THE MUSKET AND THE BOMB

Shortly after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, George Orwell wrote: ‘The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle.’ He went on to observe that the advent of the nuclear age flung humanity into a different – more depressing – order. ‘Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock’, Orwell continued, ‘it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police state’. The mega-technology of nuclear weapons in fact had different effects. The bomb had now transformed the final Armageddon from religious prophesy into factual possibility; it had made thinkable the violent destruction of all remaining democratic states and their civilised societies. The musket and the rifle were inaccurate, yet controllable. But now, according to Orwell, the human species risked either destroying itself with its own grotesque weapons, or destroying democracy with a new form of servitude wrapped in a ‘cold war’ peace that was not really peace at all. ‘Looking at the world as a whole’, he concluded, ‘the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery … in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbours.