Lawyers representing 1,000 ex-servicemen in Britain are going to court to try and win compensation for illnesses, including cancer, skin defects and fertility problems, they claim are the result of exposure to radiation during 1950s nuclear bomb tests in the South Pacific. As the BBC reported, tests were 70 times more powerful than anticipated and on one occasion, a group of men were so badly contaminated by the penetrating radiation that they produced radioactive urine.

A few weeks later, two nuclear missile submarines — one British, one French — armed with a likely total of well over 100 thermonuclear warheads collided under the Atlantic Ocean. BBC radio had recently been allowed access to Britain's nuclear weapons infrastructure in order to consider whether it really is (to use that infamous Cold War phrase) fail-safe.

"One of Britain's four Trident submarines is always out there," they reported, "somewhere under the Atlantic, carrying more destructive power than was unleashed in the entire campaign of World War II."  But they didn't consider the possibility that a British sub might collide with another nuclear armed sub. History suggests that nothing can ever be truly fail-safe.

The nuclear issue has rather receded from the headlines in recent years, but as this incident shows the danger is still very real. As a New York Times editorial said, the election of Barack Obama to the White House provides an ideal opportunity for real progress on nuclear weapons. Of course, there is no shortage of people ready to offer the new president advice, including Strangelovian figures from the Cold War like Henry Kissinger. Indeed, it's reported that Obama quietly sent Kissinger to Moscow in January to test the waters regarding cuts in nuclear warheads.

The need for cuts is clear and urgent. Obama faces opposition within his own administration, indeed (according to Time) from his Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, no less. And as ever, events - such as Iran's nuclear ambitions - will conspire to throw him off course. But let's hope he can do it.

I’m struck by a feeling of déjà vu as I read through the descriptions of the new technology on the website of America’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory in California. They talk about the “Dawn of a New Era” and that “nuclear fusion offers the potential for virtually unlimited safe and environmentally benign energy”.

Such language and the scientific dream of unlimited energy goes back to at least the start of the last century and the birth of the science of radioactivity. The discoveries of the Curies and Rutherford were seized upon by the press as evidence of unlimited energy locked in the dark heart of matter.

Rutherford’s co-worker, British chemist Frederick Soddy, predicted that atomic science was going to transform the world into what he memorably called "one smiling Garden of Eden" - an atomic paradise on earth. HG Wells was inspired by Soddy to write his influential 1914 novel The World Set Free in which he imagines an atomic utopia, but also – the flipside of the atomic coin – a global nuclear war. Indeed he even coined the phrase, “atomic bomb” in this novel.

The idea of unlimited atomic energy has inspired fiction writers ever since. It was the dream of American pulp sf in the 1940s. Clifford D. Simak’s ‘Lobby’ (1944) contains this wonderful description of an atomic scientist, called Butler. He is a classic inventor-scientist motivated by idealistic dreams of unlimited energy:

“You’ve seen his kind. Has one ruling passion. The only thing that counts with him is atomic power. Not atomic power as a theory or as something to play around with, but power that will turn wheels – cheap. Power that will free the world, that will help develop the world. Power so cheap and plentiful and safe to handle that no man is so poor he can’t afford to use it.”

But as Wells was quick to see as early as 1914, an unlimited energy source also means a potential superweapon: the atomic bomb. When the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory begins its experiment to create a miniature star on earth we should try not to get blinded by their utopian rhetoric. After all this is also the technology that lies at the heart of the H-bomb.

The other day I had an email from an angry reader. He accused me of maligning the good name of scientists in my cultural history of superweapons. Scientists were not “doomsday men” and the phrase “an organization of dangerous lunatics” should not be applied to the secret laboratories where scientists developed superweapons. As someone who had worked in the nuclear industry, he wanted to make it plain to me that it was only thanks to such “lunatics” and their many scientific discoveries that I could enjoy a comfortable and healthy life, free from the fear of Nazism and Communism.

