Someone was knocking on the door of Dean Langmuir’s apartment on East Forty-Eighth Street. It startled his younger brother Irving. Irving had arrived in New York City the day before, and Dean had put up the usual cot. Hotels had been crowded enough before VE Day. Now with troops on their way home or reassigning to the Pacific, getting a room in New York was downright impossible. Especially on short notice—and short notice was how Irving Langmuir did things.
Dean had already gone to his Wall Street job, so Irving opened the door. In the hallway stood two Army officers, and they were looking for him, not Dean. Once inside, they told him they had come to ask him to change his plans. They would prefer that he decline the invitation to Russia.
Less than a month had passed since Germany’s surrender. On May 8, 1945, Langmuir wrote “VE Day” in his GE notebook and underlined it. Then he started a list of meteorology papers he wanted to read. For the last three years, he had been doing war-related research, taking up whatever question the government needed answered. He had designed smoke generators, investigated airplane deicing, and studied precipitation static—the tendency of airplanes flying in snowstorms to pick up electrical charge that disrupts radio communications. Somehow all the projects he had been handed had converged in the fascinating field of weather study. That was what he was going to work on next.
The GE Research Lab encouraged its scientists’ fixations the way parents encourage a child’s passion for dinosaurs or ants. When Langmuir first started there, in 1909, Dr. Willis Whitney—nicknamed Doc—told him to look around and find something fun to work on. That’s what all new scientists were told: Doc Whitney was convinced that was the best way to ensure they produced quality work. He was known for making daily rounds in the lab and asking the scientists, “Are you having fun today?”
After a few weeks of playing around with whatever piqued his interest, Langmuir told Doc Whitney that he was enjoying himself, but he didn’t see how this was doing much for the company. Whitney told him not to worry about that; usefulness was Doc’s problem, not his. And sure enough, before long, Langmuir’s playful experiments had led to a complete redesign of the lightbulb—meaning longer life for customers and a whole new set of patents for GE. Soon after, his goofing around with lightbulbs led to the invention of atomic hydrogen welding. Langmuir had been following his own fancy ever since. And his fancy had led him to weather.
Now the Russians—and who knew more about snow?—were offering him a chance to meet their top scientists. The invitation had come just days earlier, addressed to “Prof. Irving Langmuir, Shenektady, N.Y.” Irving and another twenty-five prominent American scientists had been invited on a monthlong, all-expenses-paid visit to Russia to celebrate the 220th anniversary of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Never mind that there had been no Soviet Union 220 years earlier. Irving packed his bag and phoned his brother. The Russians, he told Dean, were picking him up in two days.
When Irving got to New York, Dean raised a few concerns. The whole thing seemed haphazard. The invite said very little about the program or schedule. Many of the scientists’ names were even misspelled. And did Irving know anything about Russian festivities? He would be expected to drink toast after toast of vodka. To refuse would insult Mother Russia. But to comply … well, one might find oneself in a compromised position. And what were the Soviets up to, less than a month after VE Day, inviting some of America’s most prominent scientists—many of whom had been doing war work—on a junket? Sure, the Russians were allies, but after the inaugural United Nations Conference in San Francisco, where their petulance had nearly scuttled passage of a UN charter, American suspicions about Soviet motivations were on the rise.
Irving had dismissed all of this. That was politics, and politics did not concern him. He thought the trip would be scientifically interesting, so he packed his bags. That’s how Irving was. It was fortunate he had even remembered to pack: a few years back, he showed up for a weeklong sailing trip in a blue serge suit and dress shoes, without so much as a windbreaker. Irving’s obliviousness to real-world concerns was legendary. He could walk right by a colleague without so much as nodding. When a woman fell down on the stairs in front of him, he famously stepped over her and continued on. Once, he stepped in a can of paint, pulled his foot out without pausing, and kept on walking, leaving a trail of safety-yellow footprints in his wake.
So Dean thought it reasonable to make sure that his brother knew what he was getting into. Irving had assured Dean that it was all cleared with the State Department, so Dean had shrugged and gone to work. And then the Army officers appeared.
Irving listened with his customary air of unruffled intensity, but beneath his patrician reserve he was livid. Born in 1881, Irving Langmuir had grown up in an urbane and academically inclined family, graduating from Columbia’s School of Mines and the University of Göttingen. At GE, he had gone from triumph to triumph. His initial lightbulb successes were just the start. He was one of the first scientists to conduct experiments on ionized gases with strange electrical and magnetic qualities, which he named “plasmas,” inventing the field of plasma physics. He improved sonar detection and advanced understanding of the atom’s structure, writing a famous paper describing his “concentric theory.” He intuited the relationship between winds and ocean circulation. In 1932, he became America’s first industrial scientist to win a Nobel Prize, for his work on monolayers—surface films only one molecule thick. The work launched the field of surface chemistry, with applications in mining, aviation, medicine, and water resource management, as well as in understanding the fundamental structure of matter.
