num_pages: 431
description: Contents: • Preface by H. G. Wells • The World Set Free • (1914) • novel • The Peace of the World • essay • The League of Free Nations • essay • A Memorandum on Peace Propaganda • essay • Democracy • essay"The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal."Scientists of Wells' day were aware that the slow natural radioactive decay of elements like radium continues for thousands of years. While the rate of energy release is negligible, the total amount released is huge. Wells used this as the basis for his story in The World Set Free.The problem which was being mooted by such scientists as Ramsay, Rutherford &amp; Soddy, in the beginning of the 20th century, the problem of inducing radioactivity in the heavier elements &amp; so tapping the internal energy of atoms, was solved in the novel by a wonderful combination of induction &amp; intuition by Holsten in 1933.As coincidence would have it, in reality the physicist Leó Szilárd read the book in 1932, conceived of the idea of nuclear chain reaction in 1933 &amp; filed for patents on it in 1934. Wells did have some knowledge of atomic physics, &amp; William Ramsay, Ernest Rutherford &amp; Frederick Soddy's discovery of the disintegration of uranium. Soddy's book called Wealth, Virtual Wealth &amp; Debt praises The World Set Free.In Wells' story, the atomic bombs have no more power than ordinary high explosive—but they "continue to explode" for days: "Never before in the history of warfare had there been a continuing explosive; indeed, up to the middle of the 20th century the only explosives known were combustibles whose explosiveness was due entirely to their instantaneousness; &amp; these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them."In the great tradition of science-fiction, he gives the obligatory double-talk explanation of how the bombs are supposed to work: "Those used by the Allies were lumps of pure Carolinum, painted on the outside with unoxidised cydonator inducive enclosed hermetically in a case of membranium. A little celluloid stud between the handles by which the bomb was lifted was arranged so as to be easily torn off &amp; admit air to the inducive, which at once became active &amp; set up radio-activity in the outer layer of the Carolinum sphere. This liberated fresh inducive, &amp; so in a few minutes the whole bomb was a blazing continual explosion."This is nonsense of course—even if the "inducive" does sound rather like the initiator used in modern nuclear weapons. No bomb could "explode continuously" without destroying itself. This is one of the problems that had to be solved in the development of the real atomic bomb. Nuclear weapons are &amp; need be just as "instantaneous" as a conventional explosive. Thus Wells' bombs were not truly prophetic at an engineering level. Nevertheless, it is startling to read: "Certainly it seems now that nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier 20th century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. &amp; as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands... All thru the 19th &amp; 20th centuries the amount of energy that men were able to command was continually increasing. Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was no increase whatever in the ability to escape... Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it... Before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city."Wells viewed war as the inevitable result of the Modern State; the introduction of atomic energy in a world divided resulted in social collapse. The only possibilities left were "either the relapse of mankind to agricultural barbarism from which it had emerged so painfully or the acceptance of achieved science as the basis of a new social order." Wells' world government theme is presented as a solution to the nuclear weapon threat.
language: English
title: The World Set Free and Other War Papers
titlecomplete: The World Set Free and Other War Papers (Works of H. G. Wells, Vol. 21)
ratings_count: 3
publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons