I found the gateway to the end of the world after a long bus ride across Central Asia, that captivating region of dereliction, enormous skies, beauty, and despotism, containing as it does the blue, beautiful wonders of Samarkand and the great stretch of desiccated mud which within living memory was the Aral Sea, so deep and wide that steamers crossed it. Then the rivers that fed it were plundered to plant cotton, and the sea died. The Soviet Union had just died too, and for a few short months you could visit almost any part of its enormous corpse.

I went to view the testing grounds where Stalin and Khrushchev had made and exploded their H-bombs. We had flown east all day, away from European Moscow and towards the Asian night, and I landed in an exciting windy dusk at some obscure military airfield. Then I was hurried into that crude Communist bus, and bounced and shuddered along the desert road through Kazakhstan. As so often was the case, I experienced the Soviet combination of brilliant scientific triumph and poverty-stricken material crudity. Shortly before (in another part of Central Asia), I had come within touching distance of a Soviet space rocket and found that the marks of brushstrokes were still visible on its paintwork. This was a nation that was always at war. It would do everything in its power to hurt an enemy and defend itself, and nothing for your comfort. Your job might be to reach for the stars, but lunch would still be a disgusting bowl of stewed gray sheep’s lungs, served in a dirty cafeteria.

There was nothing shown on the map here. But maps, even in free democracies, lie more often than we think, and there was in fact a sizable town with a secret name, glowing on the horizon in the middle of many miles of nothing. Its inhabitants called it Kurchatov. It is named after the majestically bearded Soviet nuclear weapons scientist Igor Kurchatov, who is buried in the northern wall of the Kremlin after dying young in 1960 from his own perilous experiments. Officially the town’s existence was so secret that its name could not be mentioned outside its own limits, or perhaps in some very private offices in Moscow. Its official title was only a misleading zip code, Semipalatinsk-21, belonging to a city eighty miles away (now itself renamed).

I do not know what Kurchatov is like today, but in 1992 it was a pleasant, tree-shaded small town, originally designed by Stalin’s horrible secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria. He had his own villa there. Outside its bookshop was a large Geiger counter, for reasons I’ll come to. Strung along its main streets were banners pithily explaining the folly of unilateral nuclear disarmament—a policy the U.S.S.R. had long urged on the United States and Britain. (Do I recall a cartoon hedgehog wisely refusing to give up his prickles in return for promises of safe conduct from an obviously untrustworthy fox?) A fine club, to which I was welcomed, served wistful Georgian Mukuzani red wine (many people mixed up with atoms think red wine may protect them from the dangers of radiation). The climbing frames in the children’s playground were built to resemble I.C.B.M.s.

But it was what lay nearby which fascinated me most. The following morning was bright and still, without a whisper of a breeze, or I would not have been allowed to travel to the actual test site. For it is said to be death to breathe in the dust, even now, decades after the open-air tests of the 1950s and 1960s. It was only when I got home to Moscow that I grasped the risks I had run, which no Western government would ever have allowed me to take. I went pale for a bit, then resolved to forget about it.

Two things especially stick in the mind: first, the scientist who showed me around very gently shifting the dust with his toe to reveal that the ground was covered with tiny shards of black glass, fused from the desert sand by the heat of nuclear explosions. (I am told that in the Marshall Islands, where the U.S. tests took place, the glass was green.) And second, the huge monoliths of solid concrete, with deep foundations in the tawny steppe, yet knocked askew by a blast of frightening force, the air itself turned into a sort of giant fist.

There was one other thing which I cannot really compute, as it seems to me impossible, though I am sure I saw it. In a shallow dent in the ground, perhaps ten or twelve feet deep at the most, which I had thought would be much deeper, I could see, amid the yellow grass, the fused metal remnants of the legs of the steel tower on which a bomb had been exploded. Surely, in the nuclear furnace, hotter than the end of the world, these traces would have evaporated. Yet it seems they did not.