As GE’s celebrity scientist, his salary rivaled those of top executives. He worked on whatever he wanted and traveled as he saw fit, frequently giving papers at academic conferences and before professional societies. His opinion was sought by radio journalists and newspapermen. People asked for his autograph. He was not accustomed to being bossed around, not even by the Department of Defense.
The officers explained that the Army would prefer that someone with Irving’s level of security clearance not visit the Soviet Union at this time. Irving asked if they were ordering him not to go. No, nothing like that, they said. They were requesting that he not go. They told him they had made the same request of the physicist Edward Condon and he wasn’t going. They neglected to mention that the State Department had helpfully revoked Condon’s passport. Later it would be clear why: Condon had worked on the Manhattan Project.
Irving didn’t make trouble. But as soon as they left, he phoned GE. He really wanted to go on this trip. A chance to see Soviet scientific labs and talk to Soviet scientists was a rare and thrilling opportunity. Besides, he didn’t know half as much as the Army seemed to think he knew about military secrets. None of the war work he had done was highly classified. The smoke screens he had developed were now being openly used in the Pacific to protect ships from kamikaze attacks. It seemed to Irving that the Army was letting a misplaced concern about secrecy get in the way of scientific learning.
Executives made a few calls. As one of the government’s largest war contractors, GE had sway with the military. The Army rescinded the request, and Langmuir was free to go to Russia.
On June 10, 1945, one of President Truman’s own C-54 transport planes left New York’s Air Transport Command airfield. On board were sixteen of America’s most prominent scientists: chemists, mathematicians, a hydrologist, and an anthropologist. Conspicuously absent were any physicists. Nevertheless, everyone aboard agreed: once things in the Pacific wrapped up, a new era of peaceful international cooperation would surely begin. And scientists, united by the apolitical pursuit of knowledge, were going to lead the way.
* * *
“Now, no emotions, please!” Kurt cried. His adored sister, Alice, ran and hugged him anyway, crying, and he too wiped away some tears. His father hugged him after Alice, and his uncle Alex—another favorite—happily pumped his hand. It’s unlikely that any of the soldiers eating ice cream, playing the jukebox, or dancing with WACs at Officer Club 1 paid much attention. This was a familiar scene at Camp Atterbury, with its rows of hastily constructed clapboard barracks lined up like hay bales in the Indiana fields. Now that the war in Europe was over, families—the lucky ones, anyway—were turning up daily to pick up their boys.
It was the Fourth of July, and Kurt junior—Kay to his family—was home. His family had only found out he was alive when his letter of May 29 reached Indiana the previous month.
“Dear People,” it began. He was alive—not only alive, but still very much Kay, simultaneously mordant and offhand as he reeled off the inventory of horrors he had survived in the last six months. The letter—ten succinct paragraphs—was a masterpiece of concision. It was his first attempt to write about his wartime experience, and it would remain his best for a quarter century. Like one of those seeds that lies dormant until the conditions for germination are perfect, it would wait until the Vietnam era to sprout into Slaughterhouse-Five.
“I’ve been a prisoner of war since December 19, 1944,” he wrote, since “seven fanatical panzer divisions” cut his division off from the others. After that, “the supermen marched us, without food, water or sleep,” for about sixty miles, then packed them into boxcars and shipped them across Germany. The prisoner train was strafed by the British on Christmas Day; a carload of officers was killed. South of Berlin, the men were unloaded and deloused. “Many men died from shock in the showers after ten days of starvation, thirst and exposure,” he wrote. “But I didn’t.”
He was shipped off to a work camp in Dresden, where conditions were dreadful. One boy starved, and two were shot dead for stealing food. “On about February 14th,” he wrote, “the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. Their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden—possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not me.”
The rest of the story was crammed into short paragraphs—his forced labor carrying corpses for incineration, the evacuation as the Russians approached, the Nazis’ abandonment of the prisoners, a bizarre wagon ride across Germany, his final repatriation to a Red Cross camp in Le Havre. He hoped to be home, he wrote, in a month.
“I’ve too damned much to say,” he concluded. “The rest will have to wait.”
Wait it would. The letter, with its repetitive short phrase, “But not me,” was a preview of Slaughterhouse-Five with its ironic catchphrase, “So it goes.” Its theme of grim good luck—the meaninglessness of both death and survival—would anchor Kurt’s lyrical antiwar masterpiece. The letter’s evocation of war was brilliant. Even Bernard could see that. He and Lois gave a copy to Lois’s hometown newspaper. The Adirondack Record—Elizabethtown Post printed Kurt’s letter on its front page, under the title “Vet Describes His Experiences as POW of Germany.” But Bernard didn’t tell Kurt about it. In 2008, after Kurt’s death, the letter would be included—incorrectly—in a collection of previously unpublished works.
