Doomsday Men

by P. D. Smith

  The Nautilus is effectively the largest dirty bomb ever built. She and her crew are sent on a suicide mission to save America. The President admits that exploding this ‘greater-than-super-weapon’ is not without dangers for America itself: ‘Its effect is not known and cannot be calculated.’ Scientists have rejected the possibility of a ‘planetary chain reaction’. But as well as wiping out the Russian population, the wind-blown fallout may well bring a ‘train of death and sickness, sterility, misery, and additional fear’ to the United States.67 Faced with defeat, this is a risk America is willing to take.

  Lying at the bottom of the Gulf of Finland, the crew of the USS Nautilus detonate the cobalt bomb in an enormous explosion that ‘vaporized’ Finland and the Baltic States. The blast even reaches Moscow. The fallout is still more deadly:

  on the wind currents it came forward, forward across the north-sloping plains, a thick dust that widened to a hundred miles, and then five hundred, moving, spreading, descending, blanketing the land… Men swallowed, ate, breathed, sickened, and perished in a day, a week, two weeks – men and women and children, all of them, dogs and cats and cattle and sheep, all of them. Wherever they took refuge, men still perished. On the high Urals in the terrible cold. In the deepest mines, the steam-spitting darkness. There was no refuge from the death; it took them all, the birds of arctic winter, the persistent insects which had survived geological ages, the bacteria – all.68

  The Russians are wiped off the face of the earth by the cobalt bomb. Wylie’s account of their annihilation by the invisible killer is reminiscent of Jack London’s story about the genocide of the Chinese by American biological weapons. Such stories typically suggest that, once the enemy is liquidated, all the world’s problems will have been resolved and utopia can begin. Tomorrow! still clings – somewhat anachronistically – to this deadly utopian dream: ‘The last war was finished. The last great obstacles to freedom had been removed from the human path.’ The reference to Wells’s The World Set Free (‘last war’) is unmistakable, with its implication of a better world beyond the atomic fires. In the future, Wylie’s characters naively believe, ‘the Bomb would be no catastrophe at all, but pure benefit’.69 But as people increasingly realized, in the age of H- and C-bombs such thinking led not to a shining utopia but to a nuclear doomsday.

  The fact that even a popular crime writer such as Agatha Christie – not known for her scientific themes – features a cobalt bomb in one of her novels, testifies to the cultural impact of Szilard’s doomsday device. Christie’s 1954 thriller Destination Unknown is about a missing nuclear scientist, Thomas Betterton, the discoverer of ‘ZE Fission’ and ‘one of the splitters in chief’.70 In the novel, Miss Hetherington, who ‘could not have been mistaken for anything but travelling English’, and an American, Mrs Calvin Baker, are sitting in their hotel knitting and discussing (as one does) the latest weapons of mass destruction.

  ‘I do think all these atom bombs are very wrong. And Cobalt – such a lovely colour in one’s paint-box and I used it a lot as a child; the worst of all, I understand nobody can survive. We weren’t meant to do these experiments. Somebody told me the other day that her cousin, who is a very shrewd man, said the whole world might go radio-active.’

  ‘My, my,’ said Mrs Calvin Baker.71

  The cobalt bomb continued to feature as the ultimate symbol of human destructiveness throughout the doomsday decade. In William Tenn’s story ‘The Sickness’ (1955), people have no doubt about their future in a world where many nations possessed C-bombs: ‘Everyone waited for extinction.’72 At the end of the decade, nuclear holocaust entered the best-seller lists with influential novels such as Pat Frank’s chilling but ultimately unconvincing tale of nuclear survival Alas, Babylon (1959), and Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), the most famous fictional exploration of history as a cyclical process destined always to end in global nuclear destruction. The bleakest of these hugely popular novels both feature cobalt bomb doomsdays: Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957) and Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7 (1959).