Deep beneath my feet lay, perhaps, the perfect spherical bubbles of nothingness, their walls of fused, polished glass ready at any time to gleam if a light ever penetrates there, that had been created by more recent underground testing. Or possibly they have collapsed in on themselves by now. All this, in any case, explained the public Geiger counter outside the bookshop. For on test days, of which there were once many, the little town, a few miles away, would prepare for some very special problems. Every window would be opened in every building to ensure that the blast did not smash the glass. Preparations would be made for evacuation if the readings got too high. Otherwise, the families stayed put. This is typically Soviet and typically Russian, reckless and madly brave in the face of danger. Any Western country would simply have put the town a lot further away from the explosions. It is worth bearing this sort of thing in mind when assessing Russian capabilities and their readiness to risk the universe. I’d seen inside a nuclear missile submarine and looked through the huge fence at Britain’s warhead store. I’d watched a Soviet space rocket—much like an I.C.B.M.—launch. But this sinister settlement, quietly poisonous in the sun, frightened me more than any other encounter with the empire of the atom.

It really was a place of death, from which the end of the world might have emerged and might still emerge. I think it has a better claim than anywhere else to be called the Soviet Los Alamos. I was reminded, as I strolled around it, of my teenage days as a nuclear disarmer, years I both regret, because I was fooled by low-grade propaganda, and am proud of, because it was important for those without salaries and obligations to object to a wicked policy—even if only to make everyone think.

While I was still young and irresponsible, the issue seemed quite simple to me. We had made a mistake. What had not yet dawned on me was that the mistake could not be unmade, that “Ban the Bomb” was an idiotic slogan, and that the interesting and rewarding course was to work out what to do next. We were overwhelmed by emotion. Does anyone else recall a 1960s poster, quite crude, in which a sketchily drawn but unmistakable Albert Einstein was shown saying, “If I had known, I would have been a locksmith”? I was impressionable when I saw it, and it made an impression upon me. The great physicist probably didn’t say it, though it would have been a reasonable thing for him to say. I think most of us, learning what had actually happened to so much soft human flesh at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would not wish to have been in any way responsible. Many of us might have feared something of the kind, well before the first bombs were actually dropped.

I learned only recently the story of another nuclear scientist, the Italian Fascist and Roman Catholic Ettore Majorana, who was rated as a genius by his scientific fellows and who disappeared from the world in 1938, aged thirty-one, never to be seen again. Frank Close, the author of a recent book on the nuclear age, Destroyer of Worlds, thinks it possible that he had foreseen the appalling outcome of the work he was doing. It is an engaging story. One novelist, at least, explored a similar dilemma. Did he know about Majorana? In Simon Raven’s light, bitter Cold War novel of 1966, The Sabre Squadron, set in 1952 in the sweetly picturesque university city of Goettingen, a British Jewish mathematician, Daniel Mond, tries to kill himself after unearthing the forgotten calculations of a dead German thinker. He realizes, in a moment of nausea and shock, that these long strings of sinister notation lead straight to the end of the world. Then he discovers that his own country’s intelligence services want him to tell them what he knows. Rather than do so, he plans to slit his own throat. Another writer of the period, the deeply unfashionable Charles Snow, knew science and scientists (for he was one) and explored their feelings in a clever 1954 novel, The New Men. It is about the first British efforts to achieve fission, eventually swallowed up in the American Manhattan Project.

Many of these researchers were men of the left who only agreed to work on an atomic bomb because they were afraid that Hitler would get one first. Once Hitler was out of the way, many of them felt cheated and sour. Snow, a man of the left himself, obviously sympathizes strongly with their doubts. They were not at all convinced by the arguments for using their work to kill large numbers of Japanese civilians in horrible circumstances. Others, who were actual Communists, chose instead to help Stalin obtain the awful weapon. Did they, by acts of treachery, accidentally create the oddly benevolent balance of terror which still just about prevents actual nuclear war? It is an embarrassing, unsettling thought.

