Philip Morrison and "If the Bomb Gets Out of Hand"

 “The bombs will never again, as in Japan, come in ones or two. They will come in hundreds, even in thousands. Even if, by means as yet unknown, we are able to stop as many as 90 percent of these missiles, their number will still be large. If the bomb gets out of hand, if we do not learn to live together so that science will be our help and not our hurt, there is only one sure future. The cities of men on earth will perish.”

-Philip Morrison, “If the Bomb Gets Out of Hand,”  (1947) pg.15

            What interests me particularly about this passage beyond its haunting prose is the fact that Morrison is discussing annihilation as a result of creation. This is man, or men, in the case of the Manhattan Project, creating death, and truly realizing only after seeing their creation at work, the full power of their progeny. The Bomb as an object is projected human Self manifested through combined thought and intent into fatal form, i.e. human thought and intent transformed into a physical objet capable of mass destruction. Once utilized, however, this object does something more astonishing than mass-murder and incalculable violence: it unifies. The creation and use of the Bomb is an act of man leading to an epiphany of widespread consequences that affect the human community as whole. It seems a little ironic that a creation meant to maintain boundaries between human communities unified all communities aware of that creation, through fear of one terrifying fate. Cultures, languages or religions may differ, but all human beings die. The idea of death is dealt with in various ways by the living, but the terror of this particular death and the suddenness with which it can arrive is what makes the Bomb so “unendurable” (7). Action must therefore be taken to prevent this scenario from occurring again, which is why Morrison and the others who wrote in One World Or None, the ones responsible for the birthing of this terror, so urgently argued against its use. “If the Bomb Gets Out of Hand” is a didactic text intended to present in clearest written terms that the bomb is so powerful, so very terrifying to all men, that hysteria would be the result of any continued use of it. Fear of a particular death would be so great that reason would vanish in a frenzy of rampant, but completely illogical, self-defense. Mankind united in hysterical frenzy is a terrifying prospect, even more so considering that by creating a weapon that in turn creates mass hysteria, the makers and users of the bomb instigate their own potential destruction. Morrison’s short story here is a warning that this scenario could occur, but it is also a reassurance that the bombs do not have to be used. Control can be regained before the nightmare ever really begins if it is caught in time, if reason masters fear.

-LBS 499: Nuclear Apocalypse Science Fiction, Fall 2011
Journal #1