PD Smith

They say all good things must come to an end, and so it seems must a good run of reviews. At the week­end the Guardian pub­lished a less than flat­ter­ing piece on Dooms­day Men.

It was a joint review by Dominick Don­ald on my book and William Langewi­esche’s The Atom­ic Bazaar. Unfor­tu­nate­ly nei­ther book seemed to appeal to Don­ald: Dooms­day Men was too long and Langewi­esche’s too short and over-priced. With my book he also seems to miss the point that it is a work of cul­tur­al his­to­ry that traces the ori­gins of the dream of the super­weapon back to the begin­ning of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.

The two quotes he uses from my book are from the pro­logue and the epi­logue and it’s true these brief sec­tions do try to forge links with the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. But the rest of the book is his­to­ry, and the fact that, as Don­ald puts it, the “lit­er­a­ture and film that he has explored so exhaus­tive­ly is (HG Wells and Neville [sic!] Shute, Dr Strangelove and Godzil­la aside) unknown today” is to miss the point entire­ly. In their day, the nov­els, films, poems, and pop­u­lar arti­cles I draw into my argu­ment were very well known indeed.

Apart from mis­spelling Nevil Shute’s name, Don­ald mis­tak­en­ly refers to how “Well­s’s nuclear weapon nov­el The Shape of Things to Come” inspired Leo Szi­lard’s eure­ka moment while he wait­ed to cross Southamp­ton Row in Lon­don. It is, Don­ald says, a “well-estab­lished Wells con­nec­tion”. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it’s not this nov­el but one writ­ten 20 years ear­li­er, The World Set Free!

Still, mis­takes aside it’s an inter­est­ing arti­cle on nuclear issues today and worth a read. But giv­en that — to quote Grib­bin’s review — my book is an “impas­sioned” explo­ration of super­weapon cul­ture, it isn’t real­ly sur­pris­ing that some­one who works for the grow­ing pri­vate secu­ri­ty sec­tor (Tim Spicer’s Aegis Spe­cial­ist Risk Man­age­ment) was unim­pressed by Dooms­day Men.

You can read Don­ald’s review here.

The Span­ish philoso­pher Sal­vador Pániker has writ­ten a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle on the two cul­tures for the Opin­ion page of El Pais (Feb­ru­ary 18, 2007). He argues that “per­me­abil­i­ty between sci­ences, arts and let­ters” should become “a hall­mark of our times”.

Refer­ring to John Brock­man’s idea of a “third cul­ture” of sci­en­tist-writ­ers and the dawn of a new age of human­ism, he sug­gests that intel­lec­tu­als out­side the sci­ences do need to engage with sci­ence: “Human­is­m’s received task is more def­er­en­tial toward the auton­o­my of sci­ence: To tru­ly under­stand our most fun­da­men­tal con­di­tion­ings; to ensure that sci­en­tif­ic par­a­digms tru­ly fer­til­ize philo­soph­i­cal and even lit­er­ary dis­course.”

Cul­ture is “born from the cross-fer­til­iza­tion of indi­vid­ual dis­ci­plines”. Rather than seek­ing to uni­fy all fields of knowl­edge beneath the ban­ner of sci­ence, Pániker joins French philoso­pher Edgar Morin in call­ing for a spir­it of “trans­dis­ci­pli­nar­i­ty”, which “aspires to a com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the dis­ci­plines based on com­plex thought”.

I agree very much with Pániker’s argu­ment. You can’t ignore sci­ence, but nei­ther should you be a pas­sive consumer. As some­one who writes about the his­to­ry of sci­ence, lit­er­a­ture and film, find­ing those moments where these dif­fer­ent fields meet and pro­duce new ideas is what it’s all about.

It reminds me of a mem­o­rable quote from the late great Kurt Von­negut: “I think that nov­els that leave out tech­nol­o­gy mis­rep­re­sent life as bad­ly as Vic­to­ri­ans mis­rep­re­sent­ed life by leav­ing out sex.“ 

Pániker’s arti­cle is on Brock­man’s site, Edge.

