PD Smith

Australian review

03 September 2007 | Curie, Doomsday Men, Haber, Oppenheimer, Teller | 2 comments

There’s a great review of Dooms­day Men on the Aus­tralian blog Lit­er­ary­Mind­ed.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Smith takes you inside the nar­ra­tives of great writ­ers and inside the nar­ra­tives of his­to­ry. He enmesh­es them so that you realise just how sci­ence-fic­tion-like the world has become. You are present and ner­vous with Leo Szi­lard when the first nuclear reac­tor is test­ed in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go foot­ball sta­di­um. You wit­ness Marie and Pierre Curie hold­ing up a vial of ‘luminous’ radi­um. You expe­ri­ence a ter­ri­fy­ing eye­wit­ness account of Hiroshi­ma. Smith gets right into the con­flicts of these peo­ple, allow­ing you to relate to their sit­u­a­tions, and be appalled at the atti­tude of some of the Strangelovean char­ac­ters eg. Fritz Haber, Edward Teller and Robert Oppen­heimer. The book is descrip­tive, well-writ­ten and infi­nite­ly inter­est­ing. It is also incred­i­bly fright­en­ing.”

Read the rest here.

2 comments so far:

  1. Thomas R. | 28 September 2007

    How did the politi­cians think about this for­mer­ly irrel­e­vant and small group of super­bright sci­en­tists whose ideas had such an impact? And who lacked most inhi­bi­tions to pon­der how to kill large num­bers of peo­ple? Did­n’t they became nerveous? Did­n’t they won­der that for each ‘von Neu­mann’ pop­ing up in the sci mil­lieu prob­a­bly sev­er­al oth­ers are out there and what they may do?

  2. PD Smith | 30 September 2007

    I guess that’s why they want­ed to keep sci­en­tists ‘on tap, but not on top’, to use a cold war phrase… But then you can’t con­trol what the sci­en­tists work­ing for your ene­my are doing, and that’s when it gets wor­ry­ing…