Couldn’t sleep so I was chewing on more of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. I’m up to the Trinity test, and while some aspects of Rhodes’ writing annoy me, his insistence on providing a complete picture of each of his subjects and how they known and relate to one another creates a really vivid portrait of human processes, and how even massive, lumbering institutions like the wartime US government can have policy directed by the preexisting dispositions of a small number of actors. Nuclear weapons became a thing when they did because a small number of scientists got really concerned about the implications of some of their research and badgered political people they knew, until the ones in America did something about it. In Japan and Germany, the scientists got brushed off instead, and those countries’ wartime nuclear research went nowhere; and who knows about the USSR (scientists working there must have known what every atomic physicist in the world knew at that point, which is that nuclear fission was theoretically a vast source of energy, but that it may or may not have been practically attainable).

But this wasn’t some Grand Plan by scientists to Invent the Atomic Bomb, not at first. Insofar as Grand Plans did develop, they seemed to have no single architect, but are the results of lots of small decisions by lots of people in key positions, whose personalities definitely shaped the outcome of history, without any of them quite managing to be the one Great Man figure. Even those at the very top, like Roosevelt and Truman, seem to lack key pieces of insight, or not really to understand the implications of the things they’re signing off on. Those who do seem to understand, at least in part, people like Niels Bohr, who anticipates the perils of the nuclear arms race before the first bomb is dropped, are overlooked or entirely ignored. By the time the Manhattan Project has begun in earnest, it is doing so as a natural consequence of forces set in motion earlier, long before the decisions that created them were fully understood.



So in lieu of the Great Man theory of history, I’d like to propose a scaled-down, distributed version of the idea: the Just Fucking Around Theory of History. Succinctly, it is this: history is made mostly as a result of people just fucking around, without quite understanding what they are doing. “Great” people might fuck around to correspondingly greater effect, but nobody really understands the consequences–or often, the motivation–of what they are doing until it is too late to do anything about it. All institutions and forces are just the statistical aggregate of individual acts of fucking around, and the reason they often seem so incomprehensible and mysterious is because their atomic constituents are nothing more than individual acts of human dumbassery.

