Szilard - the brilliant scientist who saw how to realise HG Wells's dream of atomic energy in the 1930s - is the central figure in my study of superweapons. He was a wonderfully witty and engaging character. He fiercely opposed the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and after the war became a tireless campaigner for nuclear arms control. After one of his articles on the subject was rejected by a newspaper editor, he told a friend: "If they cannot take it straight, they'll get it in fiction." The Voice of the Dolphins was the result.

It collects the stories he had been writing from the end of the war until 1961. As historian Daniel J Kevles has said, "it is a fiction of Swiftian nature, addressed to major issues, including those of geopolitics, the arms race, disarmament, population control, the morality of war, and the mismatch between modern man's enormous technical capabilities and his limited moral capacities." The collection is also wonderfully expressive of Szilard's own character and speaks powerfully of the influence of HG Wells on his life and work.

One reviewer noted its quality of "half farce and half nightmare". It was a quality that Stanley Kubrick soon realised was essential to depict an era living in the shadow of the Bomb. His classic film Dr Strangelove also depicts Szilard's most chilling brain-child: the cobalt doomsday bomb.

As Van Strum rightly says, "the satire, humor, and serious issues in these stories are as relevant today as they were forty-some years ago - a sorry reflection on our failure to heed the words of the wise."

She concludes with a wonderful quotation from Robert Lawson's The Fabulous Flight (1949), in which a boy called Peter and his seagull, Gus, steal a superweapon the size of an aspirin which is powerful enough to wipe out all of Europe:

"'Gus,' Peter said suddenly. 'I've been thinking about that capsule. We've got it and nobody else can get it and I don't think we ought to give it to anyone - even our own Government. It's just too terrible.'

"'Ben sort of thinkin' the same thing myself,' Gus replied. 'Of course I ain't eddicated, but seems to me that ain't a thing anybody ought to be let loose with."

You can read her excellent article here.

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.

Enjoy.

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.

"Doomsday Men analyses dozens of examples of how culture influenced science in the devising of superweapons. They range from the prophetic writings of HG Wells, and the science fiction published in Amazing Stories and other magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, to highly influential post-atomic-bomb novels such as Nevil Shute's On the Beach and Mordecai Roshwald's Level 7. And, of course, there is the darkly comic film Dr Strangelove, directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1963, in which the story centres around the 'doomsday machine' - a phrase originally coined by gung-ho phyisicst Herman Kahn."

Robinson concludes that Doomsday Men "successfully shows how and why superweapons have been simultaneously admired and reviled by both scientists and the public."