I must admit I was slightly taken aback by the heartfelt anger of his email. It was clear there was not going to be a meeting of minds. But in the end we did have an amicable and interesting exchange of emails.

I explained that the title of my book, Doomsday Men, was borrowed from JB Priestley’s 1938 novel of the same name, about how an atomic doomsday device is created at a secret laboratory in the Mojave Desert. My correspondent found the title provocative and even cheap. I hoped other readers would see the irony, and, as my book is about how film and fiction prefigures our obsession with superweapons, insisted it was appropriate to use a title that wouldn’t have been out of place in the pulps.

Indeed, the whole point of the book was not to blame scientists for weapons of mass destruction, but to show how humankind’s most terrible yet ingenious inventions were inspired by a desperate dream, one that was shared by a whole culture, including writers like Jack London and HG Wells, a dream of peace and scientific utopia. In a sense, we are all doomsday men. After all, it was Wells who coined the phrase “atomic bomb” before even World War I. And it was also Wells who in 1933 described scientists developing weapons of mass destruction in a secret laboratory as “an organization of dangerous lunatics”.

The great scientific romancer HG Wells could hardly be described as hostile to science or scientists. It was his anger at the misuse of science to create weapons of mass destruction that led him to condemn such scientists. I share that anger and it prompted me to explore the cultural reasons why people from all walks of life came to think that superweapons were a solution to human problems.

Readers of Wells’s fiction were familiar with mad scientists – Griffin or Moreau, for example – as well as those who hoped to improve the world, men like Holsten and Karenin in The World Set Free (1914). In the early years of the twentieth century, popular culture turned scientists into saviours who freed the world from war with awesome superweapons. But the experience of gas warfare, then biological weapons, and finally the atomic bomb gradually changed public perceptions. As fears grew about superweapons, their creators who had transformed the laws of nature into instruments of total destruction were increasingly depicted as mad scientists. Those who had been raised up to be gods, were later cast down as devils – or at least as acolytes of that master of megadeath, Dr Strangelove.

In the atomic age, as the public learned to live with first the A-bomb, then the H-bomb, and finally the world-destroying cobalt or C-bomb, scientists were stereotyped as mad, bad and dangerous (to borrow Christopher Frayling’s phrase). “What you are doing is mad, it is diabolic,” says the scientist’s assistant in Ernest B. Schoedsack’s movie Dr Cyclops (1940): “You are tampering with powers reserved to God.” In the classic science fiction film The Thing (1951), based on John W. Campbell’s story about alien invasion, the sinister scientist Dr Carrington is prepared to sacrifice human lives in the cause of science: “Knowledge is more important than life... We’ve only one excuse for existing: to think, to find out, to learn…It doesn’t matter what happens to us.”

Such scientists would be the end of us all, people feared. “What hope can there be for mankind…when there are such men as Felix Hoenikker to give such playthings as ice-nine to such short-sighted children as almost all men and women are?” asked Kurt Vonnegut in the brilliant Cat’s Cradle (1963). As far as film and fiction were concerned, scientists were not just Strangelovian doomsday men. Their whole outlook on life was positively warped. “If the murders of twelve innocent people can help save one human life it will have been worth it”, reasons Doctor Necessiter in The Man With Two Brains (1983).

But these are, of course, mere fictions. As physicist Sidney Perkowitz points out in his enjoyable survey of Hollywood Science (2007), although they may on occasion appear somewhat arrogant, most scientists are not megalomaniacs: “few scientists have a burning desire to rule the world; typically, they don’t even enjoy managing people and research budgets”. He does, however, concede that one stereotype may have a basis in truth – the image of scientists as being sartorially challenged: “The rumpled look is a badge of authority; to scientists, the ‘suits’, formally dressed bureaucrats, are members of a despised race.” (I’m aware this may be a controversial view. In the interest of balance, I urge readers to also consult the excellent Geek Chic, ed by Sherrie A. Inness, especially chapter 2, "Lab Coats and Lipstick", by L. Jowett.)

