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.

The AWE facility is where Britain's nuclear warheads are produced. Last month it was revealed that the US military has been using Britain's atomic weapons factory to carry out research into its own warhead programme, according to evidence seen by the Guardian.

The Ministry of Defence has admitted it is working with the US on the UK's "existing nuclear warhead stockpile and the range of replacement options that might be available" but has declined to give any further information.

Although Congress halted the Bush administration's plans for a new generation of nuclear warhead known as the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), it seems the US military may have used facilities in the UK to get around the restrictions at home.

At a time of global recession, with job losses being reported every day, there is a silver lining to this story: apparently the nuclear arms industry is flourishing and indeed expanding in the UK. One website I found has two pages of current jobs on offer at AWE.

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.

"Nuclear weapons have shown themselves to be completely useless as a deterrent to the threats and scale of violence we currently, or are likely to, face — particularly international terrorism; and the more you analyse them the more unusable they appear. [...] Our independent deterrent has become virtually irrelevant except in the context of domestic politics. Rather than perpetuating Trident, the case is much stronger for funding our Armed Forces with what they need to meet the commitments actually laid upon them. In the present economic climate it may well prove impossible to afford both."

Let's hope that the words of a former Chief of the Defence Staff might change the minds of the politicians who recently voted to renew Britain's nuclear deterrent. You can read the whole letter here.

There is also a very good article by Paul Rogers, Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University, on the need to change the Cold War mindset of our leaders, today's Doomsday Men, online at the New Internationalist.

A fascinating and chilling report by the BBC's Gordon Corera about the crash of a B52 bomber in northern Greenland in 1968, during which a nuclear weapon was lost beneath the ice, illustrates some of the dangers of the nuclear arms race. Read his report here.

December has a way of creeping up on you. It seems just a few weeks since summer was here and Abbas was making hay in the Alps.

2008 has been a year of fear and hope. Mighty financial institutions have collapsed overnight and America has elected its first African-American President. Apparently, Reinhold Niebuhr and Nietzsche are among Barack Obama’s favorite authors, although I can’t imagine he has had much time for reading this year. Which is a pity as there have been some great non-fiction titles published in 2008.

For me one of the most memorable was Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf (published in the UK this year by Icon). It’s an enthralling celebration of the science and "complex beauty of the reading process". In evolutionary terms, reading is a recently acquired cultural invention that uses existing brain structures for a radically new skill. Unlike vision or speech, there is no direct genetic programme passing reading on to future generations. It is an unnatural process that has to be learnt by each individual.

As director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University in Boston, Wolf works with readers of all ages, but particularly those with dyslexia, a condition that proves "our brains were never wired to read". Wolf therefore has much of practical value to say about why some people have difficulty reading and how to overcome this. Reading stories to pre-school children is crucial, she says, as it encourages the formation of circuits in the brain, as well as imparting essential information about fighting dragons and marrying princes.

Wolf's story of the development of the reading brain covers many fields, from linguistics, archaeology and education to history, literature and neuroscience. In particular, she highlights the brain's astonishing plasticity, its "protean capacity" to reorganise itself to learn new skills. According to Wolf, we are all born with the "capacity to change what is given to us by nature.” Right from the cradle we are “genetically poised for breakthroughs”. She memorably paraphrases Darwin: “biologically and intellectually, reading allows the species to go ‘beyond the information given’ to create endless thoughts most beautiful and wonderful”.

For thousands of years, the process of engaging with texts has enriched us, both existentially and - as Wolf's remarkable book shows - biologically. Different languages put their own unique stamp on the brain, creating distinctive brain networks. Reading Chinese requires a different set of neuronal connections from those needed to read English. As the writer Joseph Epstein has said, "we are what we read". Doctors treating a bilingual person who developed alexia (inability to read) after a stroke found astonishing evidence of this. Although he could no longer read English, the patient was still able to read Chinese.

2008 was unquestionably China’s year. From terrible earthquakes to space walks and, of course, the Olympics, China was rarely out of the headlines. Out of this year’s red tide of titles about this endlessly fascinating country, I found two particularly memorable: China: A-Z, by Kai Strittmatter (Haus) and China: Empire of Living Symbols, by Cecilia Lindqvist (Da Capo). Both use language as a springboard to explore Chinese culture and history.

