The Geopolitics of Apocalypse

In Wells’ 1913 novel, The World Set Free, the atomic war leads to the inevitable conclusion that the world must unite in a single World State, or destroy itself forever. In the novel, the world does unite---something else that Leo Szilard may have learned from it.

After Hiroshima, many others quickly came to a similar conclusion. Not only scientists like Szilard and Einstein, but writers like Norman Cousins’ whose essay published immediately after Hiroshima, expanded into a best-selling book, suggested that humankind now faced extinction in an atomic war, and only a new world order could prevent it. The main test humanity faced, Cousins wrote, is the “will to change rather than [the] ability to change…That is why the power of total destruction as potentially represented by modern science must be dramatized and kept in the forefront of public opinion.”

Cousins supported world federalism, and a United World Federalist movement arose in 1947. Though many people considered world government as too idealistic, there was widespread support for the United Nations as it was being formed, and something amounting to almost a consensus that nuclear weapons must be brought under international control. Even President Truman, who never regretted using the Bomb, believed that international control of atomic weapons was the correct goal.

But nothing close to world government or even international control of nuclear weapons ever materialized. Instead there was an arms race, principally between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. As nuclear weapons grew in power and number, the basic sanity of humanity was called into question. But as close as the world was to total assured destruction, it did not happen.