PD Smith

"Look, Dimitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the bomb?"

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]

Robert Hanks has written a very good review of Doomsday Men for this weekend's Financial Times. This is the opening paragraph:

"The idea that all life on earth might be extinguished very soon, and that human technology will be the cause, is deeply ingrained in our culture. Indeed, historians of the future, assuming there is a future, may be intrigued by how easily we have switched from nuclear anxieties to the environmental kind: do we enjoy thinking that we’re destroying the planet?"

He concludes that I succeeded in putting "the nuclear age into a new context, engagingly and even excitingly".

You can read the whole review online here, although unfortunately without the great photo from Dr Strangelove of Slim Pickens atop the H-bomb which they printed with the review.

Mark Whitaker has interviewed me about Doomsday Men and the Cold War for The World Today, a current affairs program on the BBC World Service.

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.[audio:World_Today_Doomsday_Men.mp3]

They say all good things must come to an end, and so it seems must a good run of reviews. At the weekend the Guardian published a less than flattering piece on Doomsday Men.

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.

The Spanish philosopher Salvador Pániker has written a fascinating article on the two cultures for the Opinion page of El Pais (February 18, 2007). He argues that "permeability between sciences, arts and letters" should become "a hallmark of our times".

Referring to John Brockman's idea of a "third culture" of scientist-writers and the dawn of a new age of humanism, he suggests that intellectuals outside the sciences do need to engage with science: "Humanism's received task is more deferential toward the autonomy of science: To truly understand our most fundamental conditionings; to ensure that scientific paradigms truly fertilize philosophical and even literary discourse."

Culture is "born from the cross-fertilization of individual disciplines". Rather than seeking to unify all fields of knowledge beneath the banner of science, Pániker joins French philosopher Edgar Morin in calling for a spirit of "transdisciplinarity", which "aspires to a communication between the disciplines based on complex thought".

I agree very much with Pániker's argument. You can't ignore science, but neither should you be a passive consumer. As someone who writes about the history of science, literature and film, finding those moments where these different fields meet and produce new ideas is what it's all about.

It reminds me of a memorable quote from the late great Kurt Vonnegut: "I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex." 

Pániker's article is on Brockman's site, Edge.

And while we're on the subject of the two cultures, there's an amusing blog on poetry and science by Shirley Dent at Guardian Unlimited. Tim Adams has also written an intriguing piece for the Observer on "The new age of ignorance". It's interesting that in this article, Brockman says Vonnegut was one of the leading novelists who declined to take part in the meetings with scientists, artists, architects, and musicians that eventually became Edge. I wonder why...