PD Smith

BBC radio interview

19 July 2007 | C-bomb, cold war, Doomsday Machine, Doomsday Men, Dr Strangelove, Kubrick | 7 comments

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]

7 comments so far:

  1. Alan Summers | 19 July 2007

    Good inter­view!

  2. PD Smith | 19 July 2007

    Glad you liked it…

  3. shannon | 19 July 2007

    Great inter­view, Peter! Some good points you have about our cur­rent soci­eties not under­stand­ing the real threat of “dooms­day devices” because we haven’t expe­ri­enced the fear of them first hand. I’d have to answer the last ques­tion with sim­ply “fear”. That is what we should be afraid of now. Fear is the thing that makes us wall our­selves off from each oth­er, and fear is the thing that makes us keep build­ing big­ger weapons to pro­tect our­selves from each oth­er. Isn’t it iron­ic that secu­ri­ty is the very thing that fear takes away?

  4. PD Smith | 20 July 2007

    Thanks Shan­non. Yes, I talk about “fear” in my book. Do you know Cecil Day-Lewis’s poem “Bombers” (1938)? He describes the bombs in their bomb bays as “the iron-embryo con­ceived in fear”…

  5. Peter Cowlam | 23 July 2007

    You say nuclear weapons are obscene (and I agree), and you would like to see them abol­ished (and I sym­pa­thise), but isn’t it the case that the genie is out of the bot­tle and we’re stuck with them?

  6. PD Smith | 23 July 2007

    Good to hear from you Peter.

    Until recent­ly I assumed that there was a con­sen­sus that these weapons — like chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal ones — should be con­trolled by treaty and then banned. But now it seems new ones are being devel­oped, even by our own coun­try! That’s rather depress­ing. It seems to me that if we learnt any­thing from the cold war it was that we won’t find answers to the world’s prob­lems in weapons of mass destruc­tion.

    I’d be inter­est­ed to know what you think though…

  7. Peter Cowlam | 24 July 2007

    The prob­lem with inter­na­tion­al treaties is that it takes only one sig­na­to­ry to sus­pect that one or more oth­ers are cheat­ing, and cheat­ing becomes man­i­fest and pro­lif­er­ates. It’s a ques­tion less of innate human wicked­ness than innate human mis­trust. This is one con­se­quence, I think, of a world divid­ed by bor­ders, eth­nic­i­ty, Oth­er­ness.