George Orwell's essay on the atomic bomb anticipates Nineteen Eighty-Four

Lately I've been reading Orwell's collected work from 1945–1950, which was being deaccessioned from the library. It opens with a short but fascinating essay on “You and the Atom Bomb”, published 19 October 1945. It seems clear that Orwell's thinking about this development led directly to his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was written in late 1948.

Orwell's initial focus is:

The question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely: “How difficult are these things to manufacture?”

This is important, he says, because:

Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. … A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.

Obviously, the atom bomb is in the first category.

Then we come to the part that is clearly the road to Nineteen Eighty-Four:

We have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end to the machine civilisation. But suppose — and really this is the likeliest development — that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.

By 1945 the three super-states were taking shape. Orwell writes about how in 1941 it had appeared that the Axis powers would win the war (he mentions James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution) so that Germany (not Russia) might control Europe and Asia, while Japan (not China) might control East Asia, but he said this was just a “miscalculation”:

More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being parcelled off into three great empires …. The haggling as to where the frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will continue for some years, and the third of the three super-states — East Asia, dominated by China — is still potential rather than actual.

The frozen and oppressive political milieu of Nineteen Eighty-Four is clearly laid out:

Mr H.G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons…. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. … The kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbours.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949, and Orwell died the following year after a long battle with tuberculosis. His essay on “You and the Atom Bomb” is available online courtesy of the Orwell Foundation and Orwell's estate.

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