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.

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.

"Taking Dr. Strangelove as his main reference-point, Peter D. Smith sets out to give us a narrative of the history of the superweapon, whose origin he dates more or less to the discovery of radioactivity. One of the main strengths of this account lies in Smith’s ability to combine science, history, and fiction in an engrossing cultural history of one of the concepts lying at the heart of the Cold War. It may sound odd, but the superweapon was conceived in a utopian spirit as the device which would end war once and for all. This idea was from the very beginning politically naïve and internally flawed. Smith rightly presents H. G. Wells’s 1914 novel The World Set Free as a formative text in imagining how the world could be reborn through atomic war. Here Wells was technologically prescient, but also disturbingly unconcerned about the millions who would have to be atomized to realize this dream. It was a dream made possible by an enterprising scientist, and Smith charts out fascinatingly how the figure of the scientist fluctuated in the period from the turn of the twentieth century up to the 1960s between the polarized extremes of a role as saviour of humanity or its villainous destroyer."

(David Seed, Modern Language Review 104.1 (Jan 2009), 195-6)

"From Adam and Eve to Dr Faustus and Dr Strangelove, the history - and popular culture - of the human race is littered with examples of our fatal fascination with the acquisition of knowledge. As PD Smith points out, Homo sapiens is the only species which knows it will die. So what is it that drives intelligent, rational men and women to push back the boundaries of science, knowing that their work will be used to develop ever more powerful methods of mass destruction? Written with all the pace of a thriller, this is a compelling, and ultimately extremely chilling, look at the way scientific discovery has always gone hand-in-hand with warfare, and it captures the sense of urgency and excitement felt in the race to create the atomic bomb."

The second is by Jon Swaine in today's Daily Telegraph:

"The story of the plan to create the C-bomb - a nu­clear bomb cap­able of dest­roy­ing all life on Earth - is chilling. Yet PD Smith's history, told with the joyful enthusiasm of a sci-fi aficionado, is also irresistible. Darting between history and biographies of the key scientists, Smith includes doomsday devices from fiction, showing how prescient some writers have (almost) proved. The tension at the story's heart - why their generation's most gifted scientists would seek to create potential apocalypse to preserve peace - endures, anchoring this surreal period drama in reality, 20 years after the end of the Cold War."

“the point is…this is exactly what happened in Vietnam…a technological solution to a human problem…”

- Joe Penhall, Landscape with Weapon (2007)

If you were a physicist in the 1920s and 30s, all roads led to Copenhagen’s Blegdamsvej 15. This was where Niels Bohr’s Institute of Theoretical Physics was located. The Ukrainian-born physicist George Gamow recalled that “the Institute buzzed with young theoretical physicists and new ideas about atoms, atomic nuclei, and the quantum theory in general”. [1]

He was a superb footballer and had played to near professional level as a young man. But in physics the tall, softly-spoken Niels Bohr was in a league of his own. German physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker said after meeting Bohr: “I have seen a physicist for the first time. He suffers as he thinks.” [2] Together with Ernest Rutherford, Bohr had mapped the structure of the atom, and later, in the 1920s, he helped shape the quantum revolution, despite strong resistance from its founder, the former patent officer from Bern – Albert Einstein. Einstein’s debates in the late 1920s with Bohr on quantum theory were like a scientific clash of the Titans. Einstein could never accept the indeterministic quantum mechanics that grew out of his own 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect.

Bohr’s annual conference, to which he invited about thirty physicists, was the highlight of the physics’ year. From the 3rd to 13th April 1932, the brightest minds in physics gathered together in Copenhagen. In a few years’ time, many of these same physicists would be working on the atomic bomb. But for now, they still had time for a little light-hearted play acting.

Each year the conference ended with what George Gamow called a “stunt pertaining to recent developments in physics”. [3] The year before, Gamow had rounded up proceedings with a cartoon history of quantum mechanics, starring Mickey Mouse in the lead role. [4] In 1932, as it was the centenary of Goethe’s death, they decided to stage a version of the German writer’s greatest play, Faust.

Written when the industrial revolution was transforming Germany, Goethe’s Faust raises key questions regarding science and technology, questions such as what is the purpose of knowledge, and how can we have progress without increasing human suffering?