Even before Kurt wrote to his family, though, he had written to Jane. He took a chummy tone, pointing out that they’d parted on pretty friendly terms. He was alluding to the fact that they were lovers and that he’d written to her several times to make sure she wasn’t pregnant. That was his typical mode—jokey understatement—when it came to writing about matters of sex.
Jane was by then working in Washington at the OSS—the predecessor to the CIA. She had graduated from Swarthmore Phi Beta Kappa in history, even though her thesis was somewhat controversial. She had argued that history teaches us nothing except that history is meaningless. The historians didn’t appreciate that much, but Kurt did. He loved the way her mind worked. Throughout boot camp and Army training, he had continued to write her love letters. As his time in the military wore on, he felt as if all his dreams were dying except one: his dream of a life with Jane.
Jane, for her part, was as busy as ever. She had other suitors, including a younger man still at Swarthmore, but Kurt was much on her mind. Then her letters of November 27, December 16, and December 27 were all returned to her, with the ominous stamp “Missing.” Like his family, she hadn’t known if he was dead or alive until she got his letter in late May.
He told her he was still alive, though he looked kind of starved. He was in possession of some money and a furlough and was hoping she hadn’t gone and gotten married.
She hadn’t.
So Kurt had stopped off in Washington to see Jane on his way to Indiana’s Camp Atterbury, and soon she would be back in Indianapolis too. He was planning to ask her once more to marry him, and she was expecting him to ask.
His family had to be shocked at his appearance. He was forty-five pounds lighter, and his skin had been ulcerated by vitamin deficiency. But he was still the same old Kay. He insisted on taking the wheel, and as he drove the forty miles from Camp Atterbury to Indianapolis, he talked nonstop. The family was transfixed as he unfurled a tale of suffering, near starvation, abuse, and dumb luck. He lamented the destruction of Dresden and railed against the cruelty of the SS. When he got to the part where he and three others were forced to dig a grave for Michael Palaia, a fellow soldier executed for stealing a can of pickled string beans, he burst into tears.
“The sons of bitches!” he cried, still driving.
They all listened intently. No one interrupted, as they would when he was little. No one could correct him or gainsay him, because he was the one who was there. Uncle Alex couldn’t get over how articulate the young man had become. Kurt’s account of the fall of Germany was terrifyingly observant. And his thoughts about the future were bleak.
“I know what’s going to happen in Europe,” he said. “Now the trouble really starts. The French hate the Americans; the Poles and Russians hate the Germans; the Poles hate the Russians.” Uncle Alex told Kurt he’d have to be patient with “civilians,” who would have so little idea of what he’d been through.
“Oh, hell,” Kurt replied. “I want to be a civilian myself. I’m sick and tired of being in the infantry … I’ve had enough of it. And I’m goddamned sick and tired of the whole damnfool bloody mess.”
He was not alone. Many of the citizen soldiers who came back from the war were sick of it. They weren’t professional soldiers. They were college boys and local kids, yanked out of normal lives and hurled into a maelstrom. Most who survived just wanted to put the whole thing behind them. Like so many of his fellow vets, Kurt had come home determined to throw himself vigorously into peacetime life. That meant finishing school, getting married, starting a family, and getting a job. The war played no part in any of that. It was time to take up where he had left off, as if the previous two years had never happened.
So Jane Marie Cox came to Indianapolis to see her mother, and when she went back to her job in Washington, she was wearing an engagement band made from Kurt’s mother’s ring. The original ring, an artifact of the family’s affluent pre-Depression life, had boasted two large diamonds. Bernard and Kurt each got one to give to their wives.
Kurt couldn’t wait to get on with married life. He was full of dreams and plans for their future, which would begin the minute he got his discharge. The only reason he stayed behind in Indianapolis instead of spending his precious leave in Washington, near his future wife, is that he was stuck at home waiting for Bernie.
Bernard had not been there to greet Kurt; he and Lois were in Elizabethtown, New York, awaiting the birth of their first child. They were still living in Cambridge while Bernie wrapped up his deicing work, but Bow wanted to have the baby at the Community House hospital near her parents. Three days after Kurt’s homecoming, Peter Vonnegut was born. Bernie sent photographs of the baby, and Kurt and Alice were amazed to see how much like Bernie he looked. It was hard to believe, Kurt told Jane in a letter, that there were now two such creatures on earth.
He wrote to her every day. After such a long separation, it was nearly unbearable to be apart once more. But Bernie kept delaying his trip. And he was hoping that after his trip to Indy, Kurt would come back to Cambridge with him, to visit and meet his son. Kurt agreed, planning to spend a few days with Bernie and Bow before heading to Washington and Jane. He wanted to see his brother, but he was eager to start his new life. He consoled himself with the thought that maybe the know-it-all Bernie would pass on some explicit marital tips. If so, he promised to relay them to Jane pronto.
