“You and the Atomic Bomb”
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was a British novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who
wrote under the pen name of George Orwell, a name inspired by his favourite place, the River Orwell.[2] His work is
characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (i.e. to both left-wing authoritarian
communism and to right-wing fascism), and support of democratic socialism.
At the end of World War II, English author and journalist George Orwell wrote the article, "You and the Atomic
Bomb" published October 19, 1945, in the British newspaper Tribune. Contemplating a world living in the shadow
of the threat of nuclear war, he warned of a "peace that is no peace", which he called a permanent "cold war." If
Orwell only knew how true his words would become. This book looks at the history of the nuclear war and it's
influence on the world.
This George Orwell piece was originally published by the Tribune on October 19, 1945 within two months after
atomic bombs were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan by the only country ever to have used them to
kill people and destroy cities, viz., the U.S.A. Orwell had written enough about the same (re: A. Bomb) but this
particular piece was exceptional for the insights it shared about the world dispensation that lay ahead in the age of
atomic weaponry. In addition, it was clear that the groundwork for his novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four had been
completed by this writing.
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Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not
roused so much discussion as might have been expected. The newspapers have published numerous diagrams,
not very helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff, and there has been much reiteration
of the useless statement that the bomb ‘ought to be put under international control.’ But curiously little has been
said, at any rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely: ‘How difficult are
these things to manufacture?’
Such information as we — that is, the big public — possess on this subject has come to us in a rather indirect way,
apropos of President Truman's decision not to hand over certain secrets to the USSR. Some months ago, when the
bomb was still only a rumour, there was a widespread belief that splitting the atom was merely a problem for the
physicists, and that when they had solved it a new and devastating weapon would be within reach of almost
everybody. (At any moment, so the rumour went, some lonely lunatic in a laboratory might blow civilisation to
smithereens, as easily as touching off a firework.)
Had that been true, the whole trend of history would have been abruptly altered. The distinction between great
states and small states would have been wiped out, and the power of the State over the individual would have been
greatly weakened. However, it appears from President Truman's remarks, and various comments that have been
made on them, that the bomb is fantastically expensive and that its manufacture demands an enormous industrial
effort, such as only three or four countries in the world are capable of making. This point is of cardinal importance,
because it may mean that the discovery of the atomic bomb, so far from reversing history, will simply intensify the
trends which have been apparent for a dozen years past.
It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection
between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over
and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be
found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages
of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus,
for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-
bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while
a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.
The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle. After the
invention of the flintlock, and before the invention of the percussion cap, the musket was a fairly efficient weapon,
and at the same time so simple that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made
possible the success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more serious
business than it could be in our own day. After the musket came the breech-loading rifle. This was a comparatively
complex thing, but it could still be produced in scores of countries, and it was cheap, easily smuggled and
economical of ammunition. Even the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or
another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccans — even Tibetans — could put up a fight for their
independence, sometimes with success. But thereafter every development in military technique has favoured the
State as against the individual, and the industrialised country as against the backward one. There are fewer and
fewer foci of power. Already, in 1939, there were only five states capable of waging war on the grand scale, and
now there are only three — ultimately, perhaps, only two. This trend has been obvious for years, and was pointed
out by a few observers even before 1914. The one thing that might reverse it is the discovery of a weapon — or, to
put it more broadly, of a method of fighting — not dependent on huge concentrations of industrial plant
From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet possess the secret of making the atomic bomb;
on the other hand, the consensus of opinion seems to be that they will possess it within a few years. So we have
before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of
people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily assumed
that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end to the machine civilisation. But suppose —
and really this the likeliest development — that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the
atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to
retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in
still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.
When James Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution it seemed probable to many Americans that the Germans
would win the European end of the war, and it was therefore natural to assume that Germany and not Russia would
dominate the Eurasian land mass, while Japan would remain master of East Asia. This was a miscalculation, but it
does not affect the main argument. For Burnham's geographical picture of the new world has turned out to be
correct. More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being parceled off into three great empires, each self-
contained and cut off from contact with the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or another, by a self-
elected oligarchy. The haggling as to where the frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will continue for
some years, and the third of the three super-states — East Asia, dominated by China — is still potential rather than
actual. But the general drift is unmistakable, and every scientific discovery of recent years has accelerated it.
