This is a smug, dismal piece of writing about physics, politics, and the destruction of the human race. It would be worthless as fiction because nobody would ever believe it. Since this piece is based entirely on fact, however, you’ll just have to live with it...
In the beginning there was nothing but deep, black, infinite darkness. It was the kind of darkness that makes a rainy day in Antarctica feel like a stroll on the sun; It was the kind of darkness that only people who were born without eyes could understand;
It was really fucking dark.[ One day, God said “Let there be light”.[ Well, he didn’t actually say “Let there be light”, I mean, this was billions and billions of years before language existed. Besides, it wasn’t like anyone was there to get a direct quote from the guy. For all I know, he actually said something like “Ramma Lamma Ding Dong” or “Pass the ketchup”.
Anyway, at God’s command, all matter became compressed into an infinitely small point by an infinitely large gravitational force until there was a great explosion. The explosion was brighter than a thousand Las Vegases; It was brighter than a million Hawaiian shirts; It was bright in exactly the same way that it wasn’t before.[The massive heat from this explosion created all the elements that make up life as we know it. All things (including every atom in your body) were created in that instant. This was the birth of everything.[ The explosion is still going on, too. At this very moment, all matter is hurling through space at an incredible rate of speed, racing away from the epicenter of the explosion. Every solar system, planet, asteroid; every salt shaker, bicycle, and garden hose in the universe is nothing more than shrapnel, hurled indifferently through space by the force of the blast. That’s how the theory goes.
Things went pretty well for a while: Solar systems formed, planets appeared, early life forms evolved, civilization developed... Then, in the 9th century, two Chinese alchemists began working on a concoction that was supposed to promote eternal life. They mixed sulfur, salt peter, and honey over a fire. The combination immediately burst into flames and burned down their hut.[ So the alchemists, in an attempt to invent a potion that would allow people to live forever, invented gun powder instead (Of course, they didn’t actually call it gun powder. Guns weren’t invented until hundreds of years later, for Christ’s sake).
Realizing that they had stumbled upon something extremely dangerous, the two men recorded the discovery in their notes, warning their readers not to reproduce the experiment under any circumstances. What happens when you tell people not to do something?
More history happened. Empires rose and fell like waves on the ocean. Someone built a wall, someone else knocked it down... Stuff like that... Then, Roger Bacon, an English friar - a man of God - made a little discovery in 1242. He purified salt peter, mixed it with sulfur, packed it into a paper tube, and ignited it. As it turns out, while gun powder burns very quickly (as our Chinese friends found out), confined gun powder explodes.
Realizing the danger of this information, Roger Bacon documented his discovery in a Latin anagram. This attempt to conceal his information failed, of course, and Bacon’s discovery led to... the end of feudalism.
The swords, armor, and stone walls of that era were suddenly obsolete once explosives were used against them. It was an all new ball game at that point. Suddenly, killing people on a battlefield was as easy as killing ants with a chain saw.
The following centuries saw the spread of this technology across the planet. In addition to primitive bombs that were used for military purposes, Arabian writings from the 1300’s described a bamboo tube, reinforced with iron, that was used to fire arrows at advancing armies. A similar contraption was used by Chinese soldiers to fire rocks at their opponents by the middle of that same century.[ These gun prototypes were advanced in the 14th century by a German monk by the name of Berthold Schwartz who developed the basic firearm design that is still in use today. Apparently, he worked on his design when he wasn’t busy praying and studying the Bible. Everyone needs a hobby.[So people were having a grand old time; blowing each other to bits and firing off guns at one another. For a while it seemed that life couldn’t get any better. Then, life got better...
Gun powder is known as a low explosive because it has to be confined to explode. In 1858, however, an Italian scientist by the name of Ascanio Sobrero mixed nitric and sulfuric acids with glycerin in an attempt to develop a headache medication. This unhappy marriage of elements formed a high explosive called “nitroglycerin”.[ Nitroglycerin is extremely unstable. Simple agitation of its elements can cause an explosion, even in open space. Ascanio learned this the hard way: His face was disfigured when a test tube full of nitroglycerin exploded in his lab. Disturbed, he declared that nitroglycerin was too unstable to have any practical applications.[ A few years later, a young Swedish scientist by the name of Alfred Nobel started refining nitroglycerin. He began experimenting in his lab and found a number of ways to control and manufacture it for marketing purposes. He had factories built and began selling his product around Europe. After having some initial success with his business, Alfred traveled to the United States to convince government and industrial leaders that his nitroglycerin was a safe product. This trip was marred, however, because, while Alfred was trying to convince the United States that his product was safe, his factories in Europe kept exploding. These accidents indicated that more stability was required for the substance to be marketable on a larger scale.
By adding porous clay to nitroglycerin, Alfred Nobel found that he could stabilize it. Alfred was a pacifist. He was also a capitalist. What happens when you mix nitroglycerin, capitalism, and pacifism? You get dynamite.
