Benford_The Berlin Project

             

                As an armchair historian, you’d think I’d gravitate more often to alternative history. I mean, with all the million little what-ifs that come up, the possibilities would seem endless. Trouble is, the what-ifs that interest me are of interest only to me, and maybe some other equally nerdy arm-chair historians. What we often get instead are flights of fancy more didactic than historical, or doomgloom scenarios, more masochistic than speculative.  I for one don’t need another “Hitler wins the war” book – not only is that too depressing to think about, but it requires no great feat of imagination. I mean, we know what that world would look like, why waste time there?

            So, when a book like Gregory Benford’s The Berlin Project comes out, I find it irresistible. I mean, what would happen if the Manhattan Project was ready a year early? Tell me, from an educated and informed perspective. My curiosity is aroused. Alas, having lured me in with the scenario, I find myself utterly unconvinced by Benford’s projections.

            Before we even get into Benford’s historical analysis, I gotta mention its length. It goes on for four-hundred and forty-eight fucking pages, four hundred sixty-four if you include the afterward. It’s two hundred and eighty pages before they get around to dropping the bomb, and another hundred sixty-eight to deal with the aftermath. Benford is a physicist, not a historian (he certainly knows more physics than history) and the physics of it are his focus. These pages painstakingly detail how scientists opt for centrifugal separation of isotopes rather than the historical gaseous diffusion method, complete with diagrams. I’m sure this is fascinating stuff for physicists; for mere civilians like me, eyes will glaze over after pages and pages and pages of this stuff. Subplots, character development and drama aren’t permitted to interfere with the lectures, nothing really happens in between them – spies do not try to steal the plans, commandos do not have to raid Heavy Water plants in Norway, there are no explosions or radioactive leaks in the lab. Not even an extra-marital affair. Nothing in short to break up the monotony.

            There’s not even any moral conflict about building superbombs. No doubts of any kind are permitted to interfere with the righteousness of the central characters. They take it for granted the Bomb will shorten the war, and that’s that.  Those who might have qualms about slaughtering millions of people and potentially destroying the world, only make fleeting appearances, and are largely dismissed as naïve. Perhaps Benford is right: when it comes to Nazis, maybe there is only one moral decision one can make. But more soul searching would not have gone amiss. A novel about the impossibly awful decisions one has to make in war, and the toll they take on the soul, would have made for an infinitely more interesting book than the technocratic wish-fulfillment we get here.

            So, we’re more than halfway through the book before we get around to dropping the damn thing. What happens next?

            Well, it erases Berlin. No surprises there. To the consternation of everyone involved, Hitler was out of town, and the war goes on. In fact, the Nazis develop their own radioactive “Death Dust”, and start spraying it on allied lines from their Messerschmitts.

            Now this part got my attention. Hitler survives, gets a superweapon of his own, and the allied advance grinds to a halt. Could Benford be suggesting that nuking Germany would actually have lengthened the war? It’s not impossible – the allies spent five years pulverizing German cities to debatable effect, so might an A-Bomb just been more of the same? Might the Germans been able to learn from it and develop their own weapons? A “Death Dust” like the one suggested here would have decimated allied armies. It’s a nightmare scenario that would have turned this into a cautionary tale, far bolder and more original than what we eventually get.

            Alas. What happens instead is:

·         The Bomb convinces Werner Heisenberg to give the allies the co-ordinates to Hitler’s hideout.

·         With Hitler dead, the Wehrmacht High Command sue for peace

·         The Germans unwittingly blow the lid on Kim Philby, who spills the beans. 

·         Pissed off at Philby, Churchill and Roosevelt agree to a separate peace, throwing the Russians under the bus.

·         The Germans take all their troops from Western Europe, and, with their V-2s, Messerchmitts and Death Dust, stop the Soviets at the Polish border.

·         Fighting stops in the Winter of 1945, ending in stalemate.

