PD Smith

Mankind’s strange love of superweapons

23 August 2007 | cold war, Doomsday Machine, Doomsday Men, Herken, Oppenheimer, Teller | 2 comments

There’s a very good review of Dooms­day Men in the cur­rent edi­tion of Nature (vol 448, num­ber 7156). It’s by Gregg Herken, author of the excel­lent study of Oppen­heimer, Teller and Lawrence, Broth­er­hood of the Bomb. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the review is not avail­able online unless you have a sub­scrip­tion, but here’s the first para­graph:

“There is noth­ing in Man’s indus­tri­al machin­ery but greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons,” said the Dev­il in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Super­man. Shaw’s adage could almost be the leit­mo­tiv of P.D. Smith’s well-researched and alto­geth­er depress­ing account of humankind’s long hunt for the ulti­mate super­weapon: a dooms­day device that, by its very ter­ri­ble­ness, would make war forever­more unwinnable, and hence unthink­able. Although we all know how this tale turns out, it is a jour­ney well worth tak­ing. Along the way, Smith includes some fas­ci­nat­ing asides about the men — and it was, almost exclu­sive­ly, a fra­ter­ni­ty — who, in seek­ing to make war obso­lete, have only made it more dead­ly.

Herken con­cludes:

One can only sym­pa­thize with the author’s obser­va­tion that, since the end of the Cold War, glob­al warm­ing and Islamist ter­ror­ism have dis­tract­ed our atten­tion from the weapons that remain in the arse­nals of nations, numer­ous, primed and wait­ing. Although not as dead­ly as Smith’s fic­tive dooms­day bomb, they are cause for us to be more fear­ful, for they are real.

2 comments so far:

  1. Alan Summers | 23 August 2007

    Good to see yet anoth­er well-deserved review!

  2. PD Smith | 23 August 2007

    Thanks Alan!