Goethe’s Faust is a proto-scientist (the word ‘scientist’ was not coined until 1834), whose desire to know nature’s deepest secrets, leads him to strike a fateful bargain with Mephistopheles. In the sixteenth century, the story of Faust had been used by the Church to frighten people about the dangers of forbidden (i.e. non-Christian) knowledge. Goethe’s play re-works the classic theme for the modern age. His Faust celebrates the spirit of inquiry, while highlighting the dangers of misapplied knowledge. True scientific understanding, Goethe suggests, is life-affirming and creative, not destructive and exploitative.

The 1932 Faust was re-written and, of course, greatly abridged by the younger scientists at Bohr’s conference. Their literary skills were no doubt boosted by the products of Copenhagen’s other claim to fame – the Carlsberg Brewery, which also happened to be one of Danish science’s most generous benefactors. Max Delbrück, who would later become a central figure in the post-war revolution in molecular biology, did most of the writing.

The play is re-worked into what is essentially a humorous skit at the expense of the leading physicists of the day. Goethe’s characters were replaced with contemporary physicists, their younger colleagues donning masks to play them on stage. Mephistopheles became the irascible Austrian Wolfgang Pauli, while Faust became Paul Ehrenfest, a close friend of Einstein. The role of God was reserved, appropriately enough, for their host, Niels Bohr.

Wolfgang Pauli’s rudeness was legendary. In the play he bluntly tells the painfully polite Niels Bohr (aka God) that his latest theory is “Crap”. [5] But their gentlemanly host, Niels Bohr, is also gently mocked. His almost pathological fear of being too critical becomes the motto of the play, emblazoned on the text’s cover: “Nicht um zu kritisieren” (Not to criticize). Even Einstein doesn’t escape unscathed. His flawed unified field theory, which had created a media storm of interest when it was published in 1929, is lampooned by his young colleagues as the son of a flea.

Faust is depicted as a proud, even vain, figure, one who is deeply dissatisfied by what he has learnt and what physics can offer. Mephistopheles tries to tempt Faust by convincing him to accept one of the more outlandish theories in quantum physics – Pauli’s own idea of the neutrino, a particle without mass or charge. If once he can make Faust say to such a theory “Verweile doch! Du bis so schön!” (Stay! You are so beautiful!) then he has won his wager with God.

At times the play is anarchic, even Dadaist, in its celebration of the bizarre world of quantum theory. But in the 1930s the new physics was itself full of weird and wonderful notions. Niels Bohr once greeted one of Pauli’s theories with the comment: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question, which divides us, is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.” [6]

The physicists transform Faust’s death scene at the end of Goethe’s play into a moment of supreme bathos. Mephistopheles ushers a press photographer on stage and it is this that is Faust’s undoing. Paul Ehrenfest utters Faust’s famous dying words, just as he is about to be immortalized by the photographer:

“Faust (highly excited, he takes a pose for the press photographer)

To this fair moment let me say:

‘You are so beautiful – Oh, stay!’

A trace of me will linger ’mongst the Great,

Within the annals of The Fourth Estate.

Anticipating fortune so benign,

I now enjoy the moment that is mine!” [7]

Although humour was the last thing in Goethe’s mind as he penned this poignant scene, in the physicists’ version of Faust it becomes a wonderfully witty moment, albeit with serious undertones. The younger physicists are making fun of their colleagues’ vanity and self-importance. Indeed, by highlighting the theme of fame, they were making an important point: in the coming years nuclear physicists would indeed enter the public eye and feature ever more frequently in the media.

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by the new scientific superweapon, the public would come to view scientists such as Einstein and Oppenheimer with both respect and fear. Eventually, as they were drawn ever closer to the government and the military, the price physicists would pay for their Faustian bargain was to be immortalized as Dr Strangelove, the ultimate doomsday man.

At the end of the play, a physicist who had entered the media spotlight in 1932 made a brief appearance as Faust’s over-ambitious famulus, Wagner. James Chadwick is portrayed by his fellow physicists as “a personification of the ideal experimentalist”. He walks on stage after Faust’s death scene wearing the scientist’s trade-mark lab coat and balancing a black ball on one finger.

This rather sinister looking figure announces an extraordinary discovery, one of which Faust himself would have been proud. James Chadwick had found one of the basic constituents of matter: the third elementary particle after protons and electrons, the neutron.

