‘The bomb’ quickly became a shorthand term for the dangerousness of the ‘Cold War’ – of the horror that would await if it turned ‘hot’. It also stood as a powerful symbol of that new state.
Orwell was the first to understand that the atomic bomb not only ushered in the new state of ideology, politics and society in the emerging conflict that he tried to conceptualise in his article. Seventy years after its publication, Orwell’s short article is still a powerful outline of the conceptual questions raised by this new type of conflict. What was the ‘world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure’ that might be fostered by such an empire? At least one thing seemed to be certain to Orwell: the real danger of the atomic bomb might be that of ‘prolonging indefinitely a “peace that is no peace”‘. How would the new empires operate that were based on the possession of atomic bombs – a state that was ‘was at once UNCONQUERABLE and in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbours’, the socialist writer and critic asked.
And as only a limited number of countries might be able to harness the new technology of the atomic bomb – Orwell reckoned it might be only three or four, a fairly accurate prediction at least for the fifteen years from 1945 onwards – it might lead them to ‘a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another’. Military weapons, Orwell knew, are an instrument of power well beyond their actual use on the battlefield. When George Orwell coined the term ‘Cold War’ in his article in Tribune on 19 October 1945, he situated the genealogy of this new type of conflict in the connections between democratisation, empire-building and weapons technology. It was an analogy that used temperature to indicate a state of conflict just short of an actual ‘hot’ war.
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