Snake Dance: Journeys Beneath a Nuclear Sky
Patrick Marnham
The terrifying first use of nuclear weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was the most controversial act of warfare in history, dramatically ending the Second World War but ushering in the age of mass destruction. Yet it was also the climax of a story that extends beyond Japan and Washington: the culmination of decades of scientific achievement and centuries of colonial exploitation.
Snake Dance is the account of a journey that turned into a quest to discover how humanity reaches this point. Patrick Marnham travels from the opulent nineteenth-century palaces of King Leopold II of Belgium, built with riches plundered from the Congo, to the lethally derelict nuclear reactor of modern-day Kinshasa. He follows the shipment of Congolese uranium to the deserts of New Mexico for the Manhattan Project’s secret test detonation. Here he uncovers the legacies of Robert Oppenheimer and Aby Warburg, two ‘mad geniuses’ who confronted the devastating power of twentieth-century science in very different ways.
Both men travelled to New Mexico. Oppenheimer was honoured for buiding a bomb, the ancestor of weapons that have enslaved humanity. Warburg, condemned to obscurity and confined to a mental hospital, regained his sanity by studying the rituals of the Native Americans of the Southwest who, for thousands of years, practiced the ritual of the 'snake dance' in an attempt to harness the power of lightening. And it was in New Mexico, at Los Alamos, that the ultimate act of playing God was realised.
The circle is closed in Japan.. Faced with the catastrophe at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant in March 2011, scientific man, like the snake dancers, is faced with a power beyond his control. Spanning three continents and the history of civilisation, Snake Dance is at once an intrepid intellectual adventure and a wake-up call for mankind.
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About Patrick Marnham
Reviews for Snake Dance: Journeys Beneath a Nuclear Sky
Piers Paul Read
Spectator
Fascinating… Snake Dance is nothing less than the biography of nuclear power, the most awesome force humanity has yet unleashed upon the planet
Peter Whittakar
New Internationalist
[Patrick Marnham’s] mastery of a vast trove of material makes him an erudite travel companion…perennially eager to poke about in radiation zones armed only with a wonky Geiger counter and a paper mask
Matthew Green
Literary Review
The travel writing is first class… [A] thrillingly ominous account
Spectator
A superb book on the genesis and use of the atomic bomb
Scotsman
This is a humane and intelligent book, and one in which Marnham has clearly been deeply engaged
Melanie McGrath
Sunday Telegraph
The great strength of Snake Dance is to create an atmosphere in which the advent of atomic energy is not just outrageous but tragic
Observer
Snake Dance is a hybrid of a film tie-in, travelogue, biography and history. It’s a blend that gels through Marnham’s unwavering verve as he follows the trail of a lethal cargo
Christian House
Independent
Impeccably researched and written
Giles Milton
Mail on Sunday
From colonial slavery to the blind potential of scientific exploration to enslave us in turn, he makes a circular journey: the nuclear snake eats its own tail
The Times
A twisting global journey in his devastating critique of nuclear policy…an honourable refusal to rationalise what boils down to an act of repeated mass murder
Metro
A penetrating historical x-ray of the first generation of people to live under the nuclear shadow
Prospect
A fascinating travelogue taking the reader from Joseph Conrad’s Congo to the Fukushima Nuclear Plant disaster of 2011, via New Mexico… a learned and compelling history of man trying to control the elements. It’s also a clarion call to arms to save ourselves and the planet
Bookseller