It is quite certain that the Hitler threat was always false, though nobody knew it until too late. In the handsome and wonderfully named East Anglian town of Godmanchester, in a grand but shabby old house called Farm Hall, captured German nuclear scientists, led by the mighty Werner Heisenberg, were hospitably housed and fed—and bugged—by British secret agents after Hitler’s defeat in 1945. Not realizing that the apparently gentlemanly British would stoop to recording their private conversations, they quickly revealed to their secret listeners that they had gotten nowhere near making an atomic bomb. When news of the Hiroshima attack was brought to them, they were shocked that anyone else had gotten so far. The event long ago ceased to be secret, and a successful play about it, Farm Hall by Katherine Moar, was recently performed in Britain and the United States. But few know about it, or ever will. This is probably because it upsets the comfortable view that the Anglo-American bomb had a high, urgent anti-Nazi purpose and was then righteously used to crush Japanese barbarism and bring peace in the Far East. Efforts to counter the threat of a Nazi bomb also formed the main plot of a successful 1965 British movie, The Heroes of Telemark, based on a real-life sabotage of heavy water plants in Norway which might have helped Germany create a nuclear weapon. I suspect this story has lodged far deeper in British public opinion than the revelations of Farm Hall.

The amusing postscript to the struggles over a British bomb is that, having been begun by leftists to fight Hitler, it was eventually finished and built, by a socialist government, as a last doomed attempt by a declining Britain to rival and outface the United States. Far from being an anti-Soviet action, it was an anti-American gesture. The decision to test and make it came in October 1946, after a seething quarrel between Ernest Bevin and Truman’s Secretary of State James Byrnes. Byrnes, a gentleman lawyer from Dixieland, unwisely tried to pull rank on the West Country–born former lorry driver and chief of the Transport and General Workers’ Union. Bevin vowed that no British foreign secretary should ever have to put up with being pushed around by his American equivalent again. He famously growled to the Cabinet, “We’ve got to have this thing over here whatever it costs. . . . We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack flying on top of it.” There are so many paradoxes in the story that even G. K. Chesterton could not have come up with it.

The Bomb was popular, wherever it was built. Much of Britain had already reconciled itself in the war years to the idea that the mass bombing of civilians was justified by the high moral purpose of a war against evil dictators. This was done by a mixture of contradictory self-deceptions. First there was a public pretense that it wasn’t happening, and that Britain’s bombing was aimed carefully at military and economic targets. I suspect a very large number of people really believed this, and still do. It lies at the bottom of the moral relativism which has become so general in modern England. This was reinforced by the dubious moral reasoning among those in the know who actually understood what the Royal Air Force was doing almost every night. To this day, very few people know the facts. They do not know how homicidal or how extensive the strategy was. They have all heard of the Anglo-American bombing of Dresden in 1945, perhaps because it features in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five. They are even prepared to consider that this went too far, though there is a mad logic which says (correctly) that it was evil of the Germans to bomb Britons in their homes, and (crazily) that they were therefore right to do the same to them, and more.

Then there is the impossible balance between two wholly different wrongs: the mass killing of civilians by bombing and the industrial extermination of the Jews.

Victor Klemperer’s diaries, in which we learn how the bombing of Dresden unquestionably saves Klemperer, a surviving German Jew, from the last of the Nazi extermination roundups, also provide a rather Old Testament dilemma about this grisly raid. Here was one just man in a city of terrible sin. From its devastation came his survival. But there is no comparable work of literature or autobiography about the equally horrible bombing of Hamburg, the well-named Operation Gomorrah of July 1943, in which the R.A.F. created its first firestorm and so gave a strong hint of what a nuclear explosion would involve. The dozens of other German cities destroyed by explosives and fire in the same long, relentless campaign are likewise unknown to most in the country which bombed them, as are most of the American “conventional” bombings of Japanese cities—though quite a few have heard of the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945, which destroyed perhaps one hundred thousand human lives and again unleashed a firestorm. One of the characteristics of these phenomena is that they create a suction so strong that it can drag children out of the arms of their parents.

