Questions and answers with Craig Nelson

“Forgotten heroes” like physicist Lise Meitner, a codiscoverer of nuclear fission, are featured in The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era (Scribner, 2014) by freelance writer Craig Nelson. Among the book’s villains are Meitner’s colleague, German chemist Otto Hahn and the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” Edward Teller.

Alvin Saperstein, a fellow at Wayne State University’s Center for Peace and Conflict Studies, reviewed the book for Physics Today . He calls Nelson “a good professional storyteller who knows how to invoke aspects of the ordinary parts of the lives of his heroes and villains to capture his audience’s attention and engagingly convey the development of the science and its effects on the world.” But he also writes that Nelson failed to make a case for the fall of the atomic era, that the book’s own later chapters give “ample evidence for the continuing and pervasive role of x rays and radioactivity in medicine and daily life.”

The Age of Radiance is Nelson’s second book covering matters with science at the core, the first being Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon (Viking Press, 2009). He is also author of several other books and is a former executive in the book publishing industry.

Physics Today recently caught up with Nelson to discuss The Age of Radiance.

PT: What motivated you to write about this topic?

Nelson: The atomic age is an incredible epoch, filled with people we think we know already—from Marie Curie and Albert Einstein to Ronald Reagan and the plant workers of Fukushima—but they all turn out to be a lot more complicated and interesting than any of us could’ve imagined. I was fascinated by how Lise Meitner lost her place in history to Nazis for being Jewish and then again in the postwar world to men for being a woman. It’s a really shocking turn of events, and one reason I write these books is to get forgotten heroes like Meitner the respect, honor, and audience they deserve.

PT: I noticed the choice of the word “radiance” instead of “radiation” in the title. What led to that choice, and have you received any feedback from readers about it?

Nelson: The scientists who lived this history thought they would change the world for the better, until maybe about 1942, when they were just hoping to beat Hitler and then Stalin. I wanted to recreate that feeling of hope, magic, and mystery, aka bafflement, underlying scientific research, using a historic piece of language. “Radiation” provokes such a knee-jerk reaction among everyone who is not a nuclear scientist that it is exactly the opposite of what you need in understanding the past.

PT: How, exactly, do you define the atomic era, and how did you go about settling on its rise, peak, and fall?

Nelson: The atomic age began with [Wilhelm] Röntgen (who discovered x rays) and is in its twilight years as we speak. There was an assortment of peaks, depending on your point of view. On the one hand, there’s Trinity (the 1945 Manhattan Project nuclear test) and Mike (the 1952 hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific); on the other hand, there’s the birth of nuclear medicine (in the 1920s and 1930s) through the Joliot-Curies (Jean Frédéric and Irène) and through George de Hevesy, who deserves far more attention than this regretful author paid him. Fusion, or thorium or pebble bed [nuclear reactors], or whatever, might break out and astonish us all. And considering our grave energy difficulties, we all certainly hope that will happen, but personally I am subsumed in doubt.

Do I think nuclear medicine, power, and weaponry will imminently and wholly disappear from the face of the earth? No. Do I think the atomic age is fading into a vague nostalgia? Yes.

PT: To what extent do you address the debate that nuclear arms are different from conventional weapons?

Nelson: In 1945 practically the only cities left to bomb in Japan were Hiroshima and Nagasaki since everything else had been decimated by that era’s version of napalm. Kyoto was still standing as US Secretary of War Henry Stimson had taken it off the to-bomb list since he’d been there on vacation and had fond memories. Because of this, we can directly compare the data for destroying cities conventionally and atomically. The fission bomb was a couple of hundred times more powerful than a conventional bomb, and fusion would be a couple thousand times greater, but essentially you could achieve the same destructive power with conventional weapons and more sorties.

Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, had a great dream: to “produce a substance or a machine of such frightful efficacy for wholesale devastation that wars should thereby become altogether impossible.” He failed, but many believe that Edward Teller succeeded with the hydrogen—aka thermonuclear, aka fusion—bomb. Given that all sides in the Cold War—from Russia and China to the United States, Britain, and France—had a thermonuclear arsenal so powerful it could only be used for genocide meant that no one, not even Stalin or Mao, actually used it. A few dogfights over Korea were the only times that the Soviets and the Americans directly battled each other throughout their entire history as mortal superpower adversaries.

When Ronald Reagan tried to talk to Margaret Thatcher about his dream of ending all atomic arsenals, she was horrified, convinced that nuclear weapons kept the Cold War cold. Comics have been satirizing Robert McNamara’s Dr. Strangelove notion of mutual assured destruction for decades—but it worked. So imagine our atomic arsenals, glowing and unused, not poised for Armageddon but instead as the warm, nucleic source of global peace. Sociologist Elspeth Rostow, appointed to the US Institute of Peace by Reagan, proposed giving the physicists and engineers of Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore the Nobel Peace Prize. Clearly Nobel would’ve agreed. What do you think?

PT: What books are you currently reading?

Nelson: My next book is on Pearl Harbor and 9/11, so I’m at the Library of Congress reading 60-plus volumes of congressional testimony. I know you’re jealous.