Doomsday Men Read online

  Doomsday Men

  P. D. Smith

  It was the weapon to end all weapons: the doomsday device. A huge nuclear bomb so powerful that it could envelop the entire planet in a cloud of radioactive dust, and bring about instant extinction.

  This is the untold story of the Cold War’s most insane plan, the men behind it and how it nearly happened. It is also the history of humanity’s nightmare vision of a superweapon, showing how popular culture – from the stories of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne to films such as Planet of the Apes, Mad Max and Dr Strangelove itself – has both shaped and reflected our darkest dreams.

  P. D. Smith

  DOOMSDAY MEN

  The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon

  For Bernard Smith (1925–2005)

  I call on all scientists in all countries to cease and desist from work creating, developing, improving and manufacturing further nuclear weapons – and, for that matter, other weapons of potential mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons.

  Hans Bethe, 1995

  Peace is the only battle worth waging.

  Albert Camus, 8 August 1945

  Acknowledgements

  This book has grown out of more than ten years of research and writing on the relationship between science and literature. The so-called two cultures are actually more closely connected than is commonly believed, and, as I hope Doomsday Men shows, tracing those points where they meet and cross-fertilize can reveal fascinating insights into our shared history.

  I am immensely grateful to the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London for asking me to teach an occasional course on science and literature and for making me an Honorary Research Fellow. I was also pleased to have the opportunity to present work-in-progress on Doomsday Men to a research seminar in the department in 2005 organised by Jane Gregory. The feedback from this and from students on my courses in the previous two years helped to shape my thinking as the project developed. Many thanks also to Martin Swales, Emeritus Professor of German at UCL, for sharing over the years his insights into literature and for inviting me to speak to the English Goethe Society on ‘Faust, Physicists and the Atomic Bomb’ in 2006.

  Being affiliated to an academic department has also allowed me to make full use of the excellent libraries at UCL, Imperial College and the University of London’s Senate House. Librarians are the unsung heroes of non-fiction writing, and the staff at all these libraries were unfailingly helpful beyond the call of duty. Senate House overlooks Russell Square, where Leo Szilard stayed in 1933 and near where he had his Eureka! moment. I often thought of Szilard’s association with this area as I walked through the square to the library in the morning.

  Special thanks go to Jon Turney for commissioning Doomsday Men and for believing in the book throughout its period of gestation. Not only were our working lunches immensely enjoyable, but his judicious editing of the initial typescript has contributed greatly to the finished work. Many thanks also to Will Goodlad, who inherited the book at Penguin, for his enthusiasm and commitment as well as for his admirably flexible interpretation of deadlines. Thanks are due as well to John Woodruff, whose knowledge of both science and science fiction made him the ideal copy-editor for the book. Any errors that remain are, of course, entirely my own responsibility. I am also grateful to my literary agents – James Gill and Zoe Pagnamenta – for placing Doomsday Men with such excellent publishers in the UK and abroad.

  Writing a study as broad in its scope as this inevitably makes one indebted to the work of many scholars. I have tried to acknowledge their contributions in both the endnotes and the bibliography, but thanks in particular to Professor Paul Brians, Professor H. Bruce Franklin, Roslynn D. Haynes, William Lanouette and Richard Rhodes, whose books I have referred to while writing Doomsday Men. Many people have offered help and advice during the three years of research and writing. In particular, I would like to thank Joanne Atkinson, Brian Balmer, Professor Paul Bishop, Rebecca Hurst, Manjit Kumar, Julian Loose and Peter Tallack. For help locating images used in the book I would also like to thank Andrey Bobrov (ITARTASS), Heather Lindsay (Emilio Segrè Visual Archives) and Felicity Pors (Niels Bohr Archive).

  My father died while I was writing this book. I will never forget our conversations about books, writers and the life of the mind. The best of these typically began while we were walking across the South Downs and ended in a Sussex pub. This book is dedicated to him, although he never lived to see it finished. In the course of writing Doomsday Men I became aware of how the story of superweapons had touched previous generations of my own family. I am grateful to Major (Ret’d) R. G. Woodfield, MBE, Regimental Archivist of the Grenadier Guards, for providing information about my grandfather’s military service.

  Last but by no means least, I want to thank my partner, Susan, for reading the manuscript with a forensic eye for detail and for stoically putting up with my obsession with science, superweapons and other strangeloves during the last few years.

  All other things, to their destruction draw,

  Only our love hath no decay.

  John Donne, ‘The Anniversary’

  P. D. Smith

  Hampshire, January 2007

  http: //www.peterdsmith.com

  NOTE ON UNITS

  For much of the period with which this book is concerned, many of the scientists and writers in my narrative were content to think in terms of inches, feet and miles, and pounds and tons. To retain this historical dimension, I have therefore chosen not to convert measurements to metric units.

  Prologue

  The Beginning or The End?

  And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.

  And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done.