  Nevil Shute, an aeronautical engineer who had worked with bouncing-bomb designer Barnes Wallis, wrote the most famous novel about a war fought with cobalt bombs. By the 1980s it had sold more than four million copies, an astonishing total and more than any other novel about nuclear issues. The war itself is not described, just the lethal after-effects. What Shute depicts is a world dying a slow and creeping death caused by fallout.

  The novel centres on the only part of the globe not yet affected by radioactivity, Melbourne in the far south of Australia. Set in 1963, after the Last War, Shute examines how people behave when faced with the inescapable reality that within nine months – when the cobalt-60 fallout finally reaches them – they will all be dead. ‘It’s just too big a matter for mankind to tackle,’ says one character. Indeed, Shute depicts people reacting fatalistically to what lies ahead: ‘It’s not the end of the world at all. It’s only the end of us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan’t be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us.’73

  As a powerful portrait of a culture in denial about its fate, On the Beach has a continuing significance in our own era of global warming. But for Shute and for many readers, the stoicism of his characters and their attempt to continue a normal life, right up to the very end, was deeply poignant. It captured the mood of powerlessness that many felt in the 1950s, facing the awesome possibility of a global nuclear holocaust that might well bring about the end of life on earth. The film version of 1959, starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Anthony Perkins, became one of the most popular nuclear movies of all time and left audiences around the world ‘stunned or weeping’.74

  When asked who started the war, Julian Osborne (Fred Astaire) replies, only half-seriously, ‘Albert Einstein’. But Julian is himself a ‘long-hair’, one of the British atomic scientists responsible for building the bombs that are slowly killing the world. As well as his own profession, he blames humanity as a whole: ‘the war started when people accepted the idiotic principle that peace could be maintained by arranging to defend themselves with weapons they couldn’t possibly use without committing suicide’. The film concludes with a lingering shot of a banner flying in a deserted Melbourne street: ‘There is still time… brother.’75

  In Shute’s novel, an American submarine commander, Dwight Towers, travels beneath the safety of the oceans from Australia to the United States, where he finds a continent utterly devoid of life. Back in the southern hemisphere, he concludes that a species capable of such destruction deserves to die. Looking at the still populated streets of Melbourne, he sheds no tears for what will happen:

  Very soon, perhaps in a month’s time, there would be no one here, no living creatures but the cats and dogs that had been granted a short reprieve. Soon they too would be gone; summers and winters would pass by and these houses and streets would know them. Presently, as time passed, the radioactivity would pass also; with a cobalt half-life of about five years these streets and houses would be habitable again in twenty years at the latest, and probably much sooner than that. The human race was to be wiped out and the world made clean again for wiser occupants without undue delay. Well, probably that made sense.76

  Humankind, in fact, is so barbaric for inventing weapons such as the cobalt bomb that it deserves to die. If the scientists had, as Oppenheimer put it, known sin by inventing atomic weapons, then the price of that sin – to be paid by all humanity – was extinction. As Shute’s character says, the world needed to be ‘made clean again’.

  More recently, in the age of global warming, this theme has reemerged. Now humankind deserves extinction for polluting the natural world. At the end of the blockbuster movie The Day After Tomorrow (2004), after the northern hemisphere has been catastrophically changed by a new ice age provoked by global warming, astronauts on the International Space Station gaze down on their transformed planet:

  Yuri said, ‘Look at that.’

  Park
er didn’t fully understand. ‘What?’

  ‘Have you ever seen the air so clear?’

  Earth lay like a jewel in the great sky, not only bruised by the storm but also purified, hanging there in space as black as the darkest memory, amid stars as bright as the brightest hope.77

  Interestingly, the novelization from which this is taken is by Whitley Strieber, who is also the author of the nuclear holocaust best-seller, War Day (1984). Just as nuclear war would rid the world of humans and make it clean again, so here earth has been ‘purified’ of its most polluting species. Indeed, human beings are now often portrayed as little more than a malign virus – as Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) memorably says in The Matrix (1999) – an infection in the otherwise pristine bloodstream of Gaia.