For Strittmatter, a German correspondent in Beijing for 10 years, China is "a land of contradictions". (This reminds me of Bohr’s delightful comment: “How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”) After spending two decades in a Maoist labour camp, author Zhang Xianliang says: “it’s because China is a mystery, that it's so dear to me”. He is now a member of the Communist party and a successful businessman. Bend, adapt and move on seems to be the lesson here. Perhaps the Chinese have learnt this philosophy from one of their most beautiful plants – bamboo.

“No plant moves me as profoundly as bamboo,” writes Lindqvist, “most of all the sound of its thin, dry leaves as they rustle in the wind.” I agree completely. One of the first things we did in our garden was plant bamboo. I can see it now from my desk, swaying sensuously. In storms it can be blown almost flat but the next day it is upright again. According to Lindqvist, the resilience of this wonderful grass taught the Chinese a powerful lesson about how to face difficulties: “Bend, adapt, of course, but never abandon ideals. Never be defeated. Other winds will blow, all in good time.”

There are, of course, many Chinas - it is a vast continent unified by a common language, standardised as far back as 221 BC. In Strittmatter’s "pocket dictionary" of Chinese culture, it is "the magic of the characters themselves" that tells the story of this paradoxical land. An entry in his book about the family (jia) highlights the importance of the Confucian virtue of service. For the Chinese that means "sometimes serving the state, generally the family, and always the parents". In a discussion of chopsticks (kuai zi) he notes drily, and entirely accurately, that they are primarily an "instrument for measuring a foreigner's ability to integrate". From gan bei (cheers) to why xiao zi (petty bourgeois) was once an insult but is now cool (ku), this is a delightfully witty and insightful guide to today's China.

Lindqvist’s remarkable study broke new ground when it was first published in Sweden nearly twenty years ago. Reissued this year, her book explores the origins of modern Chinese writing in pictures and objects over 3,000 years old, such as oracle bones. An art historian who spent her life studying Chinese culture, Lindqvist weaves archaeological evidence of the earliest Chinese characters together with the country's history to demonstrate China's unique cultural continuity. It's believed written language arose first in Mesopotamia, although Wolf cites recent evidence that suggests Egyptian hieroglyphs may be older than even Sumerian cuneiform writing. No one uses either today, but modern Chinese script is recognisably similar to the earliest forms of writing in the region. China “is a continuation in direct lineal descent from the culture that arose in the long valley of the Yellow River during the 5th millennium before the beginning of our calendar.”

Lindqvist shows how the oldest characters are representational ("man" depicts a person in profile and dates back to the earliest oracle bones) and these remain part of today's language. In this beautifully written and illustrated book, language and images come together to tell a common story about the rootedness of the modern script in the ancient signs. Drawing on her long experience of the country - its sights, sounds and tastes (including a few recipes, such as pork with bamboo, onions and dried mushrooms) - Lindqvist creates an evocative and compelling celebration of language as a carrier of culture.

Another book that memorably explored our love affair with language this year was Off the Page: Writers Talk About Beginnings, Endings and Everything in Between, edited by Carole Burns (Norton) As a non-fiction writer, I have immense admiration for what novelists do with language. It seems to me fiction is a kind of alchemy, a mix of science and magic, fact and poetry. Attempts to explain this process often fall flat. But not Burns’ book. She interviews 43 authors about the writing life, from the nuts and bolts of fiction (how to breathe life into a character) to more general comments on inspiration and influences. AS Byatt starts her novels with a "block of colour" ("Babel Tower is black and red, because of blood and destruction"). For Paul Auster the story comes first: "I find the book in the process of writing it".

All agree on one thing: writing and rewriting is never easy. Joyce Carol Oates finds the first draft the hardest: it's "like hacking one's way through a thick jungle with something like a butter knife". Richard Bausch recalls how he wrote an entire 800-page novel before deciding it was really a short story. The process of cutting it down to size was, he says, like passing a kidney stone. Ouch. “Everyone goes a little mad as a writer", says Alison Smith, and most interviewees agree. Even Martin Amis admits to the occasional "crazy-scientist cackle" while writing.

I sympathise. After finishing my last book (it took over three years), I just wanted to lie in a dark room and listen to soothing music. But I guess all writers are suckers for punishment – I’ve just started researching a new book: a cultural history of cities. It’s a fascinating time to be writing about urban history – this year we officially became an urban species with more people living in cities than in rural areas. There are of course many wonderful books about urban history. John Reader’s excellent Cities (2004) for one, and Peter Hall’s masterly Cities in Civilization (1998) which focuses on cities as centres of innovation and creativity. Interestingly, Hall only mentions China a few times in 1169 pages – a sign, perhaps, of how fast the world is changing and the astonishing rate of urbanisation in recent years. By 2020, there will be ten cities with more than twenty million citizens, gargantuan cities such as Jakarta, Delhi, Mexico City, São Paulo, New York, and Tokyo.

