It was a joint review by Dominick Donald on my book and William Langewiesche's The Atomic Bazaar. Unfortunately neither book seemed to appeal to Donald: Doomsday Men was too long and Langewiesche's too short and over-priced. With my book he also seems to miss the point that it is a work of cultural history that traces the origins of the dream of the superweapon back to the beginning of the twentieth century.

The two quotes he uses from my book are from the prologue and the epilogue and it's true these brief sections do try to forge links with the current situation. But the rest of the book is history, and the fact that, as Donald puts it, the "literature and film that he has explored so exhaustively is (HG Wells and Neville [sic!] Shute, Dr Strangelove and Godzilla aside) unknown today" is to miss the point entirely. In their day, the novels, films, poems, and popular articles I draw into my argument were very well known indeed.

Apart from misspelling Nevil Shute's name, Donald mistakenly refers to how "Wells's nuclear weapon novel The Shape of Things to Come" inspired Leo Szilard's eureka moment while he waited to cross Southampton Row in London. It is, Donald says, a "well-established Wells connection". Unfortunately, it's not this novel but one written 20 years earlier, The World Set Free!

Still, mistakes aside it's an interesting article on nuclear issues today and worth a read. But given that - to quote Gribbin's review - my book is an "impassioned" exploration of superweapon culture, it isn't really surprising that someone who works for the growing private security sector (Tim Spicer's Aegis Specialist Risk Management) was unimpressed by Doomsday Men.

You can read Donald's review here.

"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."