We were once told that the aeroplane had ‘abolished frontiers’; actually it is only since the aeroplane
became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable. The radio was once
expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a means of
insulating one nation from another. The atomic bomb may complete the process by robbing the exploited
classes and peoples of all power to revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a
basis of military equality. Unable to conquer one another, they are likely to continue ruling the world
between them, and it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow and unpredictable
demographic changes.
For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of
destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over.
Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless,
looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards
the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly
stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few
people have yet considered its ideological implications — that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of
beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable
and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.
Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an
alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have
meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police state. If, as seems to be the
case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large
-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’.
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George Orwell’s reflections about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August
seventy-five years ago – in a wide range of writings – are among his most important and insightful.
His first major statement comes in an essay, ‘You and the Atom Bomb’, published in Tribune on 19
October 1945 where he concentrates on the Bomb’s impact on the state. ‘The discovery of the atomic
bomb, so far from reversing history, will simply intensify the trends which have been apparent for a dozen
years at least,’ he says. The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of
the musket and the rifle. Most nations could get hold of rifles so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians,
Moroccans and Tibetans could fight for independence, sometimes with success. Thereafter, every
development in military technique has favoured the state. In 1939, there were only five states capable of
waging war on the grand scale – now there are only three – and perhaps only two.
He writes: ‘So we have before....... ‘peace that is no peace’..
This is Orwell, then, in his bleakest mood. Is there any hope? Only if cheap and easily manufactured
weapons can be developed that are ‘not dependent on huge concentration of industrial plant’.
He takes James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941) to task for predicting that Germany, not
Russia, would dominate the Eurasian land mass. Yet Burnham’s essential world view has turned out
correct. ‘More and more obviously, the surface of the earth is being parcelled off into three great empires,
each self-contained and cut off from contact with the wider world and each ruled, under one guise or
another, by a self-elected oligarchy.’ Without directly saying so, Orwell suggests that most likely some
combination of Western Europe and the United States, a nuclear-armed Soviet Union and East Asia, led
by China, will dominate this new, permanent state of ‘cold war’. All this clearly anticipates the world of
Nineteen Eighty-Four in which three super-states, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, are at constant war. As
Dorian Lynskey comments in The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (2019): ‘Having
invented the phrase “cold war”, he also anticipated the doctrine of mutual assured destruction.’
The Tribune essay significantly draws a response from Alex Comfort, the pacifist with whom Orwell has
earlier engaged in a controversy in verse over the cases for and against waging war. Following the spat,
the two, remarkably, become friends. In an article in War Commentary, just three weeks after the atomic
blasts, Comfort condemns them as acts of ‘criminal lunacy which must be without parallel in recorded
history’. Now, in his letter to Tribune, Comfort begins by praising Orwell for putting his finger ‘as usual, on
the wider analytical point’ that different types of weapons tend to produce particular types of societies.
Yet, he stresses, ‘another conclusion is possible besides mere resignation to the omnipotence of tyrants
equipped with nuclear energy. Not only are social institutions dictated by weapon-power: so are
revolutionary tactics, and it seems to me that Orwell has made the case for the tactical use of
disobedience, which he has tended to condemn in the past as pacifism’.
Early in 1946, Orwell gives a talk to the Red Flag Fellowship and again expresses concern over the
coming of the atom bomb. If war breaks out between the US and the USSR, he says, he would choose the
US, since, despite all the faults of uncontrolled capitalism, they had at least liberty. The Soviet Union was
so despotic there was little hope of liberty ever emerging there.
