Donovan Webster - Aftermath: The Remnants of War

DONOVAN WEBSTER

Aftermath: The Remnants of War

Donovan Webster has written for The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, and National Geographic. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. This is his first book.

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MAY 1998

Copyright 1996 by Donovan Webster

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1996.

A portion of this work was originally published, in a slightly different form, in Smithsonian Magazine, February 1994.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Webster, Donovan.
Aftermath: the remnants of war/Donovan Webster.
p. cm.
1. War. 2. WarPsychological aspects. 3. War and society.
I. Title.
U21.2.W392 1996
355.028dc20
96-7649
eISBN: 978-0-307-79725-4

Author photograph Dick Kane

Random House Web address: www.randomhouse.com

v3.1

For Janet

Prologue
Prometheus
BEGINNING OF THE CENTURY

Epilogue
The Furnace
END OF THE CENTURY

ON APRIL 13, 1888, when Alfred B. Nobela Swedish chemist living in Parisawoke to read the morning newspaper, he found his own obituary. Mistakenly run in place of one for his older brother, Ludwig (whod died the day before in Russia), the item left Nobel stunned.

The obituary vilified him as the man responsible for Europes recently dizzying arms race, singling him out not as a wonder scientist and industrialist without peer but for being, literally, the Merchant of Death. The reclusive Nobelwho had become enormously wealthy as the inventor of dynamite, blasting caps, smokeless gunpowder, and blasting gelatinwas deeply shaken to learn his lifes work had produced such a reaction against him: his own view of his achievements was quite different.

Today it is inconceivable that Nobel could have considered himself anything but a modern-day Prometheus. Despite nine centuries of gunpowderbeginning when Chinese miners discovered its central element, potassium nitrate, around the year 900weaponry had not really changed until Nobels discoveries boosted the bloody art of war from bullets and bayonets to long-range high explosives in less than twenty-four years, forever altering the way armies killed one another.

A NATIVE OF Stockholm, Nobel was born into a family of inventors. In 1851, at eighteen, he began his travels to Russia and the United States as an apprentice to established inventors and engineers. One of these was John Ericcson, an American naval engineer and creator of the Monitor, used in the U.S. Civil War and famous as the first armored warship. After four years of study, the young Nobel returned home, immediately joining his father, Immanuel, in his engineering business. (The elder Nobels most famous ideas were probably the first viable sea mines, which he produced for the Russians, and the first household hot water heater.)

At home, Alfred became fascinated by nitroglycerine. A clear liquid concocted in 1847 by the Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero, nitroglycerine was extremely unpredictable at room temperatures, often exploding ferociously when shaken. In 1862, Nobel set himself the task of making nitroglycerine safer. Within a month he had invented the blasting cap: a small gunpowder charge topped by a length of fuse. When a blasting cap was attached to a sealed tube of nitroglycerine and its fuse was lit, miners and engineers had time to leave a blast zone before the blasting caps smaller, primary explosion set off the more powerful nitroglycerine. The invention earned the thirty-year-old Nobel his first explosives patent. Millions of Nobels Igniters would be sold to mining and construction firms worldwide.

Yet nitroglycerine remained touchy to handle and transport. So Nobel kept working to make it safer. Unfortunately, his tests were not without tragedy. One morning in 1864, while Nobel and his father were away, the Nobel factory was destroyed in an explosion that killed all its workers, including Nobels twenty-one-year-old brother, Emil. The senior Nobel was heartbroken; he suffered a stroke and never recovered. Alfred only hardened his resolve to puzzle away nitroglycerines dangers.

Forbidden by the Swedish government to rebuild his factory, Nobel decided to leave solid land behind and took to the water, creating a floating factory on a harbor barge outside Stockholm, where he began experimenting once again. Two years laterand completely by accidentNobel discovered some spilled nitroglycerine inside a shipping box. The liquid had been absorbed by a claylike packing material called