As it turns out, 2008 has been a vintage year for urban studies. Gail Fenske’s beautifully illustrated biography of the Woolworth Building, The Skyscraper and the City (Chicago), is one of my favourites. It is a superb study of the New York skyscraper that became emblematic of the world’s first signature skyline. Cass Gilbert’s inspiring cathedral to commerce opened in 1913. This Gothic spire offered New Yorkers passing by on the sidewalk “an experience of sheer vertical ascent unrivalled by the taller but stepped-back skyscrapers of the 1920s”. Fenske tells the fascinating story of this building’s inspiration, design, construction and its place in the city that has come to define the modern metropolis. The pinnacled tower no longer dominates New York’s vertiginous skyline but it remains a monument to the soaring ambition of its owner and architect, as well as to human aspiration and the desire to conquer vertical space.

Once it was London that broke all urban records, from size to pollution. On Brick Lane by Rachel Lichtenstein (out in paperback from Penguin in the UK) is a wonderfully evocative and personal portrait of a part of the East End of London that has been home to successive waves of immigrants. Chicksand Street, off Brick Lane, is where Bram Stoker’s Dracula slept in a coffin of Transylvanian earth. In the seventeenth century the Huguenots arrived, later there were Jews from Eastern Europe (including Lichtenstein’s own grandparents) and now it is home to a thriving Bangladeshi community. An artist, Lichtenstein has lived and worked in Brick Lane since the 1990s. She evocatively weaves together her own experiences with those of her family and interviews with former and current residents, ranging from a Bangladeshi schoolgirl ("Brick Lane is like a part of Bangladesh"), to the footloose London author Iain Sinclair, who used to work in the 300-year-old Truman brewery, and the poet Stephen Watts, who tells her: "There is a tidal wave of sound and memory rushing down that street."

The “sensory encounter” with cities is the subject of Dell Upton’s Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic, published this year by Yale. The stench and cacophony of early nineteenth-century American cities must have been terrible, judging from Upton’s impressive research. Using travel journals, diaries, and letters he shows how the “insistent and importunate sights, sounds and smells surpassed anything previously known in the new nation”. To read his book is to be immersed in the sensations of the city.

In New York, “public porkers” roamed the streets up until the middle of the nineteenth century. Indeed, horses, cattle, and goats shared the city with their two-legged owners. Most American cities had no drainage systems and rubbish was thrown out into the street forming a putrefying heap known as “corporation pie”, until scavengers hired by the city disposed of it. Upton argues convincingly that the experience of living in noisy, stinking antebellum cities spurred a reformist desire in many urban communities to realize the ideal of a shining city upon a hill: “The relics of civilized life that bombarded the senses, and the mixed throngs that crowded the streets of antebellum cities, were the crucible within which city dwellers formed a sense of what it meant to be a citizen of a republican city.”

Of course, building Utopia is easier said than done, as Robert H. Kargon and Arthur P. Molella show in Invented Edens: Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century (MIT). Modernist reformers embraced technological solutions to solve nineteenth-century urban problems such as congestion, pollution and disease. From Ebenezer Howard’s seminal notion of the “Garden City” in the 1890s, to the new urbanist Celebration in Florida in the 1990s, Kargon and Molella argue that the techno-city was a bold social experiment, but one that in the end was doomed to failure. For despite using the latest technology, at the heart of these ideal cities was a nostalgic yearning for small-town life. What the authors term “techno-nostalgia” created a fatal fault line running through the techno-city: “the machine in the garden is a seductive dream, but a problematic reality”.

Kargon and Molella also discuss Oak Ridge in East Tennessee, a once secret city created as part of the Manhattan Project. The plan for this techno-city was inspired by the same nostalgic yearning for an idealized garden city, with tree-lined streets and “organic clusters” of houses. There is, however, a shocking irony about the fact that the people who lived in this utopian city were building a superweapon designed for one purpose – to annihilate cities.

The nuclear age is the subject of Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger’s entertaining and informative A Nuclear Family Vacation : Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry (Bloomsbury). Where are you going for your holidays next year? How about the Semipalatinsk Test Site in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan? It is, apparently, a bona fide tourist destination. But remember to pack your Geiger counter and iodine tablets. As Hodge and Weinberger discover, the site is still highly radioactive. Most of the cold war scientists who lived in the nearby secret nuclear city of Kurchatov have now returned to Russia, but some technicians remain. Asked about the measures they took to protect themselves from radioactivity, one replies dryly: "Before every test, we drank grain alcohol."