And while we’re on the sub­ject of the two cul­tures, there’s an amus­ing blog on poet­ry and sci­ence by Shirley Dent at Guardian Unlim­it­ed. Tim Adams has also writ­ten an intrigu­ing piece for the Observ­er on “The new age of igno­rance”. It’s inter­est­ing that in this arti­cle, Brock­man says Von­negut was one of the lead­ing nov­el­ists who declined to take part in the meet­ings with sci­en­tists, artists, archi­tects, and musi­cians that even­tu­al­ly became Edge. I won­der why…

John Grib­bin has said some nice things about Dooms­day Men in a review for this mon­th’s Lit­er­ary Review:

“It is an impas­sioned account of every­thing from the dis­cov­ery of radioac­tiv­i­ty to plans for a Dooms­day Device (yes, there real­ly were such plans) from an author who feels that to the gen­er­a­tions grow­ing up who see the Cold War only as some­thing in his­to­ry books, the true hor­ror of nuclear weapons has been for­got­ten. While politi­cians talk glibly of ‘weapons of mass destruc­tion’, nobody has any real feel­ing for what it means to expe­ri­ence intense machine gun fire, the kind of bomb­ing that destroyed Dres­den, or a nuclear holo­caust. Nor do many peo­ple know that there are still about 30,000 nuclear weapons still ready for launch around the world. Dooms­day Men aims to address that gap, focus­ing on nuclear weapons, but also look­ing at oth­er forms of mass destruc­tion.”

 He con­cludes that Dooms­day Men is “impor­tant, and, depress­ing­ly, there is a need for it — peo­ple, espe­cial­ly younger peo­ple than me, ought to read it”.

Author Andrew Robin­son has writ­ten a per­cep­tive review of Dooms­day Men for this mon­th’s Physics World. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it’s not avail­able on-line unless you are a sub­scriber. How­ev­er, I can tell you that he describes my book as “a chill­ing­ly com­pelling his­to­ry of chem­i­cal, bio­log­i­cal and atom­ic super­weapons”. He con­tin­ues:

“Dooms­day Men analy­ses dozens of exam­ples of how cul­ture influ­enced sci­ence in the devis­ing of super­weapons. They range from the prophet­ic writ­ings of HG Wells, and the sci­ence fic­tion pub­lished in Amaz­ing Sto­ries and oth­er mag­a­zines in the 1920s and 1930s, to high­ly influ­en­tial post-atom­ic-bomb nov­els such as Nevil Shute’s On the Beach and Morde­cai Rosh­wald’s Lev­el 7. And, of course, there is the dark­ly com­ic film Dr Strangelove, direct­ed by Stan­ley Kubrick in 1963, in which the sto­ry cen­tres around the ‘dooms­day machine’ — a phrase orig­i­nal­ly coined by gung-ho phy­isic­st Her­man Kahn.”

Robin­son con­cludes that Dooms­day Men “suc­cess­ful­ly shows how and why super­weapons have been simul­ta­ne­ous­ly admired and reviled by both sci­en­tists and the pub­lic.”

Nov­el­ist Tibor Fis­ch­er has writ­ten a great review of my book, Dooms­day Men in today’s Dai­ly Tele­graph. I just thought I’d share a few quotes with you:

“Dooms­day Men does­n’t just deal with ther­monu­clear destruc­tion. It’s a metic­u­lous account of weapons of mass destruc­tion and the sci­ence and sci­en­tists behind them. Indeed, it is two books for the price of one, because it is also a cul­tur­al dis­qui­si­tion. Smith scours fic­tion for visions of death rays and lurid imag­in­ings of Armaged­don to show how writ­ers often pre­ced­ed or influ­enced sci­en­tists.”

As well as describ­ing Dooms­day Men as “read­able and enter­tain­ing”, Fis­ch­er thinks I deserve “some sort of award for val­ue for mon­ey”. Well at least you know that if you buy my book, you’re not being short-changed!

You can read the whole review, “But, Herr Ein­stein, that’s non­sense!”, here.