“This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service. This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons. Communications have been severely disrupted, and the number of casualties and the extent of the damage are not yet known. We shall bring you further information as soon as possible. Meanwhile, stay tuned to this wavelength, stay calm and stay in your homes.”

These are the words people would have heard on their radios in Britain following a nuclear attack – that is if they were still alive. The chilling script of this broadcast, written in the 1970s, has just been released by the National Archives.

In 1955 the British government asked a top civil servant to assess the scale of the threat posed by a nuclear attack. The Strath Report, as it is known, was declassified in 2002. It makes grim reading.

Strath estimated that a “successful night attack” on Britain’s major cities with ten hydrogen bombs would kill at least twelve million people and seriously injure four million more – a third of Britain’s population. Such an attack was equivalent to dropping 100 million tons of high explosive. This was, he said, “45 times as great as the total tonnage of bombs delivered by the Allies over Germany, Italy, and occupied France throughout the whole of the last war”.

Strath spelled out to his political masters in dry and matter-of-fact language the utter horror that every person in the land might have to face. “Hydrogen bomb war would be total war in a sense not hitherto conceived. The entire nation would be in the front line.”

In many of the bombed areas, there would be a total breakdown of civil order. Chaos would reign. “The household would become the unit of survival,” said Strath. But even those sheltering in their homes would be at risk from radiation and fallout. Up to 50 miles from an explosion, people would receive such heavy doses of radiation that, if they survived, they would be ill for weeks. For a thousand square miles around each bomb it would be “suicidal” even to venture outside.

“Morale,” concluded William Strath with breathtaking understatement, “would be very low.”

In this BBC statement that has just been released the message is clear: “stay calm and stay in your homes”. Or, as Lance Corporal Jack Jones might have said in Dad’s Army, “Don’t panic!” Stay indoors, switch off your gas, don’t use water for flushing the toilet, and ration your food, “because it may have to last for 14 days or more.”

There is though one sentence that seems to hint at the appalling scale of the disaster that has befallen the country and the world: “Remember there is nothing to be gained by trying to get away.” Indeed. Quite apart from the invisible fallout blowing on the wind, where would you go?

You can download the full text of the statement on the BBC website.

“Stay tuned to this wavelength, but switch your radios off now to save your batteries until we come on the air again. That is the end of this broadcast.”

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.

"'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.

Weaving together biography, science and art, Smith has created a compelling history of physics in the 20th century, focusing on the long-lasting search for ever more destructive weapons—from the development of chemical warfare in World War I Germany through the arms race of the Cold War. Explaining “why some of the most gifted and idealistic men of the twentieth century spent so much effort trying to destroy the planet,” Smith’s dynamic, riveting narrative reveals details of people, places and events that are rarely covered in textbooks, bringing to life not just scientists like Robert Oppenheimer and Leo Szilard, but the horrors of chemical and atomic warfare. Time and again, “it seemed that a giant leap forward for science also meant a step backward for mankind,” and contemporary film and fiction echoed this sentiment with “clear signs… [of] genuine resentment towards scientists for betraying the high ideals of their profession and, indeed, the best interests of humanity.” Ironically, the goal of many of these scientists was peace, not war: “Many scientists were convinced that the terrible reality of atomic superweapons would force nations to resolve their disputes and work for world peace.” Captivating and thoroughly referenced, this chronicle should interest a wide audience, from science and history buffs to armchair politicos.

Here's the first paragraph:

"On February 27 1956, Khrushchev and members of the Supreme Soviet Presidium (as the Politburo was then known) left Moscow in a convoy of official limousines bound for NII-88, the USSR's top-secret rocket research laboratory. They were on their way to meet a man whose work was so secret his name had been erased from all records. Officially referred to as the chief designer, the man in charge of the Soviet missile programme would only be named after his death: Sergei Korolev."

They are very different books: Red Moon Rising is popular in style, with a compelling narrative. Iron Curtain is a richly researched and highly original history that reveals the origins of that key Cold War metaphor - the Iron Curtain. Both are well worth reading and I recommend them.

You can read the rest of the review on the Guardian's site, 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]

"There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons," said the Devil in George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman. Shaw's adage could almost be the leitmotiv of P.D. Smith's well-researched and altogether depressing account of humankind's long hunt for the ultimate superweapon: a doomsday device that, by its very terribleness, would make war forevermore unwinnable, and hence unthinkable. Although we all know how this tale turns out, it is a journey well worth taking. Along the way, Smith includes some fascinating asides about the men - and it was, almost exclusively, a fraternity - who, in seeking to make war obsolete, have only made it more deadly.