While awaiting Bernie’s arrival in Indianapolis, Kurt went downtown to the offices of The Indianapolis News and asked to see issues from the second week of February. He wanted to find out how the bombing of Dresden had played in America. Later he would describe finding a column half an inch long, a tiny paragraph merely noting that Dresden had been bombed and two American planes had been lost. He had experienced a life-altering cataclysm, and Americans hadn’t even heard about it.
In fact, the paper’s reporting on Dresden was much more thorough than he claimed. Strategic bombing was the front-page story, under a banner headline: “Great US and RAF Air Raids Drive on Reich.” The paper reported that 2,250 American bombers had attacked industrial centers in Germany, including delivering “one of the biggest blows of the war” to Dresden, which was “already burning from a night assault by heavy R.A.F. bombers.” The next day the paper reported that Dresden lay in ruins.
It’s not that Kurt lied or even misremembered. The newspaper’s story was simply not enough. Surrounded by movie listings, sports scores, bond prices, and ads for hats, given equal billing with Indy getting a new airport and the manpower shortage in trash collection, how could it suffice? All that heavenly life had been going on back home while he was huddled in hell. And the paper, like all American wartime newspapers, took the standard patriotic tone. The morality of firebombing civilians was not brought up. Kurt had watched Atlantis disappear beneath the waves, and the newspaper had merely reported a fruitful rain. Schoolgirls had boiled to death in water tanks; zoo animals had charred to blackened husks. Kurt saw the giraffe and wished he hadn’t. To cause that kind of suffering without feeling shame could only be considered a sin.
* * *
Bernie arrived in Indianapolis on August 7, 1945. He had repeatedly delayed the trip because Bow was having terrible headaches after Peter’s birth and he didn’t think he should leave her alone with the baby. Finally, on Monday, August 6, he left, heading to Indianapolis by rail. The trip took the better part of two days. On Tuesday afternoon, the train stopped in Dayton. He called the family to tell them he’d be in Indy at 4:40.
Somewhere in there, he must have seen the newspapers. A single bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, and banner headlines were declaring that the world had changed. “Atomic Bomb May Spell Annihilation for Japs,” proclaimed that morning’s Indianapolis Star. A drawing just underneath the headline showed a uranium atom being exploded into two new atoms.
The article called atomic energy “the most terrible destructive force ever harnessed by man.” And it was now in U.S. hands. The president was insisting on immediate surrender, or the Japanese could expect “a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which never has been seen on this earth.”
Bernard knew they weren’t posturing. He understood atomic fission; any scientist working at his level did. He had used radioactive tracers in his work with gas masks at MIT. So he knew why the Star, like papers across the nation, had very little to report about what had actually happened to Hiroshima. No trains were going in or out, and the city was under an impenetrable cloud of dust and smoke. The Japanese were reporting that Hiroshima lay in ruins, but many Americans thought they must be exaggerating. Scientists like Bernie knew better. A city had been wiped from the map, and with that the atomic era had begun, born not in the war rooms of Hitler or Hirohito but in America’s halls of science. Born in places like the one where Bernie was about to start work. This wasn’t Victorian science: this was something completely new and appalling. The usually unflappable Bernie was sick at heart.
Hiroshima cast a pall over the brothers’ reunion. Bernie took in Kurt’s emaciated appearance, and Kurt took in Bernard’s horror at the day’s news. Kurt hadn’t realized, until he saw his brother’s face, how dramatically the world had changed. Just that morning, he had written a cheerful letter to Jane with a 7 inscribed in pencil behind the typed words. Seven for the date, for the seven kids they planned to have. When he saw Bernie, his mood changed.
Like everyone else in the nation, Bernie followed the newspapers’ race to piece together the story in the days that followed. The United States, in secret from its citizens and Congress, had entered “the battle of the laboratories.” It was a two-and-a-half-year effort, employing more than 125,000 people, costing $2 billion, and requiring the construction of three top secret cities—Oak Ridge, Hanford, Los Alamos—but in the end America had won the war of the labs. The White House called it “the greatest achievement of organized science in history.”
Two days later, on Thursday, organized science annihilated Nagasaki.
The war was over: so the president and the military were saying. Families surged with new hope of seeing their sons. Many Americans, worn down by months of harrowing reports from the front lines of Iwo Jima or the liberation of the Japanese prisoner of war camps, felt a grim satisfaction: The Japs had gotten what they deserved. And it had been American know-how that gave it to them. The Indianapolis Star ran a breathless story under the headline “Scientists’ Dream Comes True—the Atom Is Split!”