  Revelation 16: 16–17

  Homo sapiens is the only species that knows it will die. The thought obsesses us. From the earliest marks made on cave walls to our most sublime works of art, the fear of death haunts our every creation. And in the middle of the twentieth century, human beings became the first species to reach that pinnacle of evolution – the point at which it could engineer its own extinction.

  In February 1950, as the temperature of the cold war approached absolute zero, an atomic scientist conceived the ultimate nuclear weapon: a vast explosive device that would cast a deadly pall of fallout over the planet. Carried on the wind, the lethal radioactive dust would eventually reach all four corners of the world. It would mean the end of life on earth.

  The world first heard about the doomsday device on America’s most popular radio discussion programme, the University of Chicago Round Table. Four scientists who had been involved in building the atomic bomb discussed the next generation of nuclear weapons: the hydrogen bomb.

  During the programme, one of the founding fathers of the atomic age, Leo Szilard, stated that it would be ‘very easy to rig an H-bomb’ to produce ‘very dangerous radioactivity’. All you had to do, said Szilard, was surround the bomb with a chemical element such as cobalt that absorbs radiation. When it exploded, the bomb would spew radioactive dust into the air like an artificial volcano. Slowly and silently, this invisible killer would fall to the surface. ‘Everyone would be killed,’ he said.1 The fallout from his chilling suggestion spread fear around the world. For many it seemed as though the biblical story of Armageddon was about to be realized; the seventh angel would empty his vial into the atmosphere, and it would contain radioactive cobalt-60.

  Those fears intensified when, in 1954, the United States detonated its biggest ever hydrogen bomb, scattering fallout over thousands of square miles of the Pacific. Such a bomb had been at the core
of Leo Szilard’s idea. Newspaper headlines around the world proclaimed the imminent construction of the cobalt bomb. In fiction and films, Szilard’s deadly brainchild soon became the ultimate symbol of the threat humankind now posed to the very existence of our living, breathing planet.

  The story of the cobalt bomb is an unwritten chapter of the cold war. For Szilard it was a dramatic way of warning people about weapons of mass destruction and the escalating arms race. Scientists had been praised by many for curtailing World War II with the atomic bomb. But in the cold war the creators of these apocalyptic superweapons were seen as holding the fate of the world in their hands. They had transformed the laws of nature into instruments of mass destruction and, as far as the public was concerned, there would soon be little to distinguish real scientists from that fictional master of megadeath, Dr Strangelove.

  But scientists have not always been mad, and superweapons not always bad. When you look at the history of superweapons through the lenses of science and popular culture, a very different story emerges. Our feelings towards weapons of mass destruction and their inventors have been characterized by a deep ambivalence. Attitudes have swung like a pendulum from utopian hopes to doomsday fears. At the turn of the last century, scientists were seen as saviours, and it was confidently predicted that science was going to transform the world into what chemist Frederick Soddy memorably called ‘one smiling Garden of Eden’.2 It was the atom that would allow us to enter this mythical paradise. Finding the key that would unlock the energy in the dark heart of matter obsessed both scientists and fiction writers.

  The dream of the superweapon also emerged at this time in popular culture, springing up alongside the visions of scientific utopia. For the superweapon was going to achieve what empires and religions had been unable to do since civilization began – to bring peace to the world. A scientific wizard would emerge from his mysterious laboratory bearing a weapon so terrible, so devastating, that no force on earth would be able to stand against it. This scientist would then compel the armies of the world to disarm. Thus the saviour scientist with his superweapon would set the world free from centuries of conflict and found a new scientific Jerusalem. It would be the beginning of a brave new world.

  The reality turned out to be somewhat different. The chemist Fritz Haber thought he could save Germany with his superweapon – poison gas. But he was wrong. The suffocating yellow clouds of chlorine billowing across the fields of Ypres in 1915 marked the first use of a scientific weapon of mass destruction. Scientists said that it was a new, humane form of warfare, but ordinary people were appalled. Haber’s wife committed suicide just days after the first use of poison gas. After World War I, Haber was branded a war criminal. But war had evolved, and the doomsday clock could not be turned back. The military on all sides quickly embraced Haber’s new scientific weapon, and soldiers everywhere had to prepare themselves for a new and frightening way to die.

  In the 1930s, a Japanese scientist, Shiro Ishii, tried to discover a superweapon that would allow his nation to conquer its enemies. He decided that viruses and bacteria were better weapons than the bullet and the bomb, and pioneered the search for a biological superweapon, committing the most appalling crimes against humanity as he did so. But once again, like some deadly pathogen, warfare had evolved, and in the cold war Ishii’s research was acquired by the American military to help it develop ever more lethal weapons of mass destruction.

  Chemistry and biology both did their worst in the twentieth century, as scientists struggled to realize the dream of the superweapon. But it was physics that eventually achieved what the other disciplines could not – a single bomb that could annihilate a whole city in a split second.

