Saul Auster­litz has writ­ten a very knowl­edge­able review of Dooms­day Men for today’s Moscow Times. Here are the open­ing para­graphs:

“ ‘We are keep­ing the rings in this buck­et, here.’ A shell-shocked civ­il defense offi­cer ges­tures to a hefty met­al buck­et at his feet, stuffed with what appear to be thou­sands of wed­ding rings. The rings have been gath­ered from the dead in a small British city; their inscrip­tions are the only hope author­i­ties have of iden­ti­fy­ing those incin­er­at­ed by the deploy­ment of a nuclear weapon. ‘This,’ a nar­ra­tor mourn­ful­ly con­cludes, ‘is nuclear war.’

The scene is imag­ined, only one of the wealth of emo­tion­al­ly over­whelm­ing moments that make up Peter Watkins’ 1965 Acad­e­my Award-win­ning fic­tion­al doc­u­men­tary The War Game, still the best film ever made on the sub­ject. Nuclear war is not mere­ly a mat­ter of war­heads and tac­tics, pres­i­dents and pre­miers; it is also a mat­ter of the buck­et of wed­ding rings.

This ten­sion — between war­heads and wed­ding rings, detached analy­sis and a deep-root­ed under­stand­ing of the human fall­out from tech­no­log­i­cal­ly accel­er­at­ed com­bat — forms the pri­ma­ry sub­ject mat­ter of P.D. Smith’s engag­ing, unset­tling Dooms­day Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the Dream of the Super­weapon. Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly and cul­tur­al­ly adept, Dooms­day Men tracks the pur­suit of dev­as­tat­ing weapon­ry in both lab­o­ra­to­ries and pulp mag­a­zines.”

You can read the rest here.