It was a dream, but it was a nightmare too. In the days following the two atomic attacks, the nation experienced a kind of cognitive dissonance. The newspapers and radio could talk of nothing but nuclear fission, but the conversation ricocheted between hope and dread. On the one hand, there were stories about atomic airplanes and atomic cars, about atomic medicine that would cure cancer and atomic energy that would power the nation for pennies. The National Press Club in Washington introduced an “atomic cocktail,” and Hollywood publicists christened the voluptuous new starlet Linda Christian the “anatomic bomb.” On the other hand, there was fear. What would happen when some other nation got its hands on the terrible new weapon? That was inevitable, Bernie told Kurt. There was no keeping this secret. War had grown more frightening than ever: it had commandeered the power to destroy the earth. When the Japanese agreed to surrender, revered radio personality Edward R. Murrow summed up the national mood. “Seldom, if ever,” he intoned, “has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.”
Bernie’s soon-to-be employer was mentioned in many stories about the bomb; GE’s contributions had been critical. And lest anyone think that the scientists could now turn to peacetime pursuits, GE was running ads in papers nationwide pointing out that “military and naval power drove this enemy to defeat down a road built by research.” Democracy owed its survival to scientific know-how. That work must not cease with the end of war. “Scientific progress and productive efficiency,” declared the ads, “are the most wonderful weapons of all time because they do not have to be laid aside when the fighting ends. They must not be laid aside.”
Bernie returned to Cambridge earlier than he had planned and without his brother. With the end of the war weeks if not days away, he had to get busy wrapping up his government contract. D. E. Chambers, assistant director of the GE Research Lab, had already written to him asking when he intended to report to his new job. Scientific progress, as the ads declared, must remain on the march.
* * *
Kurt and Jane took the small, leaky rowboat out onto Lake Maxinkuckee. It was called the Beralikur—for Bernard, Alice, and Kurt—and it had been the boat the kids used every summer, when the family spent weeks at their cabin on the lake and the three kids spent their days running around with a gaggle of cousins and friends. Those were some of the happiest days of Kurt’s life.
The honeymoon trip had a valedictory feel: this boat ride would be the last in the Beralikur. The cottage, a final vestige of the family’s pre-Depression prosperity, had been sold; Kurt and Jane would be the last Vonneguts to stay there.
The papers were still full of atomic horror as the newlyweds rowed out into the lake. They were adrift in a world gone mad, but at least they had each other.
“I swam all the way across this lake when I was eleven years old,” Kurt told his new wife.
“You told me,” she said.
“I don’t think you believe I could really do a thing like that,” he insisted. “But you ask my brother and sister if it isn’t true.” Bernard and Alice had been there, egging him on. He was tall and gangly, a kid once given a Charles Atlas bodybuilding set by a sadistic high school coach. But in the water, he felt beautiful. As he swam across the lake, he’d felt buoyed up not just by water but by his siblings. For once he’d earned their admiration. He wanted Jane’s admiration too, but she wasn’t about to hand it over for something as banal as swimming across a lake a decade earlier. She had higher hopes for him, the kinds of hopes he barely dared hold for himself.
Sometimes he could hardly believe they were married. But it had been real, all of it, the silver vases full of white gladioli on the Cox backyard terrace, the shimmery chords of a harp, modest words spoken by a minister from First Friends Church. The wedding had been moved from September 14 to September 1 after Kurt received orders to report to the Miami Beach Redistribution Center. There was not enough time for Bernard to get there, so Kurt’s high school friend Ben Hitz took his place as best man.
In the newspaper announcements of their wedding, Jane’s academic accomplishments—Tudor Hall, Swarthmore, Phi Beta Kappa—outshone Kurt’s. He had only “attended Cornell.” But there was also a write-up on the Indianapolis News society page where the columnist Filomena Gould had gushed over the young private’s “fresh and cogent humor.” He even showed her some of his writing about the war, which she declared “surpasses any firsthand account of an American soldier’s existence in enemy hands.”
Jane liked his writing too. She wanted him to keep doing it, and he was; in his free time, he worked on short stories and humorous essays and fired them off to The New Yorker or The Saturday Evening Post, reporting on his submissions—and rejections—to Jane. He assured her, however, that he had no illusions about trying to write full-time, as a career. He’d get a good job to provide for their seven kids.
A loon popped out of the lake and gave its long, mournful cry, and the newlyweds were silent.
It was all an ocean. That was one of Jane’s favorite sayings, from a book Kurt hadn’t read: The Brothers Karamazov. The priest Father Zossima says it to the youngest Karamazov brother, Alyosha. The elderly monk is explaining why someone would ask forgiveness of the birds. “It’s all an ocean,” he says, meaning the birds, the sky, the clouds, even himself; it’s all part of one big surging life force, and the name of that force is God.
“It’s all an ocean!” Jane would cry when she was struck by how everything was interconnected. It made her happy to believe, fervently, in things that lent mysterious magic to the world. She thought Dostoyevsky’s treatise on the human need for that magic was the most brilliant book ever written. She suggested Kurt start reading it on their honeymoon.
The lake, the loon, the forgiveness of birds, the rain-like patter of incendiary bombs, the exploding sun over Hiroshima: It was all an ocean, but how did it fit together? Kurt knew there were currents connecting the ruin rained down on Japan with the firestorm that haunted his dreams. The link between Hiroshima and Dresden was indiscriminate bombing, what the Allies called total war. But it was deeper than that; it was something about man’s inhumanity to man, about technocrats who valued demonstrations of know-how so much they lost sight of the fact that they were killing people: schoolgirls and geezers and mothers pushing babies in prams.
Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki: the world was spinning off into a series of atrocities, each one worse than the last. It was enough to make a man lose his faith. Kurt’s buddy Bernard V. O’Hare had told him on the ship home that the war had killed his faith in God. Kurt didn’t believe in God, but he still thought that was too much to lose. But now he too was losing his own faith, faith in knowledge and technology. As a child, Kurt had drawn pictures of futuristic cars and planes and houses. As a young man, he had acquiesced in his brother’s and father’s desire that he dedicate his life to science. Now it seemed that the urge to discover, to invent, was not noble at all, but evidence of a sickness in the human soul. “Scientists’ Dream Comes True.” What kind of dream was destruction and death in industrial quantities? This could only be the dream of a species that hated the earth and hated itself too.
Jane said they could build a life of poetry and art and beauty. They could go back to school, leaving science to others, and throw themselves into the study of the human soul. They could have friends and raise kids and build a home filled with music and books, rich conversation, and a well-stocked bar. They could make paintings and write stories and make those things their life, a life that, in its own small way, would help change the world. She showed him another of her treasures, a slip of paper given to her by a professor who copied a quotation for each student at semester’s end and tucked it into a walnut shell. Jane’s quotation was “Some good sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.”
Right there on their honeymoon, Kurt painted his first painting. For his subject, he chose a chair—something solid, and homey, and redolent of possibility. And he started reading The Brothers Karamazov.
“My brother asked the birds to forgive him,” Father Zossima told Alyosha. “That sounds senseless, but it was right for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth.”
* * *
Irving Langmuir took his seat in a room full of people who had just changed the world. It was September 19, 1945, and every famous physicist in the nation—along with eminences from other sciences and humanities as well—seemed to be here at the University of Chicago. Langmuir had seen some of them at a dinner the previous month for the American-Soviet Science Society. Now they had all been summoned to Chicago by the university’s dynamic young chancellor, Robert Hutchins, for a secret conference on the scientific and social ramifications of the atomic bomb.
Chicago had played a critical role in the Manhattan Project: Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard had achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction there in 1942. Now many of the nation’s most prominent physicists were headed for Chicago to join its new Institute for Nuclear Studies. But it was crucial that the bomb be contemplated not just as a technical problem but as a social one. The atomic era had begun, and no one knew what came next.
The general mood was grim. A terrible thought was troubling many scientific minds: not every scientific advance was necessarily good for humanity. Leo Szilard set the conference’s tone with a speech full of foreboding. The bombs that had fallen in Japan, he said, had a one-mile radius of destruction. Atomic bombs in ten years would have a destruction radius ten times greater. The Soviets would inevitably get the bomb, probably in two and a half years, and in six years they would have enough of them to destroy every major city in America. The United States by that time would have built enough atomic bombs to destroy every major city on the planet. The only hope was international control of all atomic energy, which required something drastic: world government. This would probably only come about through World War III: he estimated the chance of instituting world government without war at only 10 percent.
Some in the audience objected to such a dire forecast, arguing that world peace could be possible without world government. Others argued that Szilard was probably wrong about the Soviets getting the bomb so soon. Irving Langmuir spoke up then. He had been to Russia just a few months earlier, he said, and he agreed with Szilard. The Soviets would catch up in less than five years, probably more like two or three. Their science would surpass ours in ten. The critical question was how much information the United States should share with them. In his opinion, the United States should share its science freely.
Many scientists agreed. Science abhors secrecy. It was said that the Army was going to seek legislation giving it total control of all atomic bomb research so it could continue to keep the details classified. But to the scientists, the idea of keeping the atomic secret was absurd. Other nations would get atomic capability; the only question was when.
What the scientists hoped for was international control, including an inspection system that would keep nations from building more bombs. Langmuir pointed out that it wasn’t such a bad thing that the Russians would have the bomb soon: once other nations had nuclear weapons, it would be less likely that the United States would use them. The military strategist Bernard Brodie was there, and he agreed with Langmuir. The following year, he would publish “War in the Atomic Age” in a collection called The Absolute Weapon. The essay would be a founding text of what came to be known as the theory of nuclear deterrence.