His fears over the emergence of phony wars between a tiny number of super-states, first expressed in
‘You and the Atom Bomb’, appear again in his essay ‘Toward European Unity’ for the July/August 1947
issue of Partisan Review. Within each nuclear-armed state, he says, the ‘necessary psychological
atmosphere would be kept up by complete severance from the outer world and by a continuous phony
war against rival states. Civilization of this type might remain static for thousands of years’. As Bernard
Crick comments in his 1980 biography: ‘This is Nineteen Eighty-Four.’ But this time a new mood of
idealism mixes with the pessimism. There is hope – and it lies in European democratic socialism ‘where
people are relatively free and happy and where the main motive in life is not the pursuit of money or
power’. ‘Apart from Australia and New Zealand, the tradition of democratic Socialism can only be said to
exist … in Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, the Low Countries, France, Britain,
Spain and Italy. Only in those countries are there still large numbers of people to whom the word
“Socialism” has some appeal and for whom it is bound up with liberty, equality and internationalism.’
Atomic warfare plays a crucial role in Nineteen Eighty-Four. On one occasion, Winston Smith meets Julia,
the ‘girl from the Fiction Department’, with whom he has a passionate affair, in the ruins of a church
destroyed in a nuclear attack ‘thirty years’ earlier – which suggests the revolution which allowed the Party
to seize power occurred in 1954. And when Winston reflects on his childhood in London, one of his
earliest memories is of a sudden air raid. ‘Perhaps it was the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on
Colchester. He did not remember the raid itself, but he did remember his father’s hand clutching his own
as they hurried down, down, down into some place deep in the earth…’
To a certain degree, Orwell’s retreat to the remote Scottish island of Jura in the last years of his life in
order to concentrate, away from the drudgery of journalism, on writing what was to become his dystopian
masterpiece, was also inspired by his fear of atomic warfare. As he confides to his friend Tosco Fyvel in
December 1947: ‘This stupid war is coming off in abt 10-20 years, and this country will be blown off the
map whatever happens. The only hope is to have a few animals in some place not worth a bomb.’ And to
his friend, Julian Symons, in December 1948, he writes: ‘If the show does start and is as bad as one fears,
it would be fairly easy to be self-supporting on these islands provided one wasn’t looted.’
After the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four on 8 June 1949, in London, and five days later in New York,
Orwell discusses with his publisher, Fredric Warburg, who visits him at Cranham sanatorium, his serious
concerns over the misinterpretations of his great novel’s focus – in particular, on its warnings about
atomic warfare. In Warburg’s follow-up note on the discussion, which appears in Volume 20 of the
Collected Works, edited by Peter Davison, Orwell makes clear that the Soviet Union is not the primary
target. Rather, ‘the danger lies in the structure imposed on Socialist and on Liberal capitalist
communities by the necessity to prepare for total war with the USSR and the new weapon, of which of
course the atomic bomb is the most powerful and the most publicized. But danger lies also in the
acceptance of a totalitarian outlook by intellectuals of all colour.’
So right until near the very end of his life, atomic warfare is a major preoccupation of George Orwell – a
fact worth remembering as people all around the country gather to mark the 75th anniversary of the
attacks on Japan.
Analysis
For anyone interested in the politics of left and right--and in political journalism as it is practiced at the
highest level, Orwell’s works are indispensable. This week, in the year marks the 110th anniversary of his
birth, we present a personal list of his five greatest essays.
Published a mere two and a half months after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Orwell’s “You
and the Atomic Bomb” is notable as one of the first efforts to divine the social and political implications
of a new weapon of previously unimaginable power. Its fame arises from Orwell’s coinage of a new term
for the permanent standoff the bomb would foster between two great powers, the United States and the
Soviet Union: the “cold war.”
The social and political aspects of nuclear weapons had been debated for a year by physicists working
on the Manhattan Project, though even most of them--thanks to the requirements of secrecy within the
project--were unaware of how far the overall work had progressed until the bombs were dropped on
Japan. With the blasts, the issues were thrown open for public debate.
Orwell places the bomb properly within the historical continuum. “It is a commonplace that the history of
civilisation is largely the history of weapons,” he writes. “Ages in which the dominant weapon is
expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is
cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing
planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are
inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon —
so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.”
As for the cold war, that infinite “peace that is no peace,” Orwell foresees that it will not be long before
the Soviets join the Americans as sole possessors of the bomb’s secrets.
“From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet possess the secret of making the
atomic bomb; on the other hand, the consensus of opinion seems to be that they will possess it within a
few years. So we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed
of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between
them.”
