Doomsday Men weighs in at over 500 pages, a surprising amount for a fairly narrow topic: the plans – never realised – to build a nuclear weapon capable of destroying life on Earth. The length of the book is explained when you find the Cobalt Bomb gets about 10 pages, and the rest is taken up with the prehistory and dream life of superweapons.
The first section of the book deals with the story of nuclear physics, from Rutherford onwards, and the science fiction speculations of the early 20th century. Among the interesting snippets is the fact that the term “atom bomb” was coined by HG Wells in his 1914 story ‘The World Set Free’. The book skips back further in time to look at earlier inventors of superweapons, in particular the scientists who developed chemical weapons in WWI. Then we whizz forward again to the years leading up to the first atomic bomb, followed by the nuclear age of the 50s and 60s.
The book’s main focus is on the scientists involved in the early US nuclear weapons programmes, in particular on Hungarian-born Leo Szilard, who has received less attention than figures like Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller.
Smith is a science fiction fan rather than a scientist. For that reason, there’s a lot of good material on doomsday weapons in fiction, from Wells to Dr Strangelove, but less consideration of the politics or the weapons themselves than I would have expected. As a military technology buff, I’d like to know how effective a cobalt bomb would be. Weapon designers invariably over-rate their creations, and I’m very dubious that such a bomb could even extinguish human life, let alone life on the planet. (Fallout from nuclear tests suggests the Southern Hemisphere would get off relatively lightly).
Now the Cold War is over, the biggest concern is over rudimentary nuclear weapons in the hands of rogue states, and the days of world-annihilating weapons are long gone. But Doomsday Men is an interesting tour of a more innocent age when bigger and better bombs were seen by some as the best guarantors of peace and by others as the ultimate nightmare.
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