But many in the room recoiled from the idea of peace through a balance of power based on fear. To most of those present, seeing atomic war as a kind of game was morally repugnant. Worse still would be a world in which nations raced to out-arm one another, building bigger and more fearsome weapons. Already the Manhattan Project physicist Edward Teller was advocating building a “Super bomb,” a hydrogen atomic bomb that would make the first A-bombs look puny. But not many in Chicago agreed with him. Most of the scientists gathered there were convinced that an atomic arms race would be nothing less than the end of the world.
In fact, many seemed to feel guilty about their role in having created the first superweapon. This seemed illogical to Irving. The atomic bomb had ended the war and unquestionably saved many lives, Japanese as well as American. Yet many of the Chicago scientists seemed to feel it shouldn’t have been dropped or even that they shouldn’t have made it. “The physicists have known sin,” the head of Los Alamos, J. Robert Oppenheimer, would later declare, “and this is a knowledge they cannot lose.”
Many scientists had read H. G. Wells’s 1914 novel The World Set Free, a story that takes place in a future where scientists have harnessed atomic energy. Rather than ushering in a new era of ease and enlightenment, atomic power causes massive social upheaval and world war. The world is finally “set free” when humans realize that a technological advance as momentous as atomic power calls for an end to nationalism and a new era of world government in which science becomes “the new king of the world.”
Szilard was so taken by the book that he ordered a copy of it for the Chicago scientists. Along with most of the conference participants, he agreed with Wells’s main thesis: once scientific knowledge reaches a certain level, separate sovereign states are no longer possible. In the atomic era, nations would go the way of coal: they would be replaced by something better.
At the conference, the scientists hammered out a consensus based on three simple points: there was no secret that could be kept, there was no defense against the bomb, and there must be international control of atomic energy. They decided to form a group, the Federation of Atomic Scientists (later changed to the Federation of American Scientists), dedicated to educating the public—and the government—about this new technology. It was, the anthropologist Robert Redfield declared, their moral duty. With that, what was known as the Scientists’ Movement was born. It made its public debut with a two-page statement published in Life magazine. The statement hewed to the three main points: no secret, no defense, international control.
As one of America’s most famous scientists, Irving Langmuir was in a position to take their message to the people. He stuck to the script, at least at first. In October, he testified before a Senate subcommittee, predicting that Russian science would trump America’s in ten to twenty years. In November, he addressed a joint meeting of the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Sciences, insisting that an atomic war could make the earth uninhabitable and that “world control of all atomic energy seems the only alternative.” But in late November, back before the Senate to argue for an international agreement, he urged that “the Governments of the United States, Britain and Canada make immediate contacts with the Russian government to secure, if possible, their tentative agreement instead of relying solely on the more cumbersome machinery of the United Nations.”
At heart, Irving was a pragmatist. Sure, he’d had his youthful flirtation with socialism, but like so many men of his age and status he had settled into a low-key laissez-faire conservatism. Theoretically, he had no problem with the concept of world government. But instituting it was likely to be difficult. Science would progress most smoothly if the Western powers simply stuck together and did their best to pacify the Russians.
Also unlike many of his colleagues, Irving knew and accepted that science would never return to its prewar openness. He was not an academic but an industrial researcher at one of the nation’s biggest defense contractors. Government security clearance had always been an informal requirement at the GE Research Lab. Soon it would become mandatory for employment. This didn’t worry Irving. He didn’t see how it could possibly become a problem.
* * *
Kurt stood in the shower, thinking of Jane. His wife, Woofie. That was her old nickname. “Woofie on the dance floor or Woofie in a seminar or Woofie in a bull session or Jane Marie out for tea,” declared the 1944 Swarthmore Halcyon, “is the same piquant treat.” Jane was putting a stop to that now, though. Sometimes he called her Wifey. He was trying out other nicknames too: Lovey, Sweety, Dear Heart, Darling, Lambykins. They were jokey, but his love was real.
Water was drenching him in a shower stall in Kansas, but he was seeing Jane standing in the Florida ocean. Her dress was hiked up around her hips—oh, how he loved those hips—and her ankles were being licked by the waves. She had come down to Miami Beach while he was there awaiting his post-combat reassignment to Fort Riley. They had stayed at the Roney Plaza Hotel: palm trees, cabanas, pool, ocean beach, and their own bed; it was bliss.
What other shores, she had wondered there in the surf, had the water molecules that were touching her touched before? She was always saying things like that, brilliant things that emerged from the part of her he thought of as her fourth dimension, the part full of wisdom and inspiration and poetry. There was Jane, the smart, charming woman the world knew, and there was Jane Marie, his Jane Marie, lyrical and spiritual and capable of depths that other people could only imagine.
