PD Smith

WILL Radio: The Afternoon Magazine

14 September 2007 | atomic bomb, Doomsday Machine, Doomsday Men, H-bomb, Haber, Kahn, Szilard, WW2 | 7 comments

Bill Ham­mack of WILL Radio’s ‘The After­noon Mag­a­zine’ has inter­viewed me about Dooms­day Men. It was a wide-rang­ing dis­cus­sion last­ing 45 min­utes, with calls from lis­ten­ers in the US — I’ve nev­er been on a phone-in before so this was an inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence! We talked about Leo Szi­lard, Edward Teller, Her­man Kahn, Fritz Haber, and the Dooms­day Machine, which seems to have been pro­vok­ing some com­ment state­side recent­ly (e.g. Slate, Wired, Ques­tion Tech­nol­o­gy).

You can lis­ten to the inter­view here (MP3).

By the way, if you can read Ger­man, there’s also an inter­est­ing arti­cle about my book and the Sovi­et “Dooms­day Machine”, Perimetr, on Tele­po­lis.

7 comments so far:

  1. Paul Halpern | 14 September 2007

    Fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view. I enjoyed it very much, par­tic­u­lar­ly your insights and anec­dotes about Szi­lard, Kahn and oth­ers.

  2. PD Smith | 15 September 2007

    Thanks Paul — glad you liked it!

  3. Thomas R. | 27 September 2007

    The book sug­gests that the lead­ing sci­en­tists of that time some­how iden­ti­fied those SF-sto­ries which real­ly prog­nosed lat­er devel­op­ments. What read con­tem­po­rary lead­ing sci­en­tists and what idea of the future give their read­ings?

  4. PD Smith | 28 September 2007

    My book explores many exam­ples of fic­tion in the first half of the 20th cen­tu­ry that helped to cre­ate the “dream of the super­weapon”. Briefly, these showed how a “sav­iour sci­en­tist” would emerge from his lab­o­ra­to­ry with a weapon so pow­er­ful that no army could resist it. In this way war would effec­tive­ly be abol­ished and sci­ence would have helped to bring about a utopia.

    HG Wells’ “The World Set Free” (1914) is a key text in that it pre­dicts an atom­ic super­weapon, glob­al nuclear war, and an atom­ic utopia. It influ­enced one of the fathers of the atom­ic age, Leo Szi­lard, when he realised that a self-sus­tain­ing neu­tron chain reac­tion was the key to atom­ic ener­gy in 1933.

    Hope this helps! There are many oth­er influ­en­tial texts though in the book…

  5. Thomas R. | 28 September 2007

    Hi Peter, thanks! If I would try a prog­no­sis about recent influ­en­tial SF, I would point to Stanislav Lems books. Conc. fic­tion-sto­ries about future social and polit. devel­op­ments, when one such sto­ry catched my atten­tion and I found out that the author (a physi­cist and philoso­pher) wrote it after vis­it­ing a lead­ing insti­tute which pro­duces many lead­ing bue­ro­crats and politi­cians, I made a lit­tle exper­i­ment, made a brochure in the style of that SF for a group of pol­i­tics advi­sors and finaly gave it a unique sym­bol­ic name from out of nov­el, then send it to the tar­get group. The feed­back was very inter­est­ing…

  6. PD Smith | 30 September 2007

    …so I guess they fell for it then? That’s the kind of trick Leo Szi­lard would have pulled!

  7. Thomas R. | 30 September 2007

    Well, we live in a strange world. Acad­e­mia does not dif­fer: Once, a stu­dent (phon­ing me at 3 a.m. for it) took a joke as the­sis-theme he offered his prof and got it admit­ted. Imag­ine his reac­tion, when he asked lat­er the day for fur­ther ideas and found out.