As in the building of the atom bomb, the motive for conventional area bombing was hard and warlike, informed by an idealistic desire for earthly justice against a wicked enemy. Winston Churchill boasted to Stalin at their first meeting in August 1942 that he hoped to “shatter” almost every German city. Discussion of this ruthlessness helped to soothe Stalin, who greatly liked ruthlessness himself and was angry that an Anglo-American invasion of France had been postponed. Once he realized what Churchill intended to do, he urged that homes as well as factories should be destroyed. He had no need to do so. That was already the objective. In November 1941, Sir Richard Peirse, then commander in chief of Britain’s bomber forces, told a private dining club that his aircrews for more than a year had been attacking the German people themselves, intentionally.

“For a long time the Government, for excellent reasons, has preferred the world to think that we still held some scruples and attacked only what the humanitarians are pleased to call Military Targets,” he explained. “I can assure you, gentlemen, that we tolerate no scruples.”

Nor did they, and experts had for some time advised that the best targets were the houses of the poor, which were more concentrated than better-off suburbs, and so caught fire more effectively. In fact, post-war surveys found that this policy of deliberate mass killing of civilians had been remarkably ineffective in weakening the German war effort. Not that that has ever changed the mind of anyone who still defends it. Even eighty years afterwards, it is a very awkward subject. Those like me who criticize the policy will always face quite angry opposition from the remaining survivors of the era. The belief that these horrible actions were just is now an item of national faith, in a way that would have shocked Victorians and Edwardians.

Our pre-1914 ancestors were realistic about violence in its proper place. But they would have been appalled by the deliberate killing of civilians as a weapon of war. Their revulsion continued to exercise the minds of diplomats and thinkers right up until 1939. If peace had lasted a little longer, bombing cities from the air might actually have been banned under international law. On September 30, 1938, partly because of dismay at the German bombing of Guernica and other targets during the Spanish Civil War, and at Japanese bombing in Manchuria, the League of Nations passed a resolution urging the adoption of these principles: “The intentional bombing of civilian populations is illegal,” “Objectives aimed at from the air must be legitimate military objectives and must be identifiable,” and “Any attack on legitimate military objectives must be carried out in such a way that civilian populations in the neighbourhood are not bombed through negligence.” If these rules had become part of the laws of war, much of the coming conflict would have been illegal for both sides. But they did not.

Almost a year later, on September 1, 1939, Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued an appeal to the likely main belligerents in the war (including England) which began, “The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population during the course of the hostilities which have raged in various quarters of the earth during the past few years, which has resulted in the maiming and in the death of thousands of defenseless men, women, and children, has sickened the hearts of every civilized man and woman, and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.” More than four years later, in February 1944, the great Bishop George Bell of Chichester did his Christian duty by arguing, cogently and calmly, that such warfare was unjust and wrong. For this he attracted the spite and resentment of Churchill and the mockery of Noël Coward, who wrote a rude song about him called “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans.” Read Bell’s speech now, and you will be struck by how Edwardian it is. He plainly loathes the National Socialists. But he speaks of Germany as, more or less, a normal belligerent in a normal war. He had as yet no idea how evil their actions were. He did not know about the death camps. And when these were revealed, even though the Allies had not in fact done much to help their victims, all the wartime sins of Britain, the United States, and the U.S.S.R. shrank into insignificance.

Bell was not saying anything very different from what Roosevelt had said four years earlier. But the ad hoc morality of the Good War had in those few years made such sentiments obsolete. The president, who in 1939 barely had an air force or much of an army to command, prophesied accurately: “If resort is had to this form of inhuman barbarism during the period of the tragic conflagration with which the world is now confronted, hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings who have no responsibility for, and who are not even remotely participating in, the hostilities which have now broken out, will lose their lives.” In words which his successor Harry Truman must later have found awkward, he urged that the world turn away from such methods: “I am therefore addressing this urgent appeal to every government which may be engaged in hostilities publicly to affirm its determination that its armed forces shall in no event, and under no circumstances, undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities, upon the understanding that these same rules of warfare will be scrupulously observed by all of their opponents. I request an immediate reply.”