  For Leo Szilard, it is the ‘tragedy of mankind’ that the story of the atomic bomb began with laudable hopes for a better future.3 At the beginning of the twentieth century, people marvelled at the hidden worlds revealed by X-rays and were awestruck by the mysterious glow of the new miracle element, radium. Such discoveries offered tangible hopes that a new age was dawning.

  The scientists who would lead the world into the atomic era emerged from Berlin’s golden age of physics in the 1920s. Among them was Szilard himself, a brilliant yet eccentric Hungarian émigré, known to his friends as the ‘inventor of all things’.4 His vision of an atomic utopia was inspired in part by the fiction of H. G. Wells. The story of Szilard’s mission to save the world takes us through the first, explosive years of the atomic age and into the cold war. It is a story that features three of his fellow countrymen: Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Edward Teller. Together they were the ‘Hungarian quartet’, a group of remarkable scientists who all played leading roles in the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb and later became key figures in cold-war America.5 All were inspired by the dream of the superweapon.

  The lives and attitudes of these extraordinary individuals reveal the true complexity of being a scientist in the most brutal century the world has known. Like his close friend Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard was a humanist who wanted to save the world with science, but his fellow members of the Quartet were less idealistic. In the cold war, angered by the Soviet Union’s treatment of Hungary, they became fiercely anti-Communist. ‘I don’t think any weapon can be too large,’ said mathematician von Neumann.6 Teller, known to the public as ‘Mr H-Bomb’, agreed.7 He became obsessed with the dream of building a bomb thousands of times bigger than the one that destroyed Hiroshima. His deadly vision came true in 1954, when a hydrogen bomb exploded with the force of millions of tons of conventional explosives, vaporizing a Pacific island. Unsurprisingly, both men helped inspire that maddest of mad scientists – Dr Strangelove.

  The 1950s became the doomsday decade. It was the era, to quote one writer for the science fiction magazines, of the ‘alphabet bombs’.8 First the A-bomb incinerated two Japanese cities. Then Edward Teller’s H-bomb blasted its way into people’s lives and minds. And finally there was the ultimate weapon that Leo Szilard warned the world about in 1950 – the C-bomb. In the 1960s, the world teetered on the brink of a global nuclear holocaust. In 1962, when America discovered that the Soviet Union was secretly shipping nuclear missiles to Cuba, everyone thought the doomsday clock was about to strike midnight. Like two scorpions in a bottle, the superpowers seemed hell-bent on mutual destruction. It was easy to believe that one of them was already building a doomsday machine, the cobalt superweapon that destroys the world in Stanley Kubrick’s cold-war classic, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. In the story of superweapons, it is often difficult to decide which is stranger – truth or fiction.

  In the twentieth century, scientists were raised up to be gods only to be cast down as devils. Films and fiction first turned them into saviours who free the world from war. But as fears grew about superweapons, those saviour scientists became mad scientists. In 1932, physicists attending a conference performed a play in which one of their own was cast as Dr Faust, the alchemist who sold his soul to the Devil for ultimate knowledge. This scientific performance came at a crucial moment in the history of science and the world. Soon Szilard would grasp how to release the energy of the atom, and the race for the atomic bomb would begin. As actors on the world’s stage, scientists would eventually be forced to drop the saviour’s mask. After Hiroshima they would increasingly play the role of the Strangelovean scientist. This was the price of their Faustian bargain.

  The history of weapons of mass destruction in the twentieth century is not just about soldiers and scientists. They are not the only doomsday men. Humankind’s most terrible yet ingenious inventions were inspired by a desperate dream, one that was shared by a whole culture. For this reason, history, biography, science and fiction all have an equal part to play in this book.

  I came to this subject through Leo Szilard’s extraordinary life story. He was a brilliant man, bursting with original ideas on everything from science to politics and even fiction. He was, said one colleague, the greatest scientist never
to have won a Nobel prize. Szilard was inspired by a vision of how science could transform the world, but he was also haunted by a fear of how people might misuse this power. His life epitomizes the glories and follies of twentieth-century science and history.

  However, I soon realized that to fully explore the questions raised by Szilard’s life, I would have to undertake something more wide-ranging than a biography. For Szilard’s hopes and fears were deeply rooted in the popular culture of his day, as of course were those of all the doomsday men. To explain why some of the most gifted and idealistic men of the twentieth century spent so much effort trying to destroy the planet, I needed to pursue the origins of these hopes and fears, not only in the lives of the scientists but also in films, fiction and other popular media. Then I might be able to understand why not only the doomsday men, but ordinary men and women were so beguiled by the dream of the superweapon – a dream that may yet turn into a nightmare for us all.

  I

  The Dream

  I would address one general admonition to all – that they consider what are the true ends of knowledge, and that they seek it not either for pleasure of the mind, or for contention, or for superiority to others, or for profit, or fame, or power, or any of these inferior things, but for the benefit and use of life… [that] there may spring helps to man, and a line and race of inventions that may in some degree subdue and overcome the necessities and miseries of humanity.

  Francis Bacon, Instauratio magna (1620)