Alfred’s invention made him the richest man in the world. It also made him the biggest pacifist arms merchant in history. There was one side product of Alfred’s experiments with explosives: His brother, Emil, was killed in an explosion when Alfred hired him to develop a more potent version of nitroglycerin. Sometimes things happen on the way to the bank.
Alfred’s factories were very productive. They produced one ton of explosives for every casualty in World War One, earning an obscene amount of money in the process. The death business is very lucrative. It always has been.
Despite his resounding success in the business of death and destruction, Albert felt unfulfilled. In a letter to his brother he stated that he wanted to be remembered as a man whose virtues included “keeping his nails clean and never being a burden to anyone”. In the same letter he listed his greatest wish as “to not be buried alive”.
Eight years before his death, a newspaper mistakenly printed Alfred’s obituary, describing him as “The Merchant of Death”. He was deeply troubled by this. As Alfred grew older and his health began to decline, he quit focusing on the business of mass, efficient death and became obsessed with his own personal demise. Not only did he have to deal with the realization that he had contributed to thousands of deaths in the course of his career, he also had to contend with his own declining health. He was plagued with terrible headaches (which were the result of years of tasting nitroglycerin to ensure its purity). He was also suffering from chest pains. What did doctors prescribe him for his medical problems? Nitroglycerin tablets.
Desperate to recreate himself, Alfred Nobel started giving away his money. Realistically, he could have tossed bales of money around with both hands for the rest of his life and never even put a dent in the pile. Instead, he created the “Nobel Prize”; A financial form of recognition for accomplishments in science, politics, and literature. By supporting peaceful advancements in human thought, Nobel hoped he could distance himself from the massive carnage that his business enabled. Was Alfred’s public relations ploy successful? On a stone slab at the house of his birth he is described this way: “Inventor, supporter of culture, friend of peace”.[ If Charles Manson had a public relations firm working with him, he could have done the same kind of thing for himself. God knows, he was responsible for a mere fraction of the deaths that Nobel facilitated. Maybe if the great humanitarians, scientists, and artists in society were awarded the Manson Prize, we wouldn’t look so harshly on the man any more.
This is a good place to inject a little romance to lighten the mood. No story is complete without a gratuitous romantic sub-plot. Here you go:
In 1895 a teenage girl named Marie Winteler fell in love with a boy named Albert. It was a first love for both of them. This intelligent and enigmatic boy had moved in with Marie’s family so he could continue his education in Switzerland after his own family left the country to pursue business opportunities.[ Sixteen-year-old Albert was very charming. The love letters he wrote to Marie still survive to this day and are held up as examples of truly beautiful romantic writing. This relationship could have become one of the great love stories in history except for one little detail: Marie’s first love was about to change history.
When Albert moved to Zurich to complete his education, his letters to Marie began to grow cold. He eventually lost interest in her altogether and carried on his life with hardly a backward glance to his first love.[ A few years later Albert fell in love with his fellow physics student, Mileva Maric. Albert and Mileva spent a lot of time together over the next couple of years. When Mileva became pregnant out of wedlock, however, Albert had to leave school and take a lowly, six-day-a-week job at a patent office in order to make ends meet. In his spare time, Albert published the three most important papers in his entire career, including “The Special Theory of Relativity”. The year was 1905; Albert Einstein was twenty six years old.[ Einstein (who, like Alfred Nobel, was a pacifist) developed theories that were used to foster a new age in the history of destruction. The translation of mass directly into energy (E=MC2) indicated that a small particle of matter is the equivalent of an enormous quantity of energy.[Although he spoke in favor of world peace throughout most of his public life, Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939, urging him to begin a program that would enable the United States to develop a fission-based bomb. This theory was the floor plan for explosive technology that outdistanced everything scientists ever dreamed possible. Before we detail the progression of this weapon, however, here is the rest of Marie Winteler’s story:
One year after Einstein published “The Special Theory of Relativity”, Marie Winteler’s brother returned from the merchant marines, shot his mother and brother-in-law, and turned the gun on himself. Marie was “fortunate” enough to survive the attack so she could spend the remainder of her life battling mental illness. She died in an asylum 1957. Aren’t romantic interludes fun?
Now that we have romance out of the way, here is the next progression in explosive history:
As you may have guessed, many of the first men to receive the Nobel prize for their “peaceful advancements in science” teemed up with Robert Oppenheimer in the early 1940’s to develop The Atomic Bomb.[Oppenheimer, yet another pacifist (who eventually lost his security clearance with the United States government for his communist affiliations), gathered a circle of prominent scientists to explore the possibility of using fission to create an atomic bomb. With virtually unlimited funding (Oppenheimer had several prominent politicians and generals neatly folded into his wallet by the mid 1940’s), the Los Alamos team strove to split the atom.[ The atomic bomb was the first of a series of nuclear bombs that were produced in the following years. Bombs of this sort ignite the atmosphere around them in the transition from mass to energy. With this in mind, some scientists were concerned that detonating an atomic bomb would cause a chain reaction, effectively ending all life on the planet. Despite these concerns, the team tested the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert in 1945. Viewed from ten miles away, the brilliance of the explosion was one thousand times brighter than the sun as the temperature rose to one million degrees Fahrenheit in the first 100th of a second. Viewing the awesome destruction that the bomb caused, Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagvad Gita, stating“Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds”
These were strong words for a pacifist, don’t you think? They aren’t very likely to be mistaken for the lyrics from a Bob Dylan song, that’s for sure.[ At President Truman’s order, the United States resolved to drop the first atomic bombs on Japan. Oppenheimer and several prominent military men debated the best way to utilize their weapon. Some people suggested they drop the bomb on an uninhabited island as a demonstration of the awesome power it contained. It was believed that the Japanese government would surrender peacefully when they saw the sheer force that faced them. Oppenheimer, however, felt that this approach would be ineffective and urged the military to drop the bombs in heavily populated areas where they would have the most persuasive effect on the enemy.
