Pacific: The Ocean of the Future. Simon Winchester

Чтение книги онлайн.

      New Year’s Day 1950 was a Sunday, and by and large, as the clocks ticked and chimed and boomed their way into the first year of the century’s fifth decade, the world seemed to have settled into a fairly stable place, with memories of the Second World War starting to fade, and scant suggestion of any of the turmoil soon to come.

      The Japanese, still busily repairing their country and still occupied by American forces, had some small reason for good cheer that day, with the ending of their custom of declaring children to be one year old at birth and of everyone adding a year to his or her age each January 1. This change meant that all eighty million Japanese would not become numerically older on this day: a forty-year-old would wait until his next actual birthday before becoming forty-one. For a brief while that morning, all Japanese were said to have suddenly felt younger.

      There was smaller cheer for New Yorkers. The canned music that had flooded the concourse of Grand Central Terminal for the previous three months, and that had whipped silence-loving commuters into a mutinous fury, was turned off, and forever. Riders on the New York Central regained their sanity; the calm of the everyday hubbub was resumed. For a while, some relieved New Yorkers were said to feel suddenly younger, too.

      And in England, a teapot lid maker named Elizabeth Hulme and a man from Lancashire named James Jackson, whose job was listed as “mule spinner,” said to be a textile-related occupation, were each given awards for the contributions they had made to these crafts, in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace. In Britain nothing else of great significance occurred, according to the day’s newspaper accounts.

      Beyond, in the outside world, most of the men of note then charged with running the world could count on remaining some time yet in power. Truman, Atlee, Stalin, Adenauer, Franco, Tito, Perón—even comparative newcomers such as Kim Il Sung and Mao Zedong—were all, for now, lying easy in their beds. There were similarly complacent kings and queens and princes in abundance, from Egypt to Tonga and Kathmandu, together with an emperor in Japan, a shah in Persia, and a grand duchess in Luxembourg, mostly respected, occasionally revered, and all, for now, reigning in comparative comfort.

      Yet there were shifts in the wind. The grandest of the world’s monarchies was still England’s, with the incumbent, King George VI, still technically able to say that he reigned over a quarter of the world’s population, with his empire still in rude good health. Except that just three weeks into the New Year, his hold on one of those dominions would weaken when, as expected, Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed India to be a republic. And farther still around the world, a little-known Vietnamese Communist named Ho Chi Minh would, at the year’s beginning, commence a series of negotiations with China and the Soviet Union that would eventually ensure that the French would be turfed wholesale out of Indochina, and would leave Asia forever.

      But these small hints aside, if cracks were beginning to appear in the settled order of the world, they were only hairline, visible to few, and troubling to almost no one.

      Except, that is, for one development that is still marked indelibly on that New Year’s Day of 1950, and that came to be regarded in a pair of ways: as being, first, of the gravest moment and, second, of lasting, perhaps even everlasting, scientific significance.

      Three months previously, on September 3, 1949, a Geiger counter mounted in the nose of an American B-29 weather-monitoring plane that was flying reconnaissance missions in the western Pacific between Yokota in Japan and Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska, began to chatter furiously. Puzzled technicians swarmed to examine the records and soon determined that atomic radiation seemed to be pouring into the sky, from somewhere.

      Two days later a second plane, based in Guam, flew over the same route and picked up signs of even more radioactivity: barium, cesium, and molybdenum fission isotopes were found in the upper atmosphere, signatures that suggested that either there had been a nuclear accident somewhere to the east of the plane’s track or someone had exploded an atomic weapon.

      It turned out to be the latter. An atomic bomb known in Russia as First Lightning and elsewhere, eventually, as Joe 1, had been exploded by Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union five days before, in an experiment conducted at a hitherto unknown and subsequently top-secret nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk, in Kazakhstan. The successful exploding of the bomb, which was modeled on, looked uncannily like, and was in fact slightly more powerful than the plutonium weapon dropped by the Americans four years previously over Nagasaki, stunned the outside world. Few Americans and few of their allies thought the Soviets would be able to catch up with the United States in terms of nuclear capability for many more years. But as was discovered a decade later, Moscow had a spy in Los Alamos, Klaus Fuchs; and though debate continues to this day about how valuable the information was that this brilliant young Briton passed to the Soviets, it is generally agreed that, perhaps more than any other spy before or since, Klaus Fuchs changed world history.

      For by allowing the Soviet Union to construct nuclear weapons, and ultimately to make hydrogen bombs and all the other terrible paraphernalia of the nuclear age, his gift of secrets permitted the Cold War between East and West officially to commence—with the consequence that for the next half century, and perhaps for longer still, the planet lived in the shadow of the very real possibility of nuclear annihilation.

      There was another consequence of this development, however—that to this day is of great significance to the scientific community and, as it happens, has some bearing on the structure of this book. It concerns radioactive pollution.

      The explosion in the atmosphere over the coming Cold War years of hundreds upon hundreds of atomic bombs—big and small; fission and fusion; to be launched by missiles or dropped СКАЧАТЬ