My last column, “Good Intentions Are Not Enough,” warned against substituting intentions for the examination of results. It warned, too, of depending on our efforts alone over the help of the sacraments and the actions of Grace.
With the New Year here, though, many people are thinking about resolutions and good intentions for reform (major or minor) in the coming year. I have always felt that modest changes applied over time often have a greater chance of success than huge changes applied all at once. Regardless, that is no reason not to take the opportunity a new year brings to review the shape of my life and work to discern what changes I might make the improve it.
In any case, I was recently struck by how intent (or the lack of it) nevertheless shapes consequences in human lives and in history. A book about the research and theoretical progress that led to nuclear fission was the catalyst for this insight. And not consequently, this research led to the first atomic bomb.
The Nuclear Age
The book “Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History Of The Nuclear Age,” by Frank Close, is very interesting. It’s the story of nuclear fission. The story has multiple possible beginnings, but the one the author chose is a good one. He selected the 1896 accident/incident by French scientist Henri Becquerel.
Becquerel stored photographic plates, uranium crystals, and a copper Maltese cross in a drawer when the weather did not cooperate with an experiment he had planned. After several days of unsuitable weather, Becquerel developed the photographic plates anyhow. He did not expect much because the experiment he intended required – he thought – sunlight. The sunlight was necessary to somehow activate the uranium into emitting the new energy he was investigating.
It turned out, however, that sunlight was not necessary, and the path to the nuclear age received its first footprints. Marie and Pierre Curie and dozens of other early pioneers into nuclear science followed footsteps.
None of those early researchers foresaw the possibility of nuclear power plants. Neither did they see the use of radioactive isotopes in medicine, or the terrible desolation potentially caused by atomic weaponry. They were simply curious as to how the world worked. They were just investigating another mystery of nature, with no inkling of where it might lead in the long term.
This innocence of science, never that sturdy, was already being strained. By the end of World War I this strain was an increasing concern to the scientific community at large. In the light of later events, the mysterious 1938 disappearance of Italian physicist Ettore Majorana is intriguing. Many see his disappearance as a possible reaction by a visionary genius to his developing understanding that the work he was doing in nuclear forces could lead to terrifying advances in weaponry.
Held up against the harsh realities and consequences of WW1, arguably the first instance of war practiced as an industrial process, the glimpses of nuclear fission and fusion appearing in the early research was justifiably terrifying. Even so, the news from Europe, and especially news delivered by refugees from Nazi terror, provided more than necessary counter-weight to the qualms felt by some researchers. The weaponization of nuclear energy promised to be dreadful. But the threat of ‘the other side’ having such a weapon was, if anything, even worse.
It Didn’t Start As A Weapons Program
Nuclear research did not start as a weapons program. It started with the same kind of scientific curiosity that drives inquiry in myriad fields across hundreds of subjects and questions.
Sometimes, however, weaponry is the result of research, as in an apocryphal story about Hiram Maxim. Maxim was an inventor of automatic weapons. According to the story, a friend’s inspiration led him to inventing such weapons.
Maxim’s friend supposedly told him that if he wanted to make a lot of money, he should invent something to enable Europeans to kill each other with greater efficiency. Maxim ended up patenting three methods of designing automatic weapons, all of them harnessing a firearm’s recoil in one way or another.
More often, however, the military applications become clear later. As technology advances, people’s minds turn from pure inquiry to practical applications. Research into insects and then insect control, for example, led to nerve gas. But the original intent was to preserve crops and food storage from depredation and damage.
A 2010 article in Smithsonian magazine details 10 inventions or innovations that originated with peaceful, practical uses in mind. All 10 of these developments ended up changing the nature of warfare. They include barbed wire, locomotives, the telegraph, and the prediction of tides and weather.
The unhappy truth is that, as Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan, the life of man in nature tends to be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Many see Hobbes as embracing pragmatism over God’s plan for moral government. He opposed the idea that mankind was morally required to live inside a society. This view ran counter to the prevailing sentiments of the time, to say the least.
Current Sentiment
Ours is not a time in which people tend to line up behind philosophical concepts after having studied the arguments and their histories. Today people do not weigh the alternatives dispassionately. They also do not engage others in reasoned discourse and continue to explore ideas in a spirit of inquiry and curiosity.
Ours is a time of partisan allegiance driven by personal experiences and the emotions attendant on them. Ours is a time of picking teams or sides – sometimes even contradictory and incompatible sides – and sticking with them for reasons that satisfy each individual on a personal basis.
Such times have come and gone. Doubtless they will come and go again in the future. But for now, our problem as Christians is to discern our path through the chaos of now to the certainty of the eternal verities of Christ and His Church.
The many pastoral structures provided through our parishes and dioceses can aid us in our discernment. So, too, the magnificent and ever more accessible resources of the Magisterium are tremendous aides. There are also books, magazines, online resources, and even Catholic Stand to help us.
We live in a time of strident and quarreling voices (though a case could be made that most times are strident and quarrelsome in their own way). But we are fortunate that our access to the historic wisdom of the Church’s experience is easier and more convenient than in any time of history before this one.
In 2026, and going forward, may God help us refine and reform our intentions and use them to lead us into increasing holiness and virtue in our lives.
