PD Smith

Alom Sha­ha has set up an excel­lent web­site that seeks to answer the ques­tion: Why is sci­ence impor­tant?

There are many inter­est­ing replies here from the likes of Jim Al-Khalili, Simon Singh, and Mar­cus Chown. He’s kind­ly asked me to add my own answer — you can read it here.

My own favourite is by Maya Hawes. She’s twelve years old.

Win­ter has arrived in Hamp­shire.
I haven’t seen this much snow since I lived in Munich…

The Times Lit­er­ary Sup­ple­ment has just pub­lished my review of three immense­ly impres­sive stud­ies of urban his­to­ry: Gail Fenske’s The Sky­scraper and the City: The Wool­worth Build­ing and the Mak­ing of Mod­ern New York (Chica­go), Robert H. Kar­gon & Arthur P. Molel­la’s Invent­ed Edens: Tech­no-Cities of the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry (MIT), and Dell Upton’s Anoth­er City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New Amer­i­can Repub­lic (Yale).

This is the first para­graph:

“At 7.30 on the evening of April 24, 1913, Pres­i­dent Woodrow Wil­son pushed a but­ton on his desk in Wash­ing­ton, DC, send­ing a tele­graph­ic sig­nal to New York where it set off an alarm bell in the engine room of a sky­scraper and set in motion four mighty Corliss-type engines and dynamos. In an instant, some 80,000 incan­des­cent bulbs flashed on, illu­mi­nat­ing for the first time the world’s tallest sky­scraper – the Wool­worth Build­ing. Thou­sands of spec­ta­tors had gath­ered in City Hall Park and along low­er Broad­way to wit­ness the daz­zling elec­tri­cal spec­ta­cle that marked the open­ing of this fifty-five-storey addi­tion to New York’s sky­line. On the New Jer­sey shore, peo­ple caught their breath as the tow­er appeared, shim­mer­ing against the night sky, a gleam­ing bea­con of moder­ni­ty vis­i­ble from ships a hun­dred miles away. As the 792-foot tall sky­scraper was bathed in elec­tric light, the news was being trans­mit­ted from its pin­na­cle by Mar­coni wire­less to a receiv­er on the Eif­fel Tow­er. From there it was beamed around the world. This mod­ern media event was, as one com­men­ta­tor said, ‘the pre­mier pub­lic­i­ty stunt of this or any oth­er day’. It was a fit­ting open­ing for what would become the most famous office build­ing in the world.”

Read the rest here.

The lead­ing his­to­ri­an of sci­ence fic­tion Pro­fes­sor David Seed, author of Amer­i­can Sci­ence Fic­tion and the Cold War (1999) among oth­er titles, has writ­ten a nice review of Dooms­day Men for the Mod­ern Lan­guage Review. Here’s the first para­graph:

“Tak­ing Dr. Strangelove as his main ref­er­ence-point, Peter D. Smith sets out to give us a nar­ra­tive of the his­to­ry of the super­weapon, whose ori­gin he dates more or less to the dis­cov­ery of radioac­tiv­i­ty. One of the main strengths of this account lies in Smith’s abil­i­ty to com­bine sci­ence, his­to­ry, and fic­tion in an engross­ing cul­tur­al his­to­ry of one of the con­cepts lying at the heart of the Cold War. It may sound odd, but the super­weapon was con­ceived in a utopi­an spir­it as the device which would end war once and for all. This idea was from the very begin­ning polit­i­cal­ly naïve and inter­nal­ly flawed. Smith right­ly presents H. G. Wells’s 1914 nov­el The World Set Free as a for­ma­tive text in imag­in­ing how the world could be reborn through atom­ic war. Here Wells was tech­no­log­i­cal­ly pre­scient, but also dis­turbing­ly uncon­cerned about the mil­lions who would have to be atom­ized to real­ize this dream. It was a dream made pos­si­ble by an enter­pris­ing sci­en­tist, and Smith charts out fas­ci­nat­ing­ly how the fig­ure of the sci­en­tist fluc­tu­at­ed in the peri­od from the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry up to the 1960s between the polar­ized extremes of a role as sav­iour of human­i­ty or its vil­lain­ous destroy­er.”

(David Seed, Mod­ern Lan­guage Review 104.1 (Jan 2009), 195–6)

Today’s Times has a pow­er­ful let­ter from Field Mar­shal Lord Bra­mall, Gen­er­al Lord Rams­both­am, and Gen­er­al Sir Hugh Beach argu­ing against the renew­al of Britain’s nuclear deter­rent, the Tri­dent II D‑5 sub­ma­rine-launched bal­lis­tic mis­sile:

“Nuclear weapons have shown them­selves to be com­plete­ly use­less as a deter­rent to the threats and scale of vio­lence we cur­rent­ly, or are like­ly to, face — par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­na­tion­al ter­ror­ism; and the more you analyse them the more unus­able they appear. […] Our inde­pen­dent deter­rent has become vir­tu­al­ly irrel­e­vant except in the con­text of domes­tic pol­i­tics. Rather than per­pet­u­at­ing Tri­dent, the case is much stronger for fund­ing our Armed Forces with what they need to meet the com­mit­ments actu­al­ly laid upon them. In the present eco­nom­ic cli­mate it may well prove impos­si­ble to afford both.”

Let’s hope that the words of a for­mer Chief of the Defence Staff might change the minds of the politi­cians who recent­ly vot­ed to renew Britain’s nuclear deter­rent. You can read the whole let­ter here.

There is also a very good arti­cle by Paul Rogers, Pro­fes­sor of Peace Stud­ies at Brad­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, on the need to change the Cold War mind­set of our lead­ers, today’s Dooms­day Men, online at the New Inter­na­tion­al­ist.

A fas­ci­nat­ing and chill­ing report by the BBC’s Gor­don Cor­era about the crash of a B52 bomber in north­ern Green­land in 1968, dur­ing which a nuclear weapon was lost beneath the ice, illus­trates some of the dan­gers of the nuclear arms race. Read his report here.