At Fort Riley, he had been assigned the job of clerk-typist. In between typing up reports of correspondence received, he was writing to anyone he could think of to speed up his discharge. At least he had finished reading The Brothers Karamazov. Here, in the miserable flat Kansas landscape, where he cycled between apathy, depression, and joyful memories of Jane, the book was like a beacon of sanity. Dostoevsky was saying something he had always suspected: that if there wasn’t a God, humans would have to invent him. They needed that order, that illusion that things made sense. But the real salvation, the true holiness of the world, came only from the world itself.
Next up, he was going to read War and Peace. Also a life of Beethoven and a textbook on calculus. He had to be worthy of Jane—and of the University of Chicago.
The day the acceptance letter arrived was the happiest in his life. He was going to finish his undergraduate degree on the GI Bill, and this time it wouldn’t be in science. He would study anthropology—which at Chicago was a program that led to a master’s degree, not a bachelor’s. And Jane had been given a fellowship for grad school in Slavic languages and literature. They would enroll—if his damn discharge papers would finally come through—in the winter semester. They would finally start living the beautiful, intellectual life they had always wanted.
Chicago had been an easy choice. Kurt had thought about going to its law school even before going to war. His cousin Walter, a close friend, was studying philosophy there now, also on the GI Bill. Walter came from the “artsy” side of the Vonnegut family: his parents were actors. And he and Kurt had another thing in common: Walter had been a navigator on B-17s during the war, and after being shot down, he’d been a German POW for two years.
Kurt couldn’t wait to be done with the Army. Fort Riley was dreary, and he had little to do. The only good part was he had enough free time to write short stories. One of the very first he attempted was “Atrocity Story,” a thinly disguised account of his fellow POW Michael Palaia’s execution. Kurt changed his name to Steve Malotti and set the story in the Red Cross camp at Le Havre, where the narrator and a couple of others try unsuccessfully to get the bureaucrats in the War Crimes Commission tent interested in Malotti’s case. The story ended—as the real event had—in a frustrating lack of closure. But Palaia’s story haunted Kurt, and it would until he got it right.
Paper was scarce, so he typed his stories on the backs of the meteorological briefs that rolled off the office Teletype: “Scattered thundershowers occurred early this morning in Minnesota, northern Wisconsin and western Upper Michigan, and are occurring again this afternoon in Northern Minnesota.” On the flip side of the weather report, he typed another attempt at his war material: “Brighten Up!” This time, he aimed for a lighter tone than in “Atrocity Story,” focusing on the black marketeering of a “dissipated little weasel” named Louis Gigliano, who manages to use his time as a POW to rack up massive profits. It was an improvement, story-wise, funnier and not so pedantic. Friends of his at the base who read it said he could write.
When he finished his stories, he sent them to Jane. It was her critical eye he really cared about. She had been an editor on Swarthmore’s literary magazine, The Dodo, and could write herself. He trusted her. She typed up his stories, editing them in the process. She picked out a selection to send to the “writer’s consultant” Scammon Lockwood to get some advice. Kurt waited anxiously, fearful of what she might think of him if Lockwood said he was a hack. Fortunately, Lockwood thought he had promise and for another twenty dollars, would help edit his work. They declined, because they didn’t have the cash. But Lockwood’s praise convinced Jane more than ever that Kurt could write for a living one day. He protested: How could he support seven kids on a writer’s income? He thought he should get a job in a newsroom or a school. He knew from his misery at Fort Riley that an office job wasn’t for him. But something steady and salaried, that’s what he wanted. Jane was wonderful, but she was impractical. He told her she didn’t understand finances. She said that she just knew it would all work out.
Sometimes it scared him, Jane’s conviction that he would become a great writer. She told him he was a modern-day Chekhov, that if he’d lived in the Elizabethan age, he’d have been Shakespeare. She believed his works would help create the literature of the postwar era. He thought that was pushing it. It was easy to believe he was a genius when he and Jane were daydreaming, but now, as he toiled away as a clerk-typist in Kansas, it seemed like mere fantasy. They were just normal people, he told her; they should not aim for greatness. Bernie was the great one in the family, the one who was going to make a contribution.
But one day in November, reading the foreign affairs section of Newsweek, he had a strange sensation. He knew about these things. In fact, he knew more than the writer did. He knew what Europe looked like, how it tasted. He knew what artillery sounded like coming in, what it felt like to be crammed into a boxcar with sixty smelly men, what it sounded like to be bombed, what it felt like to begin to starve. He knew how to make iron ration soup, how a man who had given up hope stared into space with blank despair. He knew all this because he was there. His experience had taught him things that were important. Writing about them wouldn’t be just for him. People should hear about what he knew if they were going to make better decisions in the future. He told Jane in a letter that he would take his writing seriously. She had given him the courage at least to do that.
When his discharge finally came, he was ready. He was going to go back to school and to write. From this point on, he was going to live his own life.