Several target sites were discussed; some for their cultural value, some for their population, still others for their industrial importance... Finally, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were selected as the ideal cites to be blasted into history by the atomic bomb.
On August 6, 1945, a war plane dubbed “The Enola Gay” dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The resulting mushroom cloud rose 30,000 feet into the air while 75,000 people lay dying underneath it. Three days later, another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing 40,000 people. Untold thousands died in the following decades from the long range effects of radiation that was produced in the blasts.
When asked about his decision to drop the atomic bomb, President Truman said that, by dropping the bomb, the United States had ended the war; effectively saving thousands of lives. It was the “Kill for peace” defense.
Immediately after the completion of the atomic bomb, an even larger explosive - the hydrogen bomb - went into development. While an atomic bomb uses fission, (unstable atoms splitting and forming stable, smaller atoms) hydrogen bombs use fusion, (small atoms combining with larger atoms). As a result, hydrogen bombs are much more powerful than atom bombs. Since hydrogen bombs don’t rely on a critical mass, their size and destructive potential are limitless.
In the 1960s the Soviet Union is rumored to have tested a 45-megaton hydrogen bomb. The explosive power of a bomb that size is 45,000 times more powerful than the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. It was clear at that point the world would need to maintain peace at all costs. Even the scientists who were developing these weapons hoped they would never be used. Of course, this was the same sentiment that was shared by the Chinese alchemists, Nobel, Einstein, Oppenheimer, and all the other scientists whose work nudged the world a little closer to the apocalypse.
On October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy appeared on television to make an announcement to the American people. He explained that satellite photographs had revealed that Soviet atomic missile sites were being built in Cuba. He declared this development to be a violation of international law and a direct threat to the American people. He threatened to launch a nuclear assault if the Soviets didn’t withdraw their weapons immediately. For the following week, the world prepared for a nuclear war. This stand-off between the two super powers put the world minutes away from complete annihilation. On October 26, Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev withdrew his missiles and a world war was narrowly averted.
Fear of nuclear annihilation changed the world forever. The bombs dropped on Japan and the threat of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis had permanently left their scorch marks on the walls of history. Human consciousness was forever altered by the realization that we are capable of perpetuating such large scale atrocities. Elementary schools held futile “duck and cover” bomb drills, shysters got rich selling bogus anti-radiation pills, and bomb shelters were built all over the planet by people who hoped to live long enough to scratch out a living in the post-apocalyptic world. People had to accept the fact that they would never be safe again, not in their places of employment; not in their schools; not even in their homes.
You know that freeway system that you have spent countless hours on, getting to work or traveling across the country on vacation? Do you think they built those roads so you can buy back scratchers and ashtrays at Niagara Falls? No. The modern freeway system was proposed by President Dwight Eisenhower after he saw the Autobahn in Germany and realized the United States needed to be able to decentralize its population in case of a bomb attack. The modern freeway system wasn’t designed as a leisure or employment aid; it was designed as an escape route.
Despite the fear of nuclear annihilation, explosive technology continues to develop to this day. Some bombs combine fission and fusion for greater efficiency. There are also much smaller versions of the bombs (including briefcase-sized bombs, several of which disappeared from the Russian arsenal and are likely to be in the hands of terrorists).
The recently designed nuclear bombs can now be broken into two classifications: “Clean” and “dirty”. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. “Clean” bombs cause a great deal of damage without giving off much radiation. As you can imagine, these weapons do wonders for property values. “Dirty” bombs, produce the maximum amount of radiation when they explode, enabling them to kill human beings while causing minimal damage to buildings. The latter were apparently a display of compassion. After all, just because you are killing people doesn’t mean you have to ruin their stuff too.
Now that India, Pakistan, and China are locked into a nuclear arms race of their own, we can no longer claim to be the owners of the nuclear legacy. In the light of recent atomic testing in India, we are going to have to learn to share our corner of the arrogance market.
In the end, one powerful head of state won’t like the shoes another powerful head of state is wearing and a war will erupt.
No doubt, the services of another brilliant pacifist will be enlisted to up the ante. Moments before the planet is reduced to a cloud of flaming ash, this scientist will probably have something profound to say.
Perhaps it will be
“Let there be light”
Since nobody will survive to quote him, though, he may as well just say
“Pass the ketchup”.
