Car­ol Van Strum has writ­ten an excel­lent piece about Leo Szi­lard’s 1961 col­lec­tion of sto­ries The Voice of the Dol­phins, as well as review­ing Dooms­day Men for the cam­paign­ing orga­ni­za­tion the Depart­ment of the Plan­et Earth.

Szi­lard — the bril­liant sci­en­tist who saw how to realise HG Well­s’s dream of atom­ic ener­gy in the 1930s — is the cen­tral fig­ure in my study of super­weapons. He was a won­der­ful­ly wit­ty and engag­ing char­ac­ter. He fierce­ly opposed the drop­ping of atom­ic bombs on Hiroshi­ma and Nagasa­ki and after the war became a tire­less cam­paign­er for nuclear arms con­trol. After one of his arti­cles on the sub­ject was reject­ed by a news­pa­per edi­tor, he told a friend: “If they can­not take it straight, they’ll get it in fic­tion.” The Voice of the Dol­phins was the result.

It col­lects the sto­ries he had been writ­ing from the end of the war until 1961. As his­to­ri­an Daniel J Kevles has said, “it is a fic­tion of Swift­ian nature, addressed to major issues, includ­ing those of geopol­i­tics, the arms race, dis­ar­ma­ment, pop­u­la­tion con­trol, the moral­i­ty of war, and the mis­match between mod­ern man’s enor­mous tech­ni­cal capa­bil­i­ties and his lim­it­ed moral capac­i­ties.” The col­lec­tion is also won­der­ful­ly expres­sive of Szi­lard’s own char­ac­ter and speaks pow­er­ful­ly of the influ­ence of HG Wells on his life and work.

One review­er not­ed its qual­i­ty of “half farce and half night­mare”. It was a qual­i­ty that Stan­ley Kubrick soon realised was essen­tial to depict an era liv­ing in the shad­ow of the Bomb. His clas­sic film Dr Strangelove also depicts Szi­lard’s most chill­ing brain-child: the cobalt dooms­day bomb.

As Van Strum right­ly says, “the satire, humor, and seri­ous issues in these sto­ries are as rel­e­vant today as they were forty-some years ago — a sor­ry reflec­tion on our fail­ure to heed the words of the wise.”

She con­cludes with a won­der­ful quo­ta­tion from Robert Law­son’s The Fab­u­lous Flight (1949), in which a boy called Peter and his seag­ull, Gus, steal a super­weapon the size of an aspirin which is pow­er­ful enough to wipe out all of Europe:

“ ‘Gus,’ Peter said sud­den­ly. ‘I’ve been think­ing about that cap­sule. We’ve got it and nobody else can get it and I don’t think we ought to give it to any­one — even our own Gov­ern­ment. It’s just too ter­ri­ble.’

“ ‘Ben sort of thinkin’ the same thing myself,’ Gus replied. ‘Of course I ain’t eddi­cat­ed, but seems to me that ain’t a thing any­body ought to be let loose with.”

You can read her excel­lent arti­cle here.