Hodge and Weinberger are a husband-and-wife team of defense reporters turned nuclear tourists. As the title suggests, the authors did indeed visit many of the places during their holidays: everywhere from Iran's Esfahan Uranium Conversion Facility, which supplies material to the top-secret uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, to the Nevada Test Site (a "sandbox for nuclear weapons designers"), and the Cheyenne Mountain bunker ("the ultimate cold war retreat"). In Los Alamos, where the first atomic bombs were designed, the authors noticed that the scientists sometimes had pictures of their favorite nuclear tests hanging above their desks and could describe, "in loving detail, the very personal reasons for their choices". One scientist even named his son after the 1952 Ivy Mike H-bomb test. But Los Alamos hasn't designed a new nuke since the 1980s, and has become little more than a "repair shop for nuclear weapons". The scientists are not happy: "the mood at the lab hovered somewhere between depression and despair".

Revealingly, although Hodge and Weinberger interviewed many politicians and scientists, they failed to find anyone who could say what the purpose of the nuclear arsenal is now. The nuclear weapons industry, costing billions of dollars a year, is an enterprise that has "lost its way". Their important conclusion is that it is time for the US to think the unthinkable and "explore practical options for eliminating the nuclear arsenal".

No doubt that’s a policy Noam Chomsky would support. In Interventions, which appeared in the UK in paperback this year, he notes that the US spends as much on its military as the rest of the world combined. Another shocking fact: apparently the essays in this collection by one of today’s leading public intellectuals have been published in newspapers all around the world, but were largely ignored in the US.

According to Chomsky, the tacit assumption guiding all US foreign policy is now "we own the world, so what does it matter what others think?". From Iraq and the war on terror, to Iran's nuclear ambitions and US support for Israel, he accuses Washington of accelerating the race to destruction. Hopefully, America will soon be turning over a new leaf under President Obama. Lead me to that radiant city upon a hill…

“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.”

“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.”

In 1932, the centenary of Goethe’s death, physicists attending an international conference at Niels Bohr’s Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen performed a parody of Goethe’s Faust. Goethe’s critique of science in the play made this a significant choice at the dawn of nuclear physics. James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron that year was highlighted in the performance.

In 1933 while in Bloomsbury, London, the physicist Leo Szilard realized how to use a self-sustaining neutron chain reaction to release the energy of the atom. The previous year Szilard had read HG Wells’ novel The World Set Free (1914) in which the phrase “atomic bomb” was coined. As well as considering the Faustian themes in the novel, I explore parallels between Wells’s scientist, Holsten, and Leo Szilard himself. I argue that this is a clear example of fiction influencing science, and that Goethe’s notion that scientific knowledge and self-knowledge should evolve hand-in-hand, remains a valuable insight when considering the role of scientists in the creation of weapons of mass destruction.

You can download a PDF of my paper here.

A Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry (Bloomsbury) is by Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger, a husband-and-wife team of US defence reporters turned nuclear tourists. Rather than relaxing on the Florida beach for their holidays they travelled the world in search of nuclear sites. It's an entertaining and informative read with an important conclusion. The whole "nuclear weapons complex", costing billions of dollars a year, is an enterprise that has "lost its way". According to Hodge and Weinberger, it may be time for the US to think the unthinkable and "explore practical options for eliminating the nuclear arsenal". Read more in my review for the Guardian.

Also in the Guardian are a couple of paperback reviews.  Follow the Water: Exploring the Sea to Discover Climate (Basic Books) is an excellent introduction to oceanography by novelist and keen sailor Dallas Murphy. At nearly 900 pages, Cosmos: An Illustrated History of Astronomy and Cosmology by John North (Chicago) is a suitably monumental book about the biggest subject of all. First published in 1993 and now updated and reissued with many beautiful illustrations, this is a definitive history of our love affair with the stars.

Last but by no means least - because believe it or not this book is actually bigger than Cosmos - is the Chambers Dictionary of Science and Technology (Chambers). At over 1370 pages and a full 7 cm thick, this weighty tome is a must-have addition to the library of any science buff, fact checker, word lover, or wannabe contestant of University Challenge. Read my full review, intriguingly titled "Shish-kebab with a spud", in this week's Times Literary Supplement (August 15, 2008).