Britain and France responded by making a joint declaration that they would seek to spare civilians and to preserve, where possible, the great buildings of Europe. Neville Chamberlain ordered his military commanders to ensure that bombs and shells should only fall on strictly military objectives in the narrowest sense of the word. But there was an escape clause. The British government said, “In the event of the enemy not observing any of the restrictions which the Governments of the United Kingdom and France have thus imposed on the operation of their Armed Forces, these Governments reserve the right to take all such action as they may consider appropriate.” Like all escape clauses, it was the most important part of the policy. In fact, one of Winston Churchill’s first actions on becoming prime minister on May 10, 1940, was to lift these limits. On May 11, 1940, he consciously began a bombing war that lasted five years, and perhaps an even longer presumption in favor of bombing, which endures to this day. The R.A.F. bombed a civilian target, choosing the modest German town now known as Mönchengladbach, probably because it was in the very far west of the country and so could be easily reached without too much risk. Four people died, including a British woman living in Germany.

This raid was not, as is sometimes claimed, a retaliation for Hitler’s notorious bombing of Rotterdam, for that did not take place until three days later. It was a change of policy that set much of the world on fire. A senior official of the British Air Ministry, James Molony Spaight, wrote with great fervor and righteousness in 1944 of the event: “Bomber Command went to war on 11 May 1940. It had only been fooling with war till then. That is the greatest day in its war diary: not because of anything spectacular achieved immediately, but because of what was to follow in the fullness of time.” He recalled that Britain had kept quiet about it in those days, but he exulted that it was “a splendid decision.” He even used the word “heroic,” arguing, “We should have shouted it from the house-tops instead of keeping silence about it.”

Interestingly, Spaight compared the raid with the Soviet Red Army’s scorched earth policy during its battles with Germany. The date of May 11, 1940, is highly significant in the history of what was once Christendom as the point at which the government of a formally Christian country adopted the view that noble ends justify evil means. It was little noticed, as the German armies were even then tearing, without mercy, into Belgium and the Netherlands. The bombing of Mönchengladbach may have been justified as an attempt to slow that invasion, but it is more likely that it reflects the transformation of the war from an old-fashioned European great power struggle into the idealistic global conflict, into which the United States was to be drawn, and which Churchill pursued. The creation of the new world of the United Nations, human rights, world courts, war crimes tribunals, and the European Union, along with all the rest of the Eleanor Roosevelt program, was an aim so majestic that the ends justified some pretty terrible means. Irony abounds. But the more idealistic and ideological the war grew, the readier the civilized powers were to use these methods.

If Hitler had somehow managed to fight on into the late summer of 1945, it is more than likely that some other B-29 Superfortress, rather than the notorious Enola Gay, would have lifted off in early August from a base in England to drop its ominous load on one of the undestroyed cities of the Third Reich, if one could have been found. This action would have changed history in many fascinating ways, but it was not to be. And that has left us with the highly unsatisfactory justification advanced ever since for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings which took place instead. We are repeatedly told that those bombs ended the war. Almost every British and American serviceman alive at the time will tell you that the bombs probably saved his life. It is stated as a matter of fact that Japan’s resistance to a land invasion would have been dogged and ferocious to the end. It is a good argument, just as the need to race Hitler to a bomb is a good argument. But for some time now it has been tottering on its plinth.

Twenty years ago, the distinguished Japanese American historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa published a book of deep new research, enriched by his considerable knowledge of Russia and the Russian language. The book, Racing the Enemy, makes a powerful case for a different explanation of Japan’s surrender. The Japanese leadership in August 1945 was made up of men of great cruelty and ruthlessness. They did not especially care about civilian losses. The United States controlled Japanese airspace and could bomb what it liked, when it liked, with whatever munitions it chose to use. But Japan, which had striven for much of the war to keep the U.S.S.R. out of the conflict, greatly feared Moscow’s entry into the war. This threatened an actual seizure of sacred Japanese territory on a grand scale, a final revenge for the humiliations Russia had suffered in the war of 1904. The Japanese had learned to fear the Red Army in a series of struggles, known as Khalkhin Gol, against Georgy Zhukov and ending at Nomonhan, in the late summer of 1939. Hardly anybody in the West knows these deeply significant names.

