The launch was monitored by the West’s spy satellites. But it was an unexceptional moment in the history of the arms race and soon forgotten. Only after the Berlin Wall had been breached, and the ice of the cold war began to thaw, did military analysts realize the significance of these otherwise unexceptional rocket launches. They were the first operational test of what the Western press later described as ‘Russia’s doomsday machine’.

In my book Doomsday Men, I showed how popular culture played a vital role in inspiring the dream of the superweapon, a dream that in the nuclear age turned into the nightmare of mutually assured destruction, or MAD.

More than any other weapon, it was Leo Szilard’s chilling notion of the cobalt bomb (first described on American radio in 1950) that came to symbolize the threat of global nuclear destruction. The C-bomb consisted of one or more massive hydrogen bombs jacketed with cobalt. It was the ultimate weapon, a doomsday device which could spread radioactive fallout across the entire planet.

As throughout the history of superweapons, fiction and film played a key role in exploring the horrific implications of the C-bomb and how it could be used to create a doomsday machine, most famously in Peter George’s best-selling thriller Red Alert (1958) and Stanley Kubrick’s cold-war classic (based on George’s novel) Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

As Ambassador DeSadeski explains in Dr Strangelove: ‘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!’

Twenty years after Kubrick’s film depicted the world being destroyed by a Soviet doomsday machine, the real one became operational. Nicknamed by its commanders ‘The Dead Hand’, it was a sophisticated system of sensors, communication networks and command bunkers, reinforced to withstand nuclear strikes. At its heart was a computer. As soon as the Soviet leadership detected possible incoming missiles, it activated the system, known by its code name ‘Perimetr’. Part of the secret codes needed to launch a Soviet nuclear strike were released and the computerized process set in motion. Then, like a spider at the centre of its web, the computer would watch and wait for evidence of an attack.

As I said in my book, the way it worked was strikingly similar to the doomsday machine described by Dr Strangelove. He explained that the computer was ‘linked to a vast interlocking network of data-input sensors which are stationed throughout the country and orbited in satellites. These sensors monitor heat, ground shock, sound, atmospheric pressure and radioactivity.’

Much about the Dead Hand system is still shrouded in secrecy. Russian arms expert Bruce Blair revealed the first details in 1993. Recently declassified interviews with former Soviet officials have cast fresh light on the system. They show that there were doubts about its reliability. Some even questioned whether it was ever fully deployed. However, these interviews also reveal the shocking possibility that the Dead Hand system may have been fully automatic.

Previously it was thought that once the computer detected signs of an attack, it required human approval before any counter attack could be launched. A Soviet officer buried deep underground in a command post would have had the unenviable task of authorising the Dead Hand to complete its lethal task. But these interviews raise the possibility that the Dead Hand had eliminated the need for any human control. It may be that the Dead Hand could launch the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal as soon as its sensors indicated that an attack had occurred. That idea is truly terrifying.

A machine would be responsible for unleashing nuclear weapons with a total destructive power as much as 50,000 times greater than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Even without Szilard's C-bomb, who knows what would be left alive after such a nuclear holocaust.

Intriguingly, Nicholas Thompson, writing in Wired today, argues that Perimetr was actually designed ‘to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis’. In other words, it was an insurance policy meant to reassure the Kremlin’s hawks that their country could hit back, even after a sneak attack by submarine launched missiles, which would have given the Soviet leadership barely thirteen minutes advance warning of a devastating attack.

As far as anyone knows, the Dead Hand remains operational. What is truly worrying, even today, is the secrecy that continues to surround the whole subject. Thompson has found that neither George Schultz nor former CIA director James Woolsey had heard of the Dead Hand system. Former Soviet era officials will still not discuss it. One who dared to talk died in mysterious circumstances. Such secrecy is, as Dr Strangelove realised, disastrous: ‘Yes, but the...whole point of the doomsday machine...is lost...if you keep it a secret! Why didn’t you tell the world, eh?’

The doomsday machine is supposed to be the ultimate deterrent. But if no one knows that the deterrent exists... Well, you've all seen the final scenes of Dr Strangelove.

You can listen to the interview here (MP3).

By the way, if you can read German, there's also an interesting article about my book and the Soviet "Doomsday Machine", Perimetr, on Telepolis.

Having read my book, he's followed up some of my references to the Soviet-era computerised system called Perimetr. This was designed to launch the Russian nuclear arsenal in the event of a surprise attack that wiped out their top brass. It all sounds eerily similar to the one described in Dr Strangelove...

It's well worth taking the time to read some of the fascinating comments to Rosenbaum's article too.

“In a deeper and darker study, popular science historian PD Smith takes the Faustian theme more seriously. Using a wider range of sources than Segrè (including literature, popular magazines and film), he charts the ways in which science and science fiction interacted in a quest for Doomsday ‘superweapons’ in the 20th century. From HG Wells to Dr Strangelove and after, fiction has evoked weapons of mass destruction and their consequences, and created new horizons of possibility. Many scientists and policy-makers reacted to the possibilities, and from the First World War onwards, scientists worked with the military to produce the weapons and strategies that shaped the world in which we now live. Smith’s book offers a much broader cultural-historical perspective than Segrè’s, and an equally approachable history of atomic science.”

I've not yet read Segrè's book, but I'm looking forward to doing so...

"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.

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.

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 idea that all life on earth might be extinguished very soon, and that human technology will be the cause, is deeply ingrained in our culture. Indeed, historians of the future, assuming there is a future, may be intrigued by how easily we have switched from nuclear anxieties to the environmental kind: do we enjoy thinking that we’re destroying the planet?"

He concludes that I succeeded in putting "the nuclear age into a new context, engagingly and even excitingly".

You can read the whole review online here, although unfortunately without the great photo from Dr Strangelove of Slim Pickens atop the H-bomb which they printed with the review.

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.

"It is an impassioned account of everything from the discovery of radioactivity to plans for a Doomsday Device (yes, there really were such plans) from an author who feels that to the generations growing up who see the Cold War only as something in history books, the true horror of nuclear weapons has been forgotten. While politicians talk glibly of 'weapons of mass destruction', nobody has any real feeling for what it means to experience intense machine gun fire, the kind of bombing that destroyed Dresden, or a nuclear holocaust. Nor do many people know that there are still about 30,000 nuclear weapons still ready for launch around the world. Doomsday Men aims to address that gap, focusing on nuclear weapons, but also looking at other forms of mass destruction."

 He concludes that Doomsday Men is "important, and, depressingly, there is a need for it - people, especially younger people than me, ought to read it".