But Freeman Dyson suggests truth may be every bit as strange as fiction. The physicist, who worked on weapons projects as well as the Project Orion atomic spaceship in the 1950s, thinks there’s more than a grain of truth in the Strangelove stereotype. "The mad scientist is not just a figure of speech," says Dyson, "there really are such people, and they love to play around with crazy schemes. Some of them may even be dangerous, so one is not altogether wrong in being scared of such people."

Recently, I was powerfully reminded of Dyson’s comment while reviewing the reissue of Dan O’Neill’s classic nuclear history The Firecracker Boys (1994). In 1958, physicist Edward Teller, the self-styled father of the H-bomb, turned up in Juneau, Alaska, and held an impromptu news conference. He was there to unveil Project Chariot, a plan to create a deep-water harbour at Cape Thompson in northwest Alaska using thermonuclear bombs. Seventy million cubic yards of earth would be shifted instantly using nuclear explosions equivalent to 2.4 million tons of TNT. That’s 40% of all the explosive energy expended in World War II. Some firecracker.

Locals said they didn’t need a harbour. They also raised understandable concerns about radioactivity. After all, the year before, Nevil Shute had published On the Beach, one of the best-selling of all nuclear fictions (four million copies by 1980), in which the world dies a lingering death caused by fallout from a nuclear war fought with cobalt bombs. Teller was unfazed by the criticisms. That year he had defended atmospheric nuclear tests, claiming such fallout was no more dangerous than “being an ounce overweight”. He tried to reassure the Alaskans: “We have learned to use these powers with safety”. He even promised them a harbour in the shape of a polar bear.

Teller and his fellow scientists at the Livermore Laboratory in California were on a mission to redeem the nuclear bomb. They wanted to overcome the public’s irrational “phobic” reactions to nuclear weapons. “Geographical engineering” was the answer, said Teller: “We will change the earth’s surface to suit us.” The Faustian hubris of the man appeared to know no bounds. Dubbed in the press “Mr H-Bomb”, Teller even admitted to a “temptation to shoot at the moon” with nukes. You need a new Suez Canal? Blast it out with my thermonuclear bombs. Or how about turning the Mediterranean into a freshwater lake to irrigate the Sahara? All you need to do is to close the Straits of Gibraltar by detonating a few H-bombs (clean ones, of course, absolutely guaranteed). No problem. We can do it – trust me, I’m a physicist.

Dan O’Neill interviewed Teller. Or at least he tried to. As soon as he started asking questions, Teller “cursed loudly and with great facility” and tore up the release form he had just signed to allow O’Neill to use the interview. Despite Teller’s hissy fit, O’Neill’s remarkable book shows how government agencies lied to local people, attempted to bribe scientists with promises of research funding, and manipulated the Alaskan media, which demonstrated “more sycophancy than scrutiny”. But a grass-roots movement of local Alaskans – Eskimo whale hunters, bush pilots, church ladies, and log-cabin conservationists – joined forces with a few principled scientists to successfully oppose America’s nuclear establishment, and in so doing sowed the seeds of modern environmentalism.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Teller devotes a mere page to this episode in his 2001 Memoirs. Les Viereck, a “soft-spoken and shy” biologist, whose research helped expose the real cost of Teller’s plans, lost his university position because of his opposition to Project Chariot. In a letter, he told his employer: “A scientist’s allegiance is first to truth and personal integrity and only secondarily to an organized group such as a university, a company, or a government.” Now there’s a scientist you could be proud of. HG Wells would have turned him into a heroic character, the kind of scientist who might really save the world.

