The "Loss of Eden" - 28 September 2001

I dare to quote an old paragraph of mine simply because it describes Long Island as concisely as I'm able to.

Long Island, then, may fairly be seen as a fish nosing into the North Atlantic mainland at Manhattan - an island itself and one of the five boroughs of New York City.

At the tail end of Long Island, a hundred miles east into the Atlantic, there are two fins, widely separated, which enclose the large Peconic Bay.

The north fin, called the North Fork, is inhabited by the survivors of colonial settlers from Suffolk county in England and by the descendants of early 20th Century immigrant Poles who are unpretentious, hardworking, pure and good.

The south fin, called the Southshore, is inhabited by the rich, the bad and the beautiful - and, since the Second World War especially, by affluent stock manipulators, television producers, interior decorators, actresses and their parasitical ten percenters.

You can gather the shudder that goes through us North Forkers when a friend, a stranger to these parts, asks: "And how are things in East Hampton?"

It's not unlike the stab or wince that I, a born Lancastrian, feels when anybody says something like: "Oh he's an Englishman, I think, like you, he's a Yorkshireman."

After 11 days and nights watching and hearing the intolerable sorrows of 11 September I manage with much relief to get out to the end of the island to join my spouse, nurse, best friend.

And coming along the last stretch of the narrow peninsular that falls into the bay, as I've done a thousand times, I looked hard - for the first time in years - I looked hard to my right for the lawn or plot of land on which, during the second war, stood a small summerhouse owned by one Dr Moore.

His cottage is not there anymore, which I've often thought is a blessing to all of us who enjoy the quietness and the lapping water of the North Fork. For if it were still there we'd have been inundated for the past half century or so with a flood tide of tourists.

Dr Moore's cottage was rented every summer, from about 1937 on, by a most - possibly the most - distinguished exile from the Hitler persecution.

He was Albert Einstein and on 2 August 1939, a month only before Hitler invaded Poland, Dr Einstein was persuaded by two obscure Hungarian physicists - exiled Jews also - was persuaded about the lethal properties of an element nobody had ever heard of and to which Einstein himself had given little thought - uranium 235.

It's been so long - 62 years - and I've been struck in the past year or two by how many people have never heard of this letter which historically lit the fuse of the atomic bomb that I think it would be useful, at the start of what could well or ill be a new age, to read it over.

I don't know where the original letter has got to but wherever it is it would today bring at auction I suppose as much as the original Declaration of Independence.

So, you get the scene - by the waters of Peconic, on the porch of Dr Moore's cottage, sit three men: Dr Einstein, one Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner. The two visitors, who found Einstein's retreat only after two failed trips down the island on hideous hot days, they read over a letter that they've composed and decide that Einstein alone should sign it and send it to nobody but the president of the United States.

None of them knew very well the proper forms of address but came up finally with this: In the top right hand corner: Nassau Point, Peconic, Long Island, August 2nd, 1939

FD Roosevelt,

President of the United States,

White House,

Washington DC

Sir,

Some recent work of E Fermi and L Szilard which has been communicated to me in manuscript leads to me expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. ... I believe, therefore, that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations:

In the course of the last four months it has been made probable - through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America - that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated ... by which, my dear President, it might be possible to unleash an immense destructive force.

Sincerely,

A Einstein

Through a banker, who knew another banker, who had an acquaintanceship with the president, the letter got to Roosevelt two months later, by which time the war was on.

Roosevelt found the letter interesting, though mysterious, I don't know how many army and navy high-ups, British scientists, all kinds of experts ever saw or heard of the letter but not until two years later, a month or two before Pearl Habour, did the president look at it again and form a committee of the vice-president, the secretary of war, the chairman of the chiefs of staff and two American scientists, to look into it.

They thought it worth a small exploratory study and the president set aside some funds that didn't need the approval of Congress, called executive funds - $300. (Ultimately $2bn produced the Judgement Day roar and the mushroom cloud of Alamogordo in the New Mexico desert, close by the Trinity Mountains.)

As I say this I'm looking at my paperweight - a small glass cube into which is embedded what looks like a broken piece of lead or black rock.

It too is a new element formed by that first nuclear trial blast at Alamogordo in the Trinity Mountains. it is called trinitite. A constant reminder of the day when somebody, quoting Milton, wrote: "It was the beginning of all our woe and loss of Eden."

They're saying it again in many places this week after a sober but chilling press conference by Attorney General Ashcroft, warning us of the real threat of known terrorists and unknown terrorists to use the weapons they have already manufactured for massive dispersal. Among them anthrax and cyanide.

Hence the government's action this week in grounding all crop dusters - those innocent, floating little monoplanes that skim back and forth over a field of needful crops.

And hence this week the decision to recognise the appalling prospect of trucks carrying poisonous materials.

Already many of those huge trucks that clog our highways carry hazardous materials necessary to industry, to research, even to our health. I stick on my chest every morning a bit of dynamite - nitro-glycerine - which at a sufficient intensity could blow me up, but the doctors have seen to it, thank god, to modify the dose.

The FBI, the states police which means the separate police forces of the 50 states, and also city police have formed a committee representing these law enforcement agencies and they're now facing the colossal job of how, without totally crippling the flow of the goods we live by, how to monitor or screen every truck and van on the roads of America to be sure its cargo is safe and legitimate.

I doubt it can be done by any agency known to man.

In this country the railroads long ago ceased to be the main transporters of freight, or goods. today 65% of every raw and developed material we need to work by, to eat, to manufacture, to live by is carried by the truck drivers, by the powerful Teamsters Union and by various independent trucking companies.

Yet, already passionate upholders of civil rights are beginning to whine about violations of their rights, implicit or made plain by the Department of Justice, the FBI and of course the police.

Mr Ashcroft, as I talk, is going before Congress to see if it is constitutional of him to ask if the legal wiretapping of regulation telephones may be extended to cellphones.

This of course has already been done by Western countries that don't have an 18th Century written constitution to tell them how to behave in every contingency of life that might upset the freedom of an individual to go where he pleases and do what he wants.

There are going to be some nasty and tedious collisions between the necessities of war - called maximum security - and the restrictions of the Constitution, written in a previous age when the enemy was visible and far from home.

As for the injunction of St Rudolph Giuliani which has been urged on us many times now by the president, by the harried attorney general and by many others to adjust to the new age: The report from religious leaders is mixed.

The Muslims live in fear, many going back home but the vast majority, brave enough to stay and hope for the best of "the American way".

The sale of bibles has soared to best-selling proportions. The Jews, on the eve of Yom Kippur, trumpeted an affirmation of hope.

A congregation of congregationalists in the rural state of Vermont, direct descendants of those Puritans who came here to purify the corrupt Church of England, are disturbed.

"Fragile" is the word used by their minister, to whom I am close.

Last Sunday she preached a short sharp sermon. She told them to buck up and cease the whining.

"For 10, 20 years," she said, "you've lived in a dream world of material prosperity. you've lived in the Garden of Eden.

"well, you've been expelled and you've got to get used to it."

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