george orwell 1945 essay

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You and the Atom Bomb

This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Orwell Estate . The Orwell Foundation is an independent charity – please consider making a donation or becoming a Friend of the Foundation to help us maintain these resources for readers everywhere.

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 parcelled 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 neighbours.

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”.

Tribune , 19 October 1945

Second Thoughts on James Burnham
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Oxford University Press's Academic Insights for the Thinking World

George Orwell and the origin of the term ‘cold war’

Oxford Dictionaries

By Katherine Connor Martin
October 24 th 2015

On 19 October 1945, George Orwell used the term cold war in his essay “ You and the Atom Bomb ,” speculating on the repercussions of the atomic age which had begun two months before when the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. In this article, Orwell considered the social and political implications of “a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.”

This wasn’t the first time the phrase cold war was used in English (it had been used to describe certain policies of Hitler in 1938), but it seems to have been the first time it was applied to the conditions that arose in the aftermath of World War II. Orwell’s essay speculates on the geopolitical impact of the advent of a powerful weapon so expensive and difficult to produce that it was attainable by only a handful of nations, anticipating “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,” and concluding that such a situation is likely “to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘ peace that is no peac e’.”

Within years, some of the developments anticipated by Orwell had emerged. The Cold War (often with capital initials) came to refer specifically to the prolonged state of hostility, short of direct armed conflict, which existed between the Soviet bloc and Western powers after the Second World War. The term was popularized by the American journalist Walter Lippman, who made it the title of a series of essays he published in 1947 in response to U.S. diplomat George Kennan’s ‘Mr. X’ article, which had advocated the policy of “ containment .” To judge by debate in the House of Commons the following year (as cited by the Oxford English Dictionary ), this use of the term Cold War was initially regarded as an Americanism: ‘The British Government … should recognize that the ‘cold war’, as the Americans call it, is on in earnest, that the third world war has, in fact, begun.” Soon, though, the term was in general use.

The end of the Cold War was prematurely declared from time to time in the following decades—after the death of Stalin, and then again during the détente of the 1970s—but by the time the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the Cold War era was clearly over. American political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously posited that “what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such,” with the global ascendancy of Western liberal democracy become an inevitability.

A quarter of a century later, tensions between Russia and NATO have now ratcheted up again, particularly in the wake of the Ukrainian crisis of 2014; commentators have begun to speak of a “ New Cold War .” The ideological context has changed, but once again a few great powers with overwhelming military might jockey for global influence while avoiding direct confrontation. Seventy years after the publication of his essay, the dynamics George Orwell discussed in it are still recognizable in international relations today.

A version of this article first appeared on the OxfordWords blog.

Image Credit: “General Douglas MacArthur, UN Command CiC (seated), observes the naval shelling of Incheon from the USS Mt. McKinley, September 15, 1950.” Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons .

Katherine Connor Martin is Head of US Dictionaries at Oxford University Press.

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Orwell and the Atomic Bomb

5th August 2020 by Richard Lance Keeble

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 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 civilization. But suppose – and really this is 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 to 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.’ The outcome is indefinite ‘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 75 th anniversary of the attacks on Japan.

Richard Lance Keeble was chair of The Orwell Society from 2013 to 2020. His latest books are Journalism Beyond Orwell (Routledge 2020) and George Orwell, The Secret State and the Making of Nineteen Eighty-Four (Abramis, 2020).

2 replies on “Orwell and the Atomic Bomb”

Like Orwell, I’m a rightist from a mode that has more currency in European modes than American as most American “conservatives” really are Classical Liberals or economic Libertarians not traditionalists as the USA broke all ties with traditional governance in its War of Independence that really wasn’t a revolution actually! We on the Right need to assess in the age of Maoist China’s COVID 19 the reality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whether it was right in being necessary militarily to make peace with beaten Japan because there was no moral justification as it was aimed primarily at civilians not military targets. Also, the results of Maoist China as the last totalitarian Super Power left to keep their system of organized oppression with no one able to censure them due to their weaponry and wealth for it even when their actions affect the peoples of other nations like they have! We Americans lost all moral high ground we could have because in Hiroshima and Nagasaki we did what no other country has done against a foe’s civilian centers to the extent we did it for what I say objectively were negligible military justifications for it! True rightist historian John Toland and George Orwell would have been in agreement on the action of unleashing atomic destruction on densely populated centers twice especially when once was more than enough as the Japanese were trying to make a honorable truce as Toland proves. Sad reality is that it seems the US authorities of the Harry Truman Administration were genuinely more interested to see the extent of the destruction their weapons could do not so much concerned about beating Japan as they knew it was militarily beaten. The Japanese had no Navy nor Air Force left. Tojo had been overthrown by the Emperor who wanted a peaceful truce. Sir Winston Churchill suggested restraint as he was afraid of China going Soviet if the Japanese were removed without there being any resistance to the Stalin’s USSR forces from the East. Japan had been an ally of the U.K.’s in WWI. Like Orwell’s fear of nukes, Churchill’s fear of a communist victory in China was correct! I would argue that the world today is a more scary place because of what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki when negotiations were not utilized in favor of seeing the destructive effects of nukes while paving the way for the Sovietization of Asia which occurred with the Korean and Vietnam Wars as a result! The USSR and all the Powers became interested in acquiring and developing greater nukes once the effects they could do was shown with the atomic effects of nukes not going away with the rubble of explosions like conventional weapons. Is that all a good thing helpful to anybody of any political persuasion? As a Rightist, I’m a Luddite type who says “No”! Personally, as a history researcher and Rightist not happy with Maoist China’s influence in the world, I don’t think the long-term results justified that action when a negotiated settlement could have been pursued for Japan and its anti-communist allies in Asia!

This is a very illuminating article, thank you for publishing it. The Outer Hebrides are a marvelous and (still) quiet place on planet earth. The vision of Mr. Orwell producing his masterpiece 1984 at a rented farmhouse on the Isle of Jura is compelling. Mr. Orwell was unique, perhaps, in that he was able to so clearly and admirably foresee the future. Remember his last words: “It is up to is to prevent it.” IT being the horrific, anti-human, anti-love, anti-sex world painted in the novel 1984. We still have the power to prevent IT, but we must not fail ourselves nor fool ourselves nor turn our backs on our brothers ans sisters.