·         The allies nuke Okinawa “near the top of the mountain, killing the army inside, without too many of the villagers”  

·         Erwin Rommel becomes German Chancellor, uses Marshal Aid money to build a Jewish state in historical Israel (the Arabs “fold”)

·         Eisenhower and Khrushchev decide not to build a Hydrogen bomb.

·         Allied blockade of USSR prevents aid from reaching Mao, who is defeated by Republican forces. China is democratic and prosperous.

·         As of 1965, nuclear reactors are being built everywhere, and everyone’s just loving all the cheap electricity.

·         The threat of nukes hold everyone in check.  

            Where do I start with all this?

            Well, you will notice that in this world, there is no V-E day. For all Benford’s rose-tinted projections, the Germans are not defeated in this timeline. I’m not sure Benford himself realizes this. He appears to take it for granted that ending the war in 44/45 would have led to a hyper-prosperous, peaceful, democratic, denazified, virtually de-Stalinized utopia as a matter of course. Yet, even as he presented the physics of it all in excruciating detail, he’s maddeningly vague about what the peace settlement actually looked like. He puts the western cease-fire on September 26, 1944. In the real world this would be one day after the liberation of Paris. But in Benford’s world, the liberation doesn’t happen – the allies have been bogged down by Death Dust, remember? Which would leave the Germans still in control of most of western Europe at this point. And if they stop the Germans at Poland, it would give them Eastern Europe as well. In Benford’s world, the war ends with the Germans still occupying most of Europe. How is this a victory for us? That’s a bloody stalemate at best. Is this what Benford intentioned? He doesn’t say. He does not tell us what the Germans and the allies agree to. It’s a weird omission for a book this ambitious (to say nothing of presumptuous).  

    

        I gather we are meant to take certain things for granted. That the Wehrmacht willingly agree to abandon their conquests, willingly agree to de-nazify and put up their remaining nazis on trial for crimes Against Humanity (were there any Nuremberg trials in this world? Benford doesn’t say), willingly shut down their concentration camps and let their inmates out, willingly rewrite nazi race laws, and willingly adopt liberal democracy. We are left to assume that Erwin Rommel would make an enlightened statesman.  “In 1939 we did not foresee the death trains, gas chambers and crematoria,” Benford has him say in 1965. “The National Socialists spoke of such, but we did not believe it would be. . .” Sure you didn’t. All I know is that even with the unconditional surrender and dismemberment of Germany, a lot of nazis got off the hook. Now imagine if Germany wasn’t occupied. . .

            And even if you do buy all this, what’s it got to do with China?

            Make a long story short, I don’t buy any of it. I’m just not convinced this is how it would work out. It depends way too much on happenstance, on too many pieces magically falling into place. It presumes too much. It doesn’t seem to understand its own implications. It doesn’t answer the most important questions. It’s altogether too neat, too rosy, to convenient.

            I for one wanted to know what happened in Poland. From what I can gather, the Germans keep it. How is this a happy ending? Nor is there any mention of widespread radiation sickness or cancer arising from all that Death Dust. Are we to understand that widespread use of a radioactive weapon all over Europe would have no long-term consequences? How about all those SS men who weren’t killed or captured because Germany wasn’t occupied? What happened to them? Benford doesn’t say.

            In his afterward, Benford writes: “Karl Cohen made the centrifugal method should have prevailed. As I argue here, that could have well have (sic) yielded a better world.” Indeed, he could have subtitled the book How I was Never Really Worried and Always Loved the Bomb. Not for Benford the nightmare of humanity obliterating itself with the touch of a button. There are even a few jabs at hippie peace protestors, communist stooges all. No, in his world, overwhelming nuclear superiority is the ultimate peacekeeper. As it indeed it might have been if all those ifs in his book transpired the way he seems to think they would.

            If I’ve learned one thing from history, it is that nothing is neat, nothing is predictable, and almost nothing goes according to plan. So I tend to take a very dim view of any argument that the Second World War could have ended more cleanly or less bloodily. It just wasn’t going to happen, whatever road we took. Fictions arguing otherwise tend to be more wistful than thoughtful.