members the likenesses of gods. It would be equally reasonable
to compare it to one of those enforced meetings upon the
mountain-tops that must have occurred in the opening phases of
the Deluge. The strength of the council lay not in itself but in
the circumstances that had quickened its intelligence, dispelled
its vanities, and emancipated it from traditional ambitions and
antagonisms. It was stripped of the accumulation of centuries, a
naked government with all that freedom of action that nakedness
affords. And its problems were set before it with a plainness
that was out of all comparison with the complicated and
perplexing intimations of the former time.
Section 3
The world on which the council looked did indeed present a task
quite sufficiently immense and altogether too urgent for any
wanton indulgence in internal dissension. It may be interesting
to sketch in a few phrases the condition of mankind at the close
of the period of warring states, in the year of crisis that
followed the release of atomic power. It was a world
extraordinarily limited when one measures it by later standards,
and it was now in a state of the direst confusion and distress.
It must be remembered that at this time men had still to spread
into enormous areas of the land surface of the globe. There were
vast mountain wildernesses, forest wildernesses, sandy deserts,
and frozen lands. Men still clung closely to water and arable
soil in temperate or sub-tropical climates, they lived abundantly
only in river valleys, and all their great cities had grown upon
large navigable rivers or close to ports upon the sea. Over great
areas even of this suitable land flies and mosquitoes, armed with
infection, had so far defeated human invasion, and under their
protection the virgin forests remained untouched. Indeed, the
whole world even in its most crowded districts was filthy with
flies and swarming with needless insect life to an extent which
is now almost incredible. A population map of the world in 1950
would have followed seashore and river course so closely in its
darker shading as to give an impression that homo sapiens was an
amphibious animal. His roads and railways lay also along the
lower contours, only here and there to pierce some mountain
barrier or reach some holiday resort did they clamber above 3000
feet. And across the ocean his traffic passed in definite lines;
there were hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean no ship
ever traversed except by mischance.
Into the mysteries of the solid globe under his feet he had not
yet pierced for five miles, and it was still not forty years
since, with a tragic pertinacity, he had clambered to the poles
of the earth. The limitless mineral wealth of the Arctic and
Antarctic circles was still buried beneath vast accumulations of
immemorial ice, and the secret riches of the inner zones of the
crust were untapped and indeed unsuspected. The higher mountain
regions were known only to a sprinkling of guide-led climbers and
the frequenters of a few gaunt hotels, and the vast rainless
belts of land that lay across the continental masses, from Gobi
to Sahara and along the backbone of America, with their perfect
air, their daily baths of blazing sunshine, their nights of cool
serenity and glowing stars, and their reservoirs of deep-lying
water, were as yet only desolations of fear and death to the
common imagination.
And now under the shock of the atomic bombs, the great masses of
population which had gathered into the enormous dingy town
centres of that period were dispossessed and scattered
disastrously over the surrounding rural areas. It was as if some
brutal force, grown impatient at last at man's blindness, had
with the deliberate intention of a rearrangement of population
upon more wholesome lines, shaken the world. The great
industrial regions and the large cities that had escaped the
bombs were, because of their complete economic collapse, in
almost as tragic plight as those that blazed, and the
country-side was disordered by a multitude of wandering and
lawless strangers. In some parts of the world famine raged, and
in many regions there was plague… The plains of north India,
which had become more and more dependent for the general welfare
on the railways and that great system of irrigation canals which
the malignant section of the patriots had destroyed, were in a
state of peculiar distress, whole villages lay dead together, no
man heeding, and the very tigers and panthers that preyed upon
the emaciated survivors crawled back infected into the jungle to
perish. Large areas of China were a prey to brigand bands…
It is a remarkable thing that no complete contemporary account of
the explosion of the atomic bombs survives. There are, of
course, innumerable allusions and partial records, and it is from
these that subsequent ages must piece together the image of these
devastations.
The phenomena, it must be remembered, changed greatly from day to
day, and even from hour to hour, as the exploding bomb shifted
its position, threw off fragments or came into contact with water
or a fresh texture of soil. Barnet, who came within forty miles
of Paris early in October, is concerned chiefly with his account
of the social confusion of the country-side and the problems of
his command, but he speaks of heaped cloud masses of steam. 'All
along the sky to the south-west' and of a red glare beneath these
at night. Parts of Paris were still burning, and numbers of
people were camped in the fields even at this distance watching
over treasured heaps of salvaged loot. He speaks too of the
distant rumbling of the explosion-'like trains going over iron
bridges.'
Other descriptions agree with this; they all speak of the
'continuous reverberations,' or of the 'thudding and hammering,'
or some such phrase; and they all testify to a huge pall of
steam, from which rain would fall suddenly in torrents and amidst
which lightning played. Drawing nearer to Paris an observer