PD Smith

Christopher Hirst at The Independent has reviewed the paperback of Doomsday Men: "Humane and highly readable, this book concerns a black subject: the destruction of humanity (or a good chunk of it)." Read more here.

There was also a good review recently in the scholarly journal Survival: Global Politics and Strategy (Volume 50, Issue 5, 2008, pp 209-10). Bruno Tertrais writes:

"Doomsday Men by P.D. Smith tells the story of the 20th-century search for the perfect weapon. [...] Doomsday Men points out that many weapons scientists - including Haber, Sakharov, Szilard and others - saw themselves not only as helping their countries, but also humanity as a whole, and believed, as did Alfred Nobel of his invention of dynamite, that their efforts would save mankind from war. Smith also illuminates, in his valuable account, the interaction between science and literature, with scientists and authors constantly inspiring one another throughout the century. For instance, The World Set Free by H.G. Wells (1914), the first novel about nuclear war, was a source of inspiration for many scientific pioneers, including Szilard."

Two more great reviews of the paperback edition of Doomsday Men. The first is by Amber Pearson in the Daily Mail:

"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."

There's a nice review of the paperback by Helen Zaltzman in the Observer:

"Books on nuclear physics aren't often entertaining to the layperson, but Doomsday Men is comprehensible and fascinating, although likely to send one scurrying to lead-line the cupboard under the stairs just in case."

Jo Littler at the Guardian has reviewed the paperback edition of Doomsday Men.

"Smith shows how films, plays and books from The War of the Worlds to Dr Strangelove were inspired by scientific interest in a 'doomsday bomb' and how, in turn, such narratives convinced political leaders that the price of global nuclear war was just too high. Doomsday Men's greatest strength is its ability to make scientific detail clearly understandable and to dramatise its role in larger stories. It also reminds us of the legacies of the atomic age: environmental damage and 30,000 weapons of mass destruction that definitely do exist."

Read the whole review here.

“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.”