Where Did the Idea of The Carrier come from?
Never had I seen my home town, Stockholm, so eerily beautiful, so utterly abandoned. I could not restrain an archaic fear from rising: all the way from my childhood. It seemed as if the bomb had actually struck somewhere quite close. The primal scare that we once, seemingly forever, had managed to repress after the end of the Cold war.
Bewildered, mesmerized, I went down to the glittering water in Djurgårdsbrunnsviken. Heard the seagulls cut through the silence. Could gaze all along the main road, Strandvägen, to the city centre – even that strangely hollow. No cars, no buses and no trams.
Eventually other people started to gather, fragile, looking so small in the emptied city surrounding us. As the moment drew closer, I went back to the Swedish Radio house. Built in the heydays of the Cold War, with a labyrinth of nuclear shelters and tunnels, deep down in the bedrock.
There I sat waiting outside until the lengthy caravan had passed. All these black cars in only a minute or so, as quick and drawn out as every other major event.
After the lunch break, I went up to my desk at the Culture Department. Skimmed the media reports of this first ever official visit of an American president to Sweden – which had cleared the entire centre of Stockholm for security reasons. Stopped at the specifications of his enormous entourage. One Air Force One, five other more or less identical Boeings, 29 cargo planes, 40 cars, 250 security people, 300 advisors and press officers…
Back home, during the evening and the following sleepless night, I read that he too was present. The man with the nuclear briefcase. Who disappeared almost without a trace in the late 80’s, last seen in a number of thrillers: as a popular culture cliché.
What I now learned was that he had been dwelling in the President’s shadow ever since the 1950’s. Even when the American President received the Noble Peace Price in 2013 – mainly for a historic speech in Prague against nuclear weapons.
In the broadcasts one can actually observe him. Barely outside of the spotlight, blank, without a trace of the weight of his mission.
So who could that man be? How was a single human able to cope with having the apocalypse – triggering it, or preventing it, or just carrying it around – as part of his daily routine? And what would happen if this key figure defected, for one reason or another?
Soon I started writing his story. Embedded it not only in the realm of nuclear weapons but in psychology, philosophy, art history: desperately trying to put this strangest invention of mankind in context. How and why we happened to create a tool for destroying ourselves – and what it actually did to us. The threat and the temptation.
Eventually this became my debut novel. With him, The Carrier, as a first person narrator. In his own words revealing to us all about the impossible escape out of this utterly incredible mission.
The Philosophy of The Carrier
It felt like I myself was evoking all these strange factual events, one after another.
During the fall of 2013, I started writing the Swedish original of The Carrier. In October, one of the top three Generals for the American nuclear weapons system was dismissed after being caught with counterfeit gambling chips at a local casino.
Only days later, a second of these three Generals was relieved of his duties. The Air Force officials told the media that he had “fraternized with hot women” and “disrespected his hosts” at an official visit to Russia. Furthermore, during a lay-over in Switzerland, he apparently bragged loudly about his position as high nuclear commander: saying he “saved the world from war” every day.
Soon these events was linked together in American media under the blazing headline “The Nuclear Weapons Scandal”. During the winter of 2014 it was followed by a series of reports on security violations, cheatings on competency tests, drug abuse and burnouts among the young nuclear recruits, guarding and nurturing the enormous missiles in their undergrounds silos.
All these incidents, one by one, was worrying enough. Taken together they were a living nightmare. Indicating that nuclear weapons were not only the mightiest tools in the history of mankind – but, in the long run, sooner or later, in one way or another, even too mighty for us human beings to handle.
During my research about the global nuclear weapons system, I also learned that its scale was increasing rather than decreasing, as most of us had thought. In the same very period during 2013-2014 – when almost no one seemed to notice, especially not here in Scandinavia – the largest expansion since the beginning of the Cold War actually took form.
In the U.S., the cost of what is often referred to as “The Revitalization” of the nuclear weapons system currently have an estimate of almost ₤400 billion, only during the coming decade. In Britain, the Trident replacement could have a lifetime cost of around ₤200 billion. Still, these unfathomable figures dwell in the shadow of the intense and so extremely necessary climate debate.
But what I gradually have realized, is that these two issues are both related and intertwined. Current theories indicate that a full-scale nuclear war between Russia and the U.S. would release Nuclear Winter, a rapid climate change causing global starvation and in a decade or so total apocalypse for mankind. And that even a much more limited conflict could have grave effects on the long-scale inhabitation of the earth.
These two issues arouse the same philosophical question: Why we seem to seek our own extinction. Either in a couple of minutes, as is possible with nuclear weapons, or in maybe a millennium through climate influence.
This is the ultimate human riddle – and the focal point in my suspense novel The Carrier.
Sweden’s Nuclear Weapons Program and ‘The Mother of the Atomic Bomb’
A month ago, I finally entered the sacred place. Embedded in the bedrock in central Stockholm, a five minutes quirky elevator ride straight to the underworld.
There it was: an overwhelming rock hall, large enough for hundreds of people. A dark pit indicated where the enormous apparatus once had stood. “R1”, Reactor One.
This was the birth place of the top secret Swedish nuclear weapons program. Initiated after the terrifying blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki 1945, which convinced many countries in the industrialized world that they too must produce an atomic bomb.
Sweden also had many of the prerequisites. Important natural resources, an industry undamaged by the war and ever since the 1920’s top scientists within the buzzing scientific field of nuclear physics.
And then we got Lise Meitner.
An Austrian of Jewish origin, she fled to Sweden in 1938. Regarded as one of the prime scientists in the world, maybe the most notable nuclear physicist of them all. Here in Sweden, Lise Meitner suddenly understood the process of fission– what actually happens when an atom splits, creating a chain reaction that could have an incredible impact – during a winter walk iconic in the history of science.
Soon she was drawn into the Swedish nuclear physics research, instead of joining most of her famous international colleagues in their quest for an atomic bomb in Los Alamos. Lise Meitner’s standpoint seemed rock firm. She would not in any way participate in making such a dreadful tool for destroying mankind.
Still, after Hiroshima Lise Meitner was named “The Mother of the Atomic Bomb”: regarded as an informal scientific counterpart to “The Father” Robert Oppenheimer. And what she actually was doing in Sweden during all those years has never been clear. There is a dark hole in the sources – from 1949, when she became a Swedish citizen, to 1960 when he moved to relatives in Oxford. That is, the very years that Sweden’s nuclear weapons program was formed.
What we do know is that she worked inside this giant bedrock chamber. The starting point for our own efforts to build a bomb, which fruitlessly continued behind the scenes through the 50’s and 60’s. Before it finally was put down for complicated political reasons – and Sweden instead became a superpower in disarmament. Our own nuclear weapons program was kept in total silence until it finally, in 1985, was revealed by a technical magazine.
I was not alone down in The Reactor Chamber that Saturday afternoon. During the screening of a French silent movie from 1956, accompanied by live organ music, I furtively glanced at the small offices clinging like post boxes at the steep rock wall behind us. Wondered which one was Lise Meitner’s. What she actually could have been doing in there, at the same time the film was made.
What I call Lise Meitner’s Secretis also one of the plot threads in my suspense novel “The Carrier”. A way of weaving the historic Swedish nuclear weapons program, with this world-class scientist as a jewel in the bedrock, together with the new global nuclear rearmament that is currently taking place.
And to highlight her enigmatic life story: almost impossible for a novelist to resist.