration to consider and communicate its response if one happened. (The answer was a massive conventional attack.)
In the end, there’s no satisfactory answer to the risks of nuclear conflict — those consequences that gave Wigner his “eerie feeling” are shrouded in “Knightian uncertainty”, the sort for which we have no useful past information. The best we can do is to ensure that the “nuclear taboo” sticks. What Panda urges is to recommit to deterrence, with all the painstaking machinery that made it workable — regular information exchanges, mutual constraints and predictable patterns of behaviour. It may seem “unsatisfactory” as a solution to “the perils of humanity’s coexistence with the bomb”, he writes, but it’s better than testing our instinct to “march forward, proudly, toward the brink”.
Nuclear weapons can’t be uninvented or (as yet) credibly renounced, but that shouldn’t stop us reaping the benefits of Fermi’s invention. In Going Nuclear, Tim Gregory, a nuclear chemist at the UK’s National Nuclear Laboratory, sets out why this is not only desirable but a moral imperative. “Opposition to emissions-free energy — at the time we need it most — is one of the great contradictions of our age,” he writes.
Others have made the case for nuclear as the answer to net zero. But Gregory does it with particular vim, taking on all comers; especially those who argue that renewable energy is the only responsible way to wean the planet off fossil fuels. “The dream of a breezy summer’s day powering our modern world is just that — a dream,” he writes. It is “an unserious answer to a serious problem”.
He dismisses green objections that nuclear is too expensive and slow to build to decarbonise our economies in a reasonable timeframe. The €500bn Germany spent on its wind- and solar-heavy Energiewende could have bought 40 large nuclear reactors — sufficient to decarbonise its entire economy, he argues. Instead, it still has one of the highest carbon-emitting electricity systems in Europe.
And while critics focus on the extensive time taken for a few “first of a kind” nuclear projects, such as Britain’s Hinkley Point C, the median time taken to build a reactor is just over six years, Gregory says. Take into account nuclear’s colossal energy density and you get a build speed per megawatt of capacity more than three times that of offshore wind.
Some readers may find Gregory’s tone Panglossian. Objections can be swept aside with a bit too much breezy insouciance. But his arguments are rigorously grounded, and he does make profound points about how deeply embedded nuclear technology is in our world. For instance, ageing societies depend on nuclear therapeutics and medicines that come from reactors. Calls for this to be discontinued are rarely heard.
As for the vexed question of safety, he leans on seasoned evidence. While Chornobyl was a calamity, its death toll — only about 50 confirmed deaths — is tiny compared with other energy disasters. And at just 0.03 deaths per terawatt hour of generation, nuclear energy’s lethality is equivalent to that of wind and solar, and far lower than gas or coal.
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Nothing will ever stop atomic energy from unsettling mankind. It is strange and miraculous that by rearranging the internal structure of the atomic nucleus, we are able to release energy “in amounts that are over a million times larger — atom for atom — than anything made available because of the first two industrial revolutions”, as Close observes.
True, we cannot discount the risk that humanity may end up where Majorana feared, on the road to atomic perdition. But as Gregory reminds us, while knowledge has no morals — it just is — humans have both morals and agency: “What to do with knowledge of the atom’s intricate nucleus — whether to use it for the betterment of humankind or its torment — is down to us.”
Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age: 1895-1965 by Frank Close, Allen Lane £25/Basic Books $32, 336/352 pages
Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World by Tim Gregory, Bodley Head £25/Pegasus Books $29.95, 384 pages
The New Nuclear Age: At the Precipice of Armageddon by Ankit Panda, Polity £25, 288 pages
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