Review of P. D. Smith's "Doomsday Men: The real Dr Strangelove and
the dream of the superweapon"
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.
<http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25350-2648363,00.html>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2008/08/cobalt-bomb-dr-strangelove-and-real.htm>monochrom
at 8/14/2008 03:25:00 PM