The discovery of the neutron, just before the Copenhagen conference, was a seminal achievement for modern nuclear physics. Its discovery made possible Leo Szilard’s idea in the following year of a self-sustaining chain reaction. Indeed there are Faustian echoes here too. For in 1932 Szilard read HG Wells’s novel The World Set Free about a Faustian scientist discovering how to release the energy locked in the heart of the atom. [8] Szilard’s discovery helped open the door to the atomic bomb.

1932 was an important year as regards the science of the superweapon. Wernher von Braun was hired by the German army to design rocket engines, the first step on the path towards ICBMs. In the same year Harold Urey announced the discovery of a new hydrogen isotope known as deuterium. This would become the fuel for the hydrogen bomb. These are powerful reminders that the tragedy of Goethe’s Faust was about to be played out on a world stage. Clearly, the lessons of the play and of Goethe’s science were still profoundly relevant.

In Part II, Act 2 of Goethe’s Faust, Wagner (Chadwick in the 1932 performance) uses alchemy to create not a neutron but a homunculus, a miniature man. In this scene Goethe criticizes what he considered to be a misguided approach to science. Wagner’s alchemistic attempt to create the homunculus combines allusions to both Paracelsian recipes and contemporary advances in chemistry, such as Friedrich Wöhler’s synthesising of urea in 1828. [9] But significantly Wagner only succeeds because Mephistopheles is present. Goethe highlights the fact that Wagner’s approach to science is flawed and supernatural intervention is required to make it work.

Faust has turned his back on alchemy and the knowledge of books at the beginning of the play. As Faust discovers, neither words, books nor instruments alone lead to true knowledge. His passionate desire to grasp ‘the inmost force / That bonds the very universe’ (ll.382-3, “was die Welt / Im Innersten zusammenhält”) is a scientific and philosophical goal Faust pursues tirelessly throughout his life, regardless of the cost to himself or others around him. [10] But he too has much to learn about science and knowledge. For Goethe, one of the most important lessons was that the route to scientific knowledge and self-knowledge was a parallel process. As he wrote in 1823: “The human being knows himself only insofar as he knows the world; he perceives the world only in himself, and himself only in the world.” [11]

At the end of the play Goethe highlights the dangers of the misapplication of scientific knowledge. Thanks to the temptations of Mephistopheles, Faust has lost touch with the insights he has gained into both nature and himself. His overambitious attempt to reclaim land from the sea, a hasty and hubristic act which results in the deaths of the old couple, Baucis and Philemon, represents Goethe’s fears about the misuse of science and technology. It is one thing to understand the laws of nature – the forces that bind the universe – and to be able to control these laws. It is something else entirely to be able to use this power wisely.

By performing Faust in 1932, the physicists created some intriguing parallels between Wagner and Chadwick, as well as the neutron and the homunculus. Goethe used the scene in Wagner’s laboratory both to belittle alchemy’s supposed achievements and to criticize mechanistic science for its hubristic attempts to play god. What, one wonders, would Goethe have made of Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron?

Goethe’s notion that scientific knowledge and self-knowledge should evolve hand-in-hand, is a deeply suggestive theme when one looks at the history of twentieth-century science. What is the point of knowing nature’s deepest secrets, Goethe asks, if humankind never attains self-knowledge? The Faustian physicist might control the forces of nature but he does not understand, let alone control, himself.

It is fascinating that the atomic physicists gathered at Bohr’s Institute in spring 1932 chose to perform Goethe’s play at this pivotal moment in the history of science. Six years later, one of the twentieth century’s greatest playwrights began a work that would raise profound questions about the purpose of science in the atomic age. After many revisions, the final version of Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo was first performed in 1955. By then, as Oppenheimer said, the scientists had known sin and the world was living in fear of an imminent nuclear holocaust. This hugely influential play reflected the widely-held view that twentieth-century science was in crisis.

Brecht’s Galileo is a Faustian character, who initially boasts that he would happily live out his life in a dark, windowless prison if he could but discover the secret of light. But at the end of his life, under house arrest and – like the aged Faust – nearly blind, Galileo has realised that science is about more than describing the laws of nature.

Brecht believed that, as a human activity, science had a moral dimension that was increasingly ignored. In the midst of the cold war, as the superpowers and their scientists transformed the laws of nature into ever more terrible weapons of mass destruction, Brecht called for a more human-centred science, a point he makes by paraphrasing Galileo’s contemporary Francis Bacon: “I believe that the sole objective of science consists in reducing the drudgery of human existence.” According to Brecht, the alternative is that each advance in scientific knowledge results in “progress away from humanity”. The scientists’ shrieks of Eureka! will one day be greeted by “a universal cry of horror” because of the ever more lethal technologies their discoveries make possible. [12]

Goethe would no doubt have been flattered that a century after his death some of the world’s most gifted physicists performed a version of his greatest play. He would, however, have been appalled to discover that soon scientists such as these would create weapons that could incinerate tens of thousands of people in an instant. Would he have been surprised though? I doubt it.

