Dr Strangelove and the real Doomsday machine

P. D. Smith
DOOMSDAY MEN
The real Dr Strangelove and the dream of the superweapon
552pp. Allen Lane. £20.
9 78 071 399815 3

In his film Dr Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick did for the Cold War what he had done for space in 2001: he intensified it, thereby making it more theatrical and at the same time giving it more depth. It is easily the funniest movie made about global thermo-nuclear war, and Strangelove seems not to have lost its bite, even though we think (mistakenly) that we have escaped the nuclear age. Obsessed with the idea that communists are trying to rob Americans of their “precious bodily fluids”, General Jack D. Ripper orders a B52 bomber wing to attack the Soviet Union. Left with little choice, the White House formulates a plan for the Russians to shoot down the American bombers. However, the Soviet Ambassador informs the President that the USSR has constructed a “Doomsday Device” which will automatically trigger their nuclear weapons if their country is hit. And that’s the rub because one of the B52s gets through to its target. As Dr Strangelove explodes down the phone to his Soviet counterpart: “You fools! A Doomsday Machine isn’t any good if you don’t tell anyone you have it!”

Thanks to the power of his film and Peter Sellers’s performance, Kubrick coined a new adjective: Strangelovean, to describe a person who has a potentially fatal fascination with the idea of nuclear war. Dr Strangelove came to embody the anxieties of a generation about scientists creating ever more lethal technologies of mass destruction. Strangelove himself was an amalgam of what the author of Doomsday Men, P. D. Smith, calls “the four horsemen of the apocalypse”: Edward Teller (the man who invented the H-bomb), Wernher von Braun (the man who invented the first ballistic missile), the wheelchair-bound John von Neumann, one of the most brilliant scientists of the time who laid the ground work for the computer, and Herman Kahn, the personification of the military intellectual. Yet Kahn, to his credit, although guyed in the film, went to his death firmly believing that the central problem of arms control was to delay the day when the Doomsday Machine “became practical”.

Smith’s study is the gripping, untold story of the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, which first came to public attention in 1950 when the Hungarian-born scientist Leo Szilard made a dramatic announcement on radio: science was on the verge of creating a Doomsday Bomb. For the first time in history, mankind would soon have the ability to destroy all life on the planet. The shockwave from this statement reverberated across the following decade and beyond.

What Szilard had in mind was the third of the “alphabet bombs” that came to characterize an entire age. The first, the A-bomb, had been used to incinerate two Japanese cities. Teller’s H-bomb blasted its way into public consciousness a few years later. Finally, there was the ultimate weapon: the C-bomb, a hydrogen bomb that could “transmute” an element such as cobalt into a radioactive element about 320 times as powerful as radium. A deadly radioactive cloud could be released into the atmosphere and carried by the westerly winds across the surface of the earth. Every living thing inhaling it, or even touched by it, would be doomed to certain death. In the autumn of 1950, Szilard’s fears were given independent validation by Dr James R. Arnold of the Institute for Nuclear Studies in Chicago. Arnold, slide-rule in hand, had started out to debunk Szilard’s arguments. He finished by publishing a set of calculations that showed that a Doomsday device, perhaps two-and-a-half times as heavy as the battleship Missouri, could indeed be built.

Throughout the 1950s and into the next decade the C-Bomb became a familiar spectre. In best-sellers such as Neville Shute’s On The Beach (1957) and box office hits such as Return to the Planet of the Apes it became a compelling symbol of humanity’s self-destructive Promethean ambition. It even found a mention in Agatha Christie’s novel Destination Unknown (1954), in which one of the characters, sitting in her hotel, knitting and discussing the latest weapons of mass destruction, concludes: “I do think all these bombs are very wrong. And cobalt – such a lovely colour in one’s paintbox. I used it a lot as a child. And the worst of all, I understand nobody can survive”. The travel writer Bruce Chatwin was also reminded of his great-aunt’s paintbox (she did lots of “St Sebastians”, always against a cobalt blue background) when he wrote his autobiographical book In Patagonia (1977). As a schoolboy he had pictured a dense blue cloudbank, spitting tongues of flame at the edges. He had seen himself, out alone on a green headland, scanning the horizon for the advance of the cloud. Patagonia, he had decided, was the one place on the map he could live while the rest of the world blew up.

The Cobalt bomb was largely forgotten after the Cuban Missile Crisis came and went. So too disappeared the fear of a Doomsday machine that could not be overridden by human intervention. Only after the Berlin Wall had been breached and the ice of the Cold War had begun to thaw did military analysts realize the Russians had actually built a version of the device. The details of this top-secret Soviet system were first revealed in 1993 by Bruce G. Blair, a former American ICBM launch control officer, now one of the country’s foremost experts on Russian arms. Fearing that a sneak attack by American submarine-launched missiles might take Moscow out in thirteen minutes, the Soviet leadership had authorized the construction of an automated communications network, reinforced to withstand a nuclear strike. At its heart was a computer system similar to the one in Dr Strangelove. Its codename was Perimetr. It went fully operational in January 1985. It is still in place. Its job is to monitor whether there have been nuclear detonations on Russian territory and to check whether communications channels with the Kremlin have been severed. If the answer to both questions is “yes” then the computer will conclude that the country is under attack and activate its nuclear arsenal. All that is then needed is final human approval from a command post buried deep underground. It would be a brave officer, adds Smith, who, having been cut off from his superiors in the Kremlin, could ignore the advice of such a supposedly foolproof system.

Bruce Blair has speculated that President Bush’s September 2001 proposal for a new generation of weapons, including the robust nuclear earth penetrator, or “bunker-buster”, might be intended to knock out the underground command post that controls the system. The Bush administration withdrew its request for funding for the programme at the end of 2005, after facing fierce domestic opposition. Some military analysts, nevertheless, believe that research is continuing into these weapons. We all face the prospect that, if Russia were ever attacked, its strategic nuclear warheads could be launched by a computer system designed and built in the late 1970s. Those of us who think Dr Strangelove to be the most telling commentary on the nuclear age should not be surprised. To paraphrase the novelist J. G. Ballard, old or not, the system remains a vivid demonstration, arranged for our benefit by the machine, of our own dispensability as a species.
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Christopher Coker is the author of Emoires in Conflict: The growing rift between Europe and the United States, an RUSI Whitehall paper, 2003, and Humane Warfare, 2001. He is a Reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science.