But perhaps that’s where the problem lies. As the Marquise von O tells the Russian Count at the end of Kleist’s great novella, “she would not have seen a devil in him then if she had not seen an angel in him at their first meeting”. We burden scientists with such impossibly high expectations: they’re going to discover a source of unlimited energy, invent a weapon that will make war impossible, and along the way find a cure for cancer. But when the philosopher’s stone turns into a Pandora’s box, we turn our saviours into Strangeloves. Despite their miraculous discoveries, scientists are only human. We shouldn’t forget that.

O’Neill is rightly scathing about Teller’s role in Project Chariot: it seems Teller and his colleagues were more interested in improving the public image of nuclear weapons than in the lives of Alaskans. A Los Alamos colleague of Teller accused the brilliant scientist of becoming corrupted by his "obsession for power". According to Emilio Segrè, Teller was "dominated by irresistible passions" that threatened his "rational intellect". Another colleague said simply, "Teller has a messianic complex".

Thankfully, for every Teller there is a Les Viereck. If you don’t believe me, then read Mind, Life, and Universe (2007), a wonderfully inspiring collection of interviews with scientists about their lives and work, edited by Lynn Margulis and Eduardo Punset.

But despite this, sometimes a dark suspicion creeps up on me, a nagging fear that somewhere out there a Dr Hoenikker is hard at work, intoxicated by his own genius and the desire for ultimate knowledge. Like Teller, this phantom Strangelove has forgotten Joseph Rotblat’s wise words: “a scientist is a human being first, and a scientist second”. All I can do at such moments is console myself by reciting the well-known Bokononist Calypso:

“Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end,
And our God will take things back that He to us did lend.
And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God,
Why go right ahead and scold Him. He’ll just smile and nod.”

Apparently, hundreds of UK veterans who witnessed nuclear tests in the 1950s have joined one of the largest compensation claims against the Ministry of Defence. There's a fascinating piece on this by Helena Merriman at the BBC. She interviewed one witness, Bob Malcolmson, who was an 18-year-old radio operator on HMS Diana at the time. He saw a 98-kiloton explosion: "The explosion was tremendous. They actually heard it in Australia 200 miles away from the islands. We turned our backs, covered our eyes with our hands. I had my eyes open and I could see the bones in my hands, even with my back to this thing." Malcolmson was later diagnosed with blood cancer. I hope they are successful in the courts. Read the rest of the piece here.

Last week there was a wonderful article in the Guardian called 'Read poetry: it's quite hard', by Sean O'Brien. He argues convincingly for a poetic canon, in part because it "presents a challenge to the reader, of a kind which in our impatient times often produces anxiety and resentment". I agree: canons can be helpful when you're a student, if only to give you something to rebel against.

One of his concerns is that a new generation of readers may be missing out on challenging texts, as teachers discard "classics" in favour of more "relevant" pieces. He's critical of the contemporary attitude to reading: "The difficulty that readers face owes much to the fundamentally prosaic and utilitarian view of language which dominates our period: speed, impact and 'the facts' are pre-eminent."

I was interested in this point as I have just been reading Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid, which is a fascinating exploration of the neuroscience of reading. She is troubled by the impact of the Internet revolution on the way we read, believing it leads to a more superficial way of reading. Perhaps we need a slow reading movement, as well as one for slow food?

And finally, a very funny piece on academia by Ben McGrath in the New Yorker: "Powder Room 101". Enjoy.

"Doomsday Men relates the grim story of increasing barbarism during the 20th century, associated with scientific advancement and the pursuit of superweapons. ... Smith argues that, like Faust, scientists gained terrible knowledge during the 20th century, at great cost: designing weapons of mass destruction, they sacrificed much of the idealism about science in the service of humanity. ... Doomsday Men is a gripping but disturbing read, from which my review could only select extracts. What it highlights for me is the unavoidable social responsibility that scientists carry for their work and the constant danger that scientists may be reduced to being little more than 'tools of war'. Smith concludes with a warning: 'Weapons of mass destruction have not gone away. Today, cold war tensions may have faded from the public mind and the media may be preoccupied with global warming, but the weapons are still out there, and the doomsday men are still at work developing new ones.'"

