“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]