The ambivalence of the atom, between military and civil uses
3' min read
3' min read
Atomism is a fundamental insight of human thought, which runs like a karst river through Western culture, starting with Leucippus and Democritus in the 5th century B.C., through the natural philosophy of Lucretius in De Rerum Natura, Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus up to the Panisperna School with Enrico Fermi and the fearsome atomic mushroom of Alamogordo (the 'Trinity Test') in New Mexico.
This is what emerges from the full-bodied and very dense volume by Riccardo Campa, historian of thought and pupil of physicist Erwin Schrödinger, on atomism and western culture. On the one hand, "the age of innocence, pursued historically, preconceives universal harmony, with the joyous din of atoms simultaneously commemorating it" (p. 10), on the other hand, the Manhattan Project leads the atomistic tradition of the West towards the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, already preconised by H.G. Wells, on the eve of the First World War (1914), imagining that "atom bombs" could be dropped on enemy cities.
The destructiveness of the absolute weapon has mobilised intellectuals such as Karl Jaspers (the atomic bomb and the fate of man), Franco Fornari, (the psychoanalysis of atomic warfare), Herman Kahn (the philosophy of atomic warfare), Albert Camus (choosing between hell and reason).
The historical paradox is that the nuclear weapon is re-proposed today as an instrument of deterrence, as a vehicle for an 'atomic peace'.
Ukraine recriminates about giving up atomic warheads inherited from the dissolution of the Soviet Union with the Budapest Memorandum in 1994.