You can read the review here.

"'We are keeping the rings in this bucket, here.' A shell-shocked civil defense officer gestures to a hefty metal bucket at his feet, stuffed with what appear to be thousands of wedding rings. The rings have been gathered from the dead in a small British city; their inscriptions are the only hope authorities have of identifying those incinerated by the deployment of a nuclear weapon. 'This,' a narrator mournfully concludes, 'is nuclear war.'

The scene is imagined, only one of the wealth of emotionally overwhelming moments that make up Peter Watkins' 1965 Academy Award-winning fictional documentary The War Game, still the best film ever made on the subject. Nuclear war is not merely a matter of warheads and tactics, presidents and premiers; it is also a matter of the bucket of wedding rings.

This tension -- between warheads and wedding rings, detached analysis and a deep-rooted understanding of the human fallout from technologically accelerated combat -- forms the primary subject matter of P.D. Smith's engaging, unsettling Doomsday Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon. Scientifically and culturally adept, Doomsday Men tracks the pursuit of devastating weaponry in both laboratories and pulp magazines."

You can read the rest here.

Here are a couple of highlights:

"Doomsday Men offers a marvelous resource for understanding the issues and personalities underlying Kubrick's masterpiece and other creative interpretations of the Cold War. From pulp science-fiction stories to Godzilla's theatrical invasions, it is a veritable lexicon of atomic-age culture. Consequently, it is a long and meaty book, but fast-paced nonetheless. [...]

With the Cold War fading into history, Doomsday Men offers a valuable reminder of the period's fears and foibles. It provides an outstanding guide to a pivotal era when humanity first faced the terrifying prospect of annihilation by its own hand."

Read the whole review here.

It sounds scarcely believable but it's true - as I found out writing Doomsday Men, truth is often stranger than fiction. Forget about all the sophisticated electronic fail-safe locks you see in Hollywood movies preventing someone from detonating a nuclear bomb. Until 1998 the UK's nukes could be armed with a small metal key. So if one had fallen into the hands of terrorists there were no safeguards - a combination lock, for instance - to prevent them from detonating it.

Equally disturbing is the fact that Newsnight has discovered that UK submarine commanders have the ability to launch their nuclear missiles without authorization from the British Prime Minister. France and the United States introduced a fail-safe system of release codes to prevent a general from starting World War III, as happens in Dr Strangelove.

According to Newsnight, as early as 1966 an attempt was made to introduce such safeguards for British nuclear weapons. The Chief Scientific Adviser, Solly Zuckerman, told the Defence Secretary, Denis Healey: "the Government will need to be certain that any weapons deployed are under some form of 'ironclad' control".

But secret documents from the time reveal that the Royal Navy prevented this from happening. They argued that officers of the Royal Navy could be trusted with these ultimate weapons of mass destruction: "It would be invidious to suggest... that Senior Service officers may, in difficult circumstances, act in defiance of their clear orders".

Given that the UK plans to spend some £20 billion updating its Trident submarine missile system, maybe our government should also think about introducing some twenty-first century safeguards to protect us all from the misuse of these terrible weapons.

You can read a summary of Newsnight's findings and watch part of Watts' report here.

In December 1944, Moe found himself in the auditorium of the Zurich Polytechnic where a rebellious Einstein had once studied (one of his lecturers described him as a "lazy dog" for his failure to attend maths classes). On the stage that day was Werner Heisenberg, one of the central figures in the Nazi atomic bomb program, and Moe Berg was listening intently to what he was saying.

Moe was no fool. The six-foot one-inch tall baseball player had shone in his first appearance on the radio quiz show Information Please in 1938. A regular on the show later said he was the "most scholarly professional athlete" he'd ever met. At Princeton, Moe had studied seven languages, including Sanskrit. But it was German he needed that day in Zurich.