Today, despite the myriad distractions of an increasingly technologized culture, the lessons of Goethe’s Faust remain profoundly relevant to us all. As Brecht so eloquently put it in the final scene of Galileo:

"May you now guard science’s light

Kindle it and use it right

Lest it be a flame to fall

Downward to consume us all.

Yes, us all." [13]

References

The issues surrounding the physicists’ Faust are discussed at greater length in my book, Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon, and in an article for the current issue of the Publications of the English Goethe Society, available to download here.

1. George Gamow, Thirty Years That Shook Physics, 1966; repr Mineola, N.Y., 1985, 51.

2. Cited in Richard P. Feynman, Don’t You Have time to Think?, London, 2005, xii.

3. Gamow, 167.

4. John Canaday, The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics and the First Atomic Bombs, Madison, 2000, 268, n.

5. The Blegdamsvej Faust is on microfilm 66 of the Archive for the History of Quantum Physics (American Philosophical Society). An English version, together with the illustrations, is in Gamow, 165-218.

6. Bohr cited in Robert Ehrlich, Eight Preposterous Propositions, Princeton, 2005, 5.

7. Gamow, 210.

8. H.G. Wells, The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind, 1914; repr. as The Last War, Lincoln, 2001.

9. P.D. Smith, ‘Scientific Themes in Goethe’s Faust’, in Paul Bishop, ed., A Companion to Goethe’s Faust, Rochester, N.Y., 2001, 198-99.

10. See ibid., 194–220.

11. “Der Mensch kennt nur sich selbst, insofern er die Welt kennt, die er nur in sich und sich nur in ihr gewahr wird. Jeder neue Gegenstand, wohl beschaut, schließt ein neues Organ in uns auf.” Goethe, “Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges Geistreiches Wort” (1823), Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, 1981, vol 13, 38; tr. Douglas Miller: Goethe, Scientific Studies, Princeton, 1995, 39.

12. On Brecht and Bacon see PD Smith, Metaphor & Materiality: German Literature and the World-View of Science 1780-1955 (Oxford, 2000), 304; all quotes in this paragraph from Brecht, Life of Galileo, scene 14.

13. Life of Galileo, Scene 15; tr. Charles Laughton (Penguin, 2008).

“Hütet nun ihr der Wissenschaften Licht

Nutzt es und mißbraucht es nicht

Daß es nicht, ein Feuerfall

Einst verzehre noch uns all

Ja, uns all.”

Apparently, in Portuguese Dr Strangelove is translated as Dr. Fantástico.

The UK edition is now also available in paperback at Amazon, Waterstone's, The Book Depository and your local bookshop.

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.”

The demonstration had been organised by the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (DAC) and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) joined in. Gerald Holtom, a designer and former World War II conscientious objector, persuaded DAC that they needed an image to express their aims. To create this he used letters from the semaphore - or flag-signalling - alphabet, super-imposing N (uclear) on D (isarmament) and placing them within a circle symbolising the Earth.

The full story is told in Ken Kolsbun's new book, Peace: The Biography of a Symbol. There's also a fascinating article about it on the BBC.

They interview peace historian Lawrence S. Wittner who says that "it is still the dominant peace sign," a fact partly due to its beautiful simplicity. It's perfect for spraying on walls and is a universally recognised symbol of peace and resistance to repression.

As Wittner says, although people are still fighting wars - this weekend is also the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq - there has not yet been a nuclear war:

"There are many ways in which nuclear war has been prevented. The hawks say that the reason nuclear weapons have not been used is because of the deterrent. But I believe popular pressure has restrained powers from using them and helped curbed the arms race."

I agree that popular movements have played a big role in preventing nuclear war. But I would also argue that fiction and film brought the unique horrors of nuclear war alive in people's imaginations. The role of writers like HG Wells and Peter George (aka Peter Bryant), whose novel Red Alert was the basis for Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is often forgotten. They too helped prevent war.

A peaceful Easter to you all!

"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.