Herken concludes:

One can only sympathize with the author's observation that, since the end of the Cold War, global warming and Islamist terrorism have distracted our attention from the weapons that remain in the arsenals of nations, numerous, primed and waiting. Although not as deadly as Smith's fictive doomsday bomb, they are cause for us to be more fearful, for they are real.

It's a classic moment in movie history: President Merkin Muffley (aka Peter Sellers) has just called the Soviet Premier on the telephone to tell him that in the next hour, 34 US bombers will each drop 40 megatons of H-bombs onto his country. As the Premier delivers a withering blast of Marxist-Leninist abuse down the phone line, Muffley looks pained: "Well, how do you think I feel about this?"

Unknown to the President and indeed the rest of humanity, the Soviets have just activated the ultimate weapon of mass destruction - the Doomsday Machine. This superweapon to end all superweapons is triggered automatically by a nuclear attack. At its heart is the cobalt bomb, a doomsday device that had filled people with fear since it was first suggested by one of the fathers of the atomic age, Leo Szilard, in 1950. Over a decade later, the Soviet Ambassador, De Sadeski, describes Szilard's deadly brainchild in Kubrick's film Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb:

"If you take, say, fifty H-bombs in the hundred-megaton range and jacket them with Cobalt-Thorium-G, when they are exploded they will produce a Doomsday shroud, a lethal cloud of radioactivity which will encircle the earth for ninety-three years."

In a MAD world there was an insane logic to the C-bomb. It certainly embodied the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction: You attack me and I'll blow us both up! That's a pretty big deterrent. Unfortunately it doesn't really work if you forget to tell your enemy that you've got a Doomsday Machine, a fact Dr Strangelove points out to the Ambassador.

"It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday," he replies. "As you know, the Premier loves surprises."

You can hear the clip of De Sadeski talking about the C-bomb in a radio interview I did about my book Doomsday Men here.

Recently I was fascinated to see that some of the themes I explored in my book are also at the heart of Joe Penhall's excellent new play, Landscape with Weapon. The world premiere was in April at the National Theatre in London.

Penhall shows what happens when a scientific and engineering genius thinks he can control how his discovery is used by the military. His character Ned has invented a revolutionary type of unmanned air vehicle that doesn't need GPS to navigate. Like a flock of starlings swirling in the twilight sky, his military drones develop "intuitive emergent behaviour" which allows them to navigate themselves. Such drones could penetrate underground tunnels and bunkers in pursuit of a target. Initially, Ned intended them for surveillance, but the military quickly saw the offensive potential and "weaponised" them.

Ned's brother is appalled when he finds out that he has been working on weapons of mass destruction. Ned defends his invention:

"as well as being a weapon...it's a 'deterrent'. A-a-a-a psychological weapon, it's so frightening and and and appalling...it works without even being used..."

Heard the argument before somewhere?

But, of course, the arms race didn't end with the thawing of the Cold War. There may not have been any WMD in Iraq but there are still tens of thousands of nuclear weapons around the world. And somewhere, in a town near you perhaps, today's Strangeloves are still chasing the dream of the superweapon. As Oppenheimer said about the original plans for the hydrogen bomb in 1951, they were "technically so sweet" that scientists and engineers couldn't resist the challenge of turning them into reality.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the superweapon promised to solve the most intractable problem facing humanity - to end war. In the many examples of novels and plays about the superweapon, the saviour scientist emerged from his laboratory carrying the technological solution that would make war redundant overnight.

Penhall's Landscape with Weapon is the most recent contribution to this genre and a compelling drama too. At the start of the play, Ned - like the real scientists Fritz Haber and Robert Oppenheimer - thought his invention would prevent or even abolish war. By the end of the play not only has he lost control of his technology, but he has learnt that such inventions - however brilliant - cannot end war; because as Ned says they are "technological solutions for a human problem".

If only we too could learn this lesson, we might avoid repeating the mistakes of the last century.

[also posted on The Nervous Breakdown]

The interview includes some fascinating audio clips from their archives - descriptions of the Nagasaki atomic bomb, one by a worker in the shipyard and one from Captain Leonard Cheshire who witnessed the explosion from the air, as well as President Kennedy talking about the Soviet resumption of nuclear tests.

There is also a clip from Kubrick's classic film Dr Strangelove - the moment when the Russian Ambassador describes the Doomsday Machine...

You can listen to my interview below.