Despite his undoubted language skills, it's unclear how much of Heisenberg's abstruse discussion of S-matrix theory Moe Berg actually understood. After all, he wasn't a physicist. But what is clear is that Heisenberg didn't mention the atom bomb. For if he had, the baseball player from Newark would have reached into his pocket, taken out a .45 pistol, and shot him dead.

For Moe Berg - codename 'Remus' - was an operative of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, America's first central intelligence agency. His mission that day was to kill Heisenberg if he gave even the slightest hint during his lecture that the Nazis were close to building an atomic bomb. Fortunately for the quantum theorist, they weren't and the .45 stayed in Moe's pocket.

It's an extraordinary story - one of many moments of individual bravery now consigned to the history books of the atomic age. I came across it while reading the new paperback edition of Jeffrey T Richelson's Spying on the Atomic Bomb, a fascinating and detailed account of America's struggle to force the nuclear genie back into the bottle. Berg's exploits take up just a few pages of Richelson's impressive study which brings the story of proliferation right up to date with the latest intelligence assessment on Iran's atomic ambitions. His book reveals the secret history of spies and nuclear science that governments have in the past tried to keep hidden from their citizens.

Of course, in the Cold War most people were well aware of the threat from atomic weapons. Pop culture was full of references to the atomic age: fallout, H-bombs (as well as C-bombs and N-bombs), Geiger counters, radioactivity, megadeaths, and Doomsday Machines - this was the vocabulary of mass destruction that filled the newspapers and airwaves.

The A-word featured in countless film titles, from Canadian Mounties vs the Atomic Invaders (1953) to The Atomic Man (1956). Giant radioactive ants and dinosaurs rampaged across cinema screens. And in the first James Bond film, Dr No (1962), spies and mad atomic scientists came together in a cinematic formula that would prove a perennial success at the box-office.

As well as B movies about the A-bomb, children played with their toy Geiger counters and ate atomic fire ball candy. There were zappy atomic ray guns and, for the serious atomic nerds, there was the atomic energy lab, with real samples of uranium ore. (Can you imagine the teacher's reaction today if one of her kids came up and said, "Hey, miss, Susie has stolen my uranium!"?)

But for the adults, there was always the fear nagging in the back of their minds about what to do if the sirens sounded. Would government advice on how to "Protect and Survive" or "Duck and Cover" really be any good? One government sponsored book On How to Survive an Atomic Bomb, published in 1950, gave sartorial advice for Doomsday: women should wear stockings and long-sleeved dresses, and men should wear wide-brimmed hats.

For those who didn't swallow the official propaganda, there were other fanatasies. Such as the survivalist dream of returning to a frontier existence after the bombs had fallen and society had dissolved into a Mad Max world. It was a warped dream that spawned atomic erotica and even post-nuclear porn - books like Jane Gallion's Biker (1969) and George Smith's The Coming of the Rats (1961).

Today references to atomic or nuclear imagery have largely dropped out of pop culture. In fact, when they do appear, nukes are more likely to be saving the planet than destroying it, as in films like Armageddon (1998) or Sunshine (2007). The Cold War and the Atomic Age seem like ancient history to a new generation - stuff people tell you in school. Few really believe any more that "This Could Happen Tomorrow!".

Personally, I was never a great fan of the Atomic Energy Lab. But, as books like Richelson's show, the nukes are still out there - in the UK and the US as well as Iran and Russia. We might not be so obsessed with them, but they haven't gone away. And as President Putin gloats over the launch of a new missile that can hit a target 3,800 miles away with pin-point accuracy, the headlines are once again speaking of a new Cold War. We may need people like Moe Berg sooner than you think.

[also posted on TNB]

In his film Dr Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick did for the Cold War what he had done for space in 2001: he intensified it, thereby making it more theatrical and at the same time giving it more depth. It is easily the funniest movie made about global thermo-nuclear war, and Strangelove seems not to have lost its bite, even though we think (mistakenly) that we have escaped the nuclear age.

Read the rest of Coker's interesting piece here.