Around the time the Nazi–Soviet Pact was being signed in Moscow, Zhukov won this forgotten war, causing Japan to seek Moscow’s neutrality. One of the strangest aspects of World War II was the long period when Russia was fighting Germany with every sinew, and with a lot of American sinews too, while maintaining wholly peaceful relations with Tokyo. But in 1945, this arrangement no longer had any value for Stalin, who, in the brief period before peace was concluded, seized several of Japan’s northern islands. Moscow still holds them, to the fury and resentment of Japan. Had the war been longer, Japan would have lost much, much more land to the Soviets (who would never have given it back), and its leaders knew it.

These facts give weight to Hasegawa’s argument, though of course there is no independent umpire who can pronounce that Hasegawa’s interpretation is right. No piece of paper will ever surface, signed by Emperor Hirohito, saying, “It was the Russian threat which made us decide to give in.” History is not like that, though some people seem to think that it is. So you may, if you wish, continue to believe the comforting traditional explanation that the bombing did it. In which case you can continue to think that there is some good in such weapons, and that Harry Truman was right to drop one of them, though perhaps not two. All I ask is that you consider whether you might be wrong.

When I try to work out my view on this era, my mind will always go back to a rather crude piece of 1960s propaganda movie-making by the B.B.C. called The War Game (banned from British T.V. at the time but shown in countless theaters). In this film, a wholly unlikely series of events leads to the explosion of Soviet bombs over parts of Southeast England and perhaps elsewhere. It ceases to matter much what is happening elsewhere. The noise made by the first bomb is described as being like a door slamming in Hell. Two things live on in my mind. One is the rapid descent of a civil society into misery—in those days the sight of traditional British police, in their friendly uniforms, carrying rifles and forming a firing squad, was as shocking as pornography in church. The other is the listless, grimy attempt to celebrate Christmas amid the ruins, with a toothy, crumpled Church of England curate propelling a vinyl disc of carols around a dead turntable, without electricity, so that you can just hear a faint and tinny rendition of “Silent Night,” once recorded by what is now a dead choir in what is now a ruined church, as the stylus runs along the grooves. I believe now that even an H-bomb cannot defeat the Risen Christ, but then it looked very much as if nuclear war would be the end not just of material civilization but of all kinds of hope in this world or in the next. I struggle to imagine the celebration of Christmas or Easter in a former civilization devastated by nuclear warfare, where the survivors dwell as ghosts of their former selves. Perhaps we would need a new commemoration, the Night of Gethsemane, a world apparently without hope in which even God Himself begs to be spared what is to come.

That was perhaps why I went on those Ban the Bomb marches, which were—as I recall them—a kind of pilgrimage, through and towards an older, quieter, slower, more Puritan England, which had once hoped to become a peaceable kingdom under God, with much discomfort, rain, and mockery to be endured on the way. When they began, the marchers first trudged, at Easter, the fifty miles from London to the strangely named village of Aldermaston, where the British bomb is still made. Did the fact that its name sounded startlingly like “Armageddon” lend a deep note of doom to the proceedings? The spirit of old Bishop Bell, who had so hopelessly and rightly opposed conventional bombing, was probably there. So was the actual ancient person of another Edwardian survivor, Bertrand Russell. The white-haired old philosopher turned up at the huge metal doors of the London Ministry of Defence bearing a series of anti-nuclear theses, which he proposed to fasten to the portals of that glum building with a hammer and nails. This was obviously impossible, but, as he approached, the giant portals opened a crack and a pinstriped official arm emerged, holding a roll of sticky tape and some scissors. How I miss Britain when it was like that, and disagreement did not require enmity or anger.

Those protests were too late before they even began, and they have never regained their original righteous pilgrim spirit in the years since. And yet, however grown-up and cynical I now am about such things, I am glad that they happened, and that I took part. Something had to be said, or our honor would have been wholly lost.

This essay appears in the Assumption 2025 issue of The Lamp.