Times Online
August 08, 2007
Christopher Coker
P. D. Smith
DOOMSDAY MEN
The real Dr Strangelove and the dream of the superweapon
552pp. Allen Lane. £20.
9 78 071 399815 3
... Smith’s study is the gripping, untold story of the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, which first came to public attention in 1950 when the Hungarian-born scientist Leo Szilard made a dramatic announcement on radio: science was on the verge of creating a Doomsday Bomb. For the first time in history, mankind would soon have the ability to destroy all life on the planet. The shockwave from this statement reverberated across the following decade and beyond.
What Szilard had in mind was the third of the “alphabet bombs” that came to characterize an entire age. The first, the A-bomb, had been used to incinerate two Japanese cities. Teller’s H-bomb blasted its way into public consciousness a few years later. Finally, there was the ultimate weapon: the C-bomb, a hydrogen bomb that could “transmute” an element such as cobalt into a radioactive element about 320 times as powerful as radium. A deadly radioactive cloud could be released into the atmosphere and carried by the westerly winds across the surface of the earth. Every living thing inhaling it, or even touched by it, would be doomed to certain death. In the autumn of 1950, Szilard’s fears were given independent validation by Dr James R. Arnold of the Institute for Nuclear Studies in Chicago. Arnold, slide-rule in hand, had started out to debunk Szilard’s arguments. He finished by publishing a set of calculations that showed that a Doomsday device, perhaps two-and-a-half times as heavy as the battleship Missouri, could indeed be built.
Throughout the 1950s and into the next decade the C-Bomb became a familiar spectre. In best-sellers such as Neville Shute’s On The Beach (1957) and box office hits such as Return to the Planet of the Apes it became a compelling symbol of humanity’s self-destructive Promethean ambition. It even found a mention in Agatha Christie’s novel Destination Unknown (1954), in which one of the characters, sitting in her hotel, knitting and discussing the latest weapons of mass destruction, concludes: “I do think all these bombs are very wrong. And cobalt – such a lovely colour in one’s paintbox. I used it a lot as a child. And the worst of all, I understand nobody can survive”. The travel writer Bruce Chatwin was also reminded of his great-aunt’s paintbox (she did lots of “St Sebastians”, always against a cobalt blue background) when he wrote his autobiographical book In Patagonia (1977). As a schoolboy he had pictured a dense blue cloudbank, spitting tongues of flame at the edges. He had seen himself, out alone on a green headland, scanning the horizon for the advance of the cloud. Patagonia, he had decided, was the one place on the map he could live while the rest of the world blew up ...
http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25350-2648363,00.html
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