PD Smith

MI6, Hitler's atomic bomb project and Cherie Booth QC - it was a potent mixture that was guaranteed to make headlines. The Guardian's was: "Spy left out in the cold: how MI6 buried heroic exploits of agent Griffin".

Paul Rosbaud was a physicist and the editor of the scientific journal Die Naturwissenschaften. Rosbaud encouraged Otto Hahn to publish the news of the fission of uranium in January 1939 thus ensuring that this breakthrough was shared with scientists around the world. He was friends with Germany's top atomic physicists throughout the war and was therefore well placed to keep the British intelligence service briefed on German progress towards an atomic bomb. For Rosbaud was an MI6 agent, codenamed Griffin.

Now his nephew - represented by Ms Booth, wife of the former prime minister - is trying to force the security services to declassify all its files on Rosbaud so the full story can be told. And this is one story that will certainly be worth reading.

You can get a flavour of what Rosbaud was like from this remarkable passage from Paul Lawrence Rose's excellent book Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: A Study in German Culture (U of California P, 1998):

“During the war Rosbaud had realized perfectly well how Heisenberg’s self-serving moral sophistry was shared by his colleagues on the uranium project. A few days after the big Speer-Heisenberg meeting at Harnack-Haus in June 1942, the scientists learned of Speer’s decision not to press ahead with the bomb project. One evening at Restaurant Orient, on Fasanenstrasse near the Kurfürstendamm, a group of twelve physicists were professing their moral relief at not having to develop a bomb. A rather intoxicated Rosbaud was finally provoked by the cant he was hearing to shout out: ‘If any one of you knew how to make the bomb, he would not hesitate a minute and tell your Führer how to destroy the rest of the world in order to get the highest order of the Iron Cross.’ Rosbaud admits ‘they were decent enough not to denounce me after this, but my remark was followed by [icy silence].’ The stunned scientists, evidently frightened that Rosbaud might be an agent provocateur who would report their reactions to the Gestapo, quickly split up and vanished. But, of course, Rosbaud had hit both nails on the head – the first, that their advice to Speer stemmed from technical ignorance about how to build a bomb, and the second, that their moralizing was empty cant.”

The legal hearing is set to continue. Personally I hope Rosbaud's nephew is successful.

I was very interested to hear that the British government's chief scientific advisor, Professor Sir David King, has set out a universal ethical code for scientists. As well as asserting the importance of honesty, integrity and responsible communication, it also calls upon scientists to "Minimise and justify any adverse effect your work may have on people, animals and the natural environment".

Bertolt Brecht included the idea of a Hippocratic oath for scientists in the penultimate scene of his play Life of Galileo. The idea of an oath that committed scientists to using their knowledge solely for the benefit of humanity occurred to him before the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. But it was only after the hydrogen bomb was developed that this idea was incorporated into the 1955 version of the play.

By then others, including Rutherford's co-worker on radioactivty at the dawn of the atomic age, Frederick Soddy, had publicly called for scientists to take such a Hippocratic oath. In 1969 philosopher Karl Popper would follow suit, as did physicist and peace campaigner Joseph Rotblat, who had taken the courageous decision to leave Los Alamos as soon as it became clear that Germany was incapable of developing an atomic bomb.

David King's ethical code doesn't go as far as Brecht would have liked. But it's a step in the right direction. For, as Rotblat has rightly said, “a scientist is a human being first, and a scientist second”.

You can read reports on the ethical code on the British Association site and BBC News.

Bill Hammack of WILL Radio’s 'The Afternoon Magazine' has interviewed me about Doomsday Men. It was a wide-ranging discussion lasting 45 minutes, with calls from listeners in the US - I've never been on a phone-in before so this was an interesting experience! We talked about Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Herman Kahn, Fritz Haber, and the Doomsday Machine, which seems to have been provoking some comment stateside recently (e.g. Slate, Wired, Question Technology).

You can listen to the interview here (MP3).

By the way, if you can read German, there's also an interesting article about my book and the Soviet "Doomsday Machine", Perimetr, on Telepolis.

There's a great review of Doomsday Men on the Australian blog LiteraryMinded.

Here's an excerpt:

"Smith takes you inside the narratives of great writers and inside the narratives of history. He enmeshes them so that you realise just how science-fiction-like the world has become. You are present and nervous with Leo Szilard when the first nuclear reactor is tested in the University of Chicago football stadium. You witness Marie and Pierre Curie holding up a vial of ‘luminous’ radium. You experience a terrifying eyewitness account of Hiroshima. Smith gets right into the conflicts of these people, allowing you to relate to their situations, and be appalled at the attitude of some of the Strangelovean characters eg. Fritz Haber, Edward Teller and Robert Oppenheimer. The book is descriptive, well-written and infinitely interesting. It is also incredibly frightening."

Read the rest here.

There's an interesting article by Ron Rosenbaum at Slate on "The Return of the Doomsday Machine?"

Having read my book, he's followed up some of my references to the Soviet-era computerised system called Perimetr. This was designed to launch the Russian nuclear arsenal in the event of a surprise attack that wiped out their top brass. It all sounds eerily similar to the one described in Dr Strangelove...

It's well worth taking the time to read some of the fascinating comments to Rosenbaum's article too.