My essay “Gen­tle­men, You are Mad!: Mutu­al Assured Destruc­tion and Cold War Cul­ture” has been pub­lished in The Oxford Hand­book of Post­war Euro­pean His­to­ry, edit­ed by Pro­fes­sor Dan Stone. This sub­stan­tial vol­ume con­tains 35 chap­ters explor­ing the Cold War through the lens­es of many dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines. My con­tri­bu­tion looks at how mutu­al assured destruc­tion (MAD) was reflect­ed and refract­ed in Euro­pean cul­ture and soci­ety from 1950 to 1985, and argues that film and fic­tion played a key role in high­light­ing the hor­rif­ic poten­tial out­come of MAD – a glob­al nuclear holo­caust. It was fas­ci­nat­ing to revis­it a sub­ject I explored in my book Dooms­day Men (2007) but I also enjoyed the oppor­tu­ni­ty to look in more detail at the his­to­ry of the anti-nuclear move­ments through­out the Cold War.

The title of the essay is a quo­ta­tion from a 1946 arti­cle by the his­to­ri­an Lewis Mum­ford attack­ing the sui­ci­dal poli­cies of the Cold War. “We in Amer­i­ca,” he wrote, “are liv­ing among mad­men. Mad­men gov­ern our affairs in the name of order and secu­ri­ty.” Accord­ing to Mum­ford, the mod­ern super­weapon soci­ety, for all its tech­no­log­i­cal suprema­cy, was unable to rec­og­nize the loom­ing dis­as­ter. Peo­ple were sleep­walk­ing towards the abyss of atom­ic war: “The mad­men have tak­en it upon them­selves to lead us by grad­ual stages to that final act of mad­ness which will cor­rupt the face of the earth and blot out the nations of men, pos­si­bly put an end to all life on the plan­et itself.”

Mumford’s arti­cle pro­vid­ed the per­fect point of depar­ture for a jour­ney through the era of the alpha­bet bombs – the A‑bomb, the H‑bomb and the world-destroy­ing C‑bomb. I show that films and fic­tions from Dr Strangelove and On the Beach, to The Day After played a major role in reveal­ing the flawed, dooms­day log­ic behind MAD. As Albert Camus said just days after the bomb­ing of Hiroshi­ma: “peace is the only bat­tle worth wag­ing”.

It was anoth­er text by Mum­ford – The City in His­to­ry (1961) – that was among the first books I read when I began writ­ing my lat­est book, City: A Guide­book for the Urban Age. Mumford’s book is an immense­ly impres­sive work of schol­ar­ship and syn­the­sis, although as Jonathan Yard­ley point­ed out in his recent Wash­ing­ton Post review of my book, much has changed since he was writ­ing:

“Half a cen­tu­ry ago, Lewis Mum­ford pub­lished The City in His­to­ry, a huge­ly influ­en­tial and in some ways con­tro­ver­sial book that has been the Bible for stu­dents and lovers of city life. But that was half a cen­tu­ry ago, and around the world the cityscape has under­gone enor­mous changes. A new look at this great sub­ject has for some time been need­ed, and in City: A Guide­book for the Urban Age, P.D. Smith pro­vides it. A British schol­ar con­nect­ed to Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don, Smith is less philo­soph­i­cal and more empir­i­cal than Mum­ford, but if any­thing this is wel­come, as City is whol­ly acces­si­ble to the seri­ous gen­er­al read­er.”

City was pub­lished a cou­ple of weeks ago in the UK and is due out on 19 June in US. It is always an anx­ious time for any author and as City is struc­tural­ly quite unusu­al – being designed like a guide­book to an imag­i­nary “Everyc­i­ty” – I am par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in the reac­tion of read­ers. For­tu­nate­ly Yardley’s review was favourable, as was Jonathan Glancey’s in the Guardian:

“So behind the walls of the city – Smith has a chap­ter on these – there is dark­ness, graf­fi­ti, street lan­guage, upris­ings, reli­gions, ghet­tos and slums, cathe­dral-like rail­way sta­tions, traf­fic, trade, bazaars, malls, muse­ums, red-light dis­tricts and so much else. Smith packs the blood, guts, under­bel­ly and dri­ving forces of the arche­typ­al city into chap­ters as dense­ly packed as the streetscapes of Man­hat­tan or Hong Kong.”

So far I have talked about the book on BBC Radio 3, Talk Radio Europe, as well as Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Radio, and there are many more inter­views and arti­cles yet to appear. Watch this space!

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, last week I injured my back – what is pop­u­lar­ly (although, accord­ing to my phys­io­ther­a­pist, inac­cu­rate­ly) known as a slipped disc. It’s excru­ci­at­ing­ly painful and I’m writ­ing this while lying flat on my back. It’s ter­ri­ble tim­ing, of course, but I’m keep­ing my fin­gers crossed that the drugs and the doc­tors will have me on my feet again soon.

It does, how­ev­er, pro­vide the per­fect excuse to catch up on read­ing, such as Nick Harkaway’s won­der­ful­ly doomy nov­el Angel­mak­er… Just what the doc­tor ordered!