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	Doomsday Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon By P.D. Smith St. Martin's Press 416 pages. $27.95

The Big Bang

The only thing outdoing science fiction is science itself in P.D. Smith's history of the superweapon.

By Saul Austerlitz
Published: February 15, 2008

'We are keeping the rings in this bucket, here." A shell-shocked civil defense officer gestures to a hefty metal bucket at his feet, stuffed with what appear to be thousands of wedding rings. The rings have been gathered from the dead in a small British city; their inscriptions are the only hope authorities have of identifying those incinerated by the deployment of a nuclear weapon. "This," a narrator mournfully concludes, "is nuclear war."

The scene is imagined, only one of the wealth of emotionally overwhelming moments that make up Peter Watkins' 1965 Academy Award-winning fictional documentary "The War Game," still the best film ever made on the subject. Nuclear war is not merely a matter of warheads and tactics, presidents and premiers; it is also a matter of the bucket of wedding rings.

This tension -- between warheads and wedding rings, detached analysis and a deep-rooted understanding of the human fallout from technologically accelerated combat -- forms the primary subject matter of P.D. Smith's engaging, unsettling "Doomsday Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon." Scientifically and culturally adept, "Doomsday Men" tracks the pursuit of devastating weaponry in both laboratories and pulp magazines. Smith's wide-ranging book also serves as a biography of sorts of the scientist, writer and thinker Leo Szilard, who emblematizes science's growing awareness of the consequences of its own thirst for knowledge. Whether Szilard's quest for more responsible science was a success or a failure remains an open question.

Taking its cues from the work of Richard Rhodes and Mike Davis, Smith's book is simultaneously a careful study of a century of scientific research in the field of warfare, and a look at the cultural impact of novelists, poets and filmmakers imagining mass destruction. Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" provides the personalities; Davis' "Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster" supplies the interest in metaphoric resonances. But the gap between science and literature is not quite as wide as it might initially seem. Literature often shared its bright ideas with science, with alchemical processes turning imagination into horrific reality.

It was writers who first dreamed of weapons so overwhelmingly powerful that they might paradoxically bring about peace. H.G. Wells coined the term "atomic bomb" in his 1914 novel "The World Set Free," and as far back as 1871, Edward Bulwer-Lytton's "The Coming Race" envisioned scientifically advanced aliens whose energy source -- known as vril -- was so far superior to that of humans that it meant an end to all wars. Scientists, in their more reflective moments, also imagined a superweapon of peace -- one so risky to deploy that it would prevent further combat. That their efforts ultimately contributed to greater, and not lesser, catastrophe managed to be ignored by the more hawkish physicists.

But the search for superweapons did not begin with physics. The outbreak of World War I jumpstarted a frantic worldwide search for better killing through chemistry, and it was German scientists -- led by the resourceful patriot Fritz Haber -- who first rendered gas deadly, employing chlorine gas against the British. Haber's wife committed suicide in protest, but to no avail: Science had opened Pandora's box (an image memorably utilized in one of the clammiest nightmares of the atomic era, Robert Aldrich's 1955 noir classic "Kiss Me Deadly") and could no longer close it. That some of Haber's own relatives were later killed by other German soldiers in another war with a different kind of gas -- Zyklon B -- was a gruesomely ironic illustration of this precept. Scientists may plan, but politicians and generals only laughed, ignoring all warnings, throwing caution to the winds, and treating each advance as a further opportunity to make mass-death part of the national arsenal.

Itar-Tass Edward Teller takes stock of a model of a Soviet hydrogen bomb in Chelyabinsk in 1994.

An American editorialist of the era accused scientists of kowtowing before military might in their pitiless pursuit of knowledge: "Chemistry, you stand indicted and shamed before the Bar of History! You have prostituted your genius to fell and ogrish devices... You have turned killer and run with the wolf-pack." By the time Adolf Hitler (himself a victim of gassing during World War I) came to power in Germany, the effort had moved into the field of physics, and a secret race was on to unlock the power of the atom. Szilard, ever vigilant about the long-term consequences of scientific research, sought to put a lid on what he had discovered about the nature of chain reactions, and succeeded in doing so, for a time. Once the United States entered World War II and began work on the $2 billion Manhattan Project, such slow-down efforts were worse than useless, so Szilard dedicated himself to agitating for atomic power and against German efforts to develop similar weaponry.

Szilard -- a Hungarian refugee and "inventor of all things" who wrote science fiction and sketched out plans for electrified barbers' chairs and magnetized stockings in his spare time -- stood in confrontational counterpoint to warrior-scientists like Edward Teller and Herman Kahn, who sought to weaponize atomic research. Szilard advocated fruitlessly for the United States to restrict itself to an atomic-bomb demonstration in order to frighten Japan into submission in 1945, and was suitably horrified by misleading pronouncements like that in the 1951 public-information film "Atomic Alert" that "the chance of your being hurt by an atomic bomb is slight." Unchecked by the ramifications of their research, scientists pressed on to the next generations of superweaponry -- the hydrogen bomb and the proposed cobalt bomb, which would create a radioactive cloud potentially powerful enough to end all human life. "Gentlemen: You are mad!" shouted the title of an incendiary essay by the historian Lewis Mumford, but at the time, the righteous outrage of a Mumford or a Bertrand Russell seemed positively feeble next to the careful, calculating sophistry of Kahn, who proclaimed that nuclear war was winnable, or of Teller, who argued that "radiological warfare could be used in a humane manner."

As might be guessed from the book's subtitle, "Doomsday Men" concludes with a nimble analysis of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 black-comic Armageddon film, "Dr. Strangelove." Strangelove himself -- the prototypical mad scientist updated for the atomic age -- is equal parts Kahn, Teller and German rocketmaster Wernher von Braun. But after 400 pages on the subject of catastrophic destruction, with a chorus of scientists proclaiming each new weapon the potential savior of humanity, "Dr. Strangelove" no longer plays as a comedy; it has become a documentary of scientific hubris and human foolishness. Smith's startling story chronicles the ways in which science divorced itself from humanity -- how bombs became dissociated from the buckets of wedding rings they would unavoidably bring about. Watkins' "The War Game" (strangely unmentioned in "Doomsday Men") is an imaginary recreation of what might occur, but the details are only too real: After the firebombing of Dresden in 1945, German officials collected rings in a desperate attempt to identify the dead. Without care and diligence in combating the nuclear menace, such tactics might be necessary once again.

Saul Austerlitz is a critic in New York.

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