  Shute’s novel and the subsequent film made a huge impression on audiences around the world. In September 1957, On the Beach even became a talking point during a party at Lord Beaverbrook’s home in the South of France. Winston Churchill was heard to say that he intended to send a copy to the Soviet premier, Khrushchev. ‘I think the earth will soon be destroyed by a cobalt bomb,’ declared the former Prime Minister. ‘I think if I were the Almighty I would not recreate it…’, he added, with characteristic dark humour.78

  Edward Teller, now firmly established in Washington’s corridors of power as an influential advisor on nuclear issues, was so concerned by the pessimistic message of On the Beach that he wrote a book to ‘help the general public better assess the nature of radioactivity and the risks connected with it’.79 Our Nuclear Future (1958), which he co-authored with Albert Latter, discussed the cobalt bomb in detail. Although he admitted that a ‘cobalt bomb would indeed be a most unpleasant object’, Teller nevertheless argued that ‘radiological warfare could be used in a humane manner’.80 It was a position justified by truly Strangelovean logic. However, he later admitted that this book ‘had little or no effect on public opinion’. In contrast, he grudgingly acknowledged that Shute’s novel ‘had immense and far-reaching effects’.81

  Like Szilard, Teller was nothing if not persistent. After the film of On the Beach was released, he co-authored another book, The Legacy of Hiroshima (1962), devoting an entire chapter to a critique of Shute’s work. While granting that On the Beach had made a deep impression on public opinion, America’s leading weapons designer criticized Shute’s use of the cobalt bomb, a device Teller had himself justified just four years earlier:

  These bombs do not exist. They would have no military usefulness. They would do their greatest damage not on the spot of a target, but around the globe; not immediately, but after the passage of years… The cobalt bomb is not the invention of an evil warmonger. It is the product of the imagination of high-minded people who want to use this spectre to frighten us into the heaven of peace.

  This final broadside of Teller’s was presumably aimed in part at his friend Leo Szilard.

  For perhaps the only time in his life, Edward Teller found himself agreeing with the Russian newspaper Pravda whose reviewer had condemned Shute for what he saw as the novelist’s fatalism. It was an attitude Teller found in ‘the overwhelming majority of our people’, and he hated it. He was shocked when a young colleague admitted in a discussion about careers that ‘The world is coming to an end. There’s no sense in planning for the future.’ For Teller, the cobalt bomb and On the Beach were symptoms of a general malaise: ‘we are obsessed by the idea of an impending day of doom’. Fatalism was equated with defeatism, and in the cold war this was tantamount to treachery. The father of the H-bomb refused to tolerate such attitudes. He backed what was the official line in Washington, London and Moscow: ‘The biggest nuclear conflict would be a catastrophe beyond imagination. But it will not be the end.’82

  Mordecai Roshwald disagreed. His 1959 novel Level 7, published first in Britain by Heinemann (which had also published On The Beach), described the end of the world as the result of a war fought with cobalt bombs. Level 7 is the diary of the man who pushed the button to launch the doomsday missiles. J. B. Priestley called it ‘the best statement there has been so far on the ghastly imbecility of nuclear armaments’.83 Bertrand Russell also praised it. Roshwald said that he wanted ‘to write a book that would frighten people into sanity’, an aim with which Lewis Mumford and Leo Szilard would have greatly sympathized.84 It has since sold over 400,000 copies around the world.

  Roshwald’s push-button warrior X-127 is deep underground, on Level 7, the lowest level of a command bunker. As X-127 points out, the world has changed for the military and civilians since World War I:

  the armed forces now find themselves in the safest place in the world, not in the front lines. Quite a change from the days when a soldier had to advance into a machine-gun volley and a pilot was forever expecting something to blast him out of the sky. Today we, the soldiers of our country, are shielded by an earth crust 3,000 or 4,400 feet thick. No warrior’s armour-plating ever compared with that. For once let the civilians tremble while the soldiers feel secure.85

  As in the film of On the Beach, where the war is blamed on a fault in a ‘handful of vacuum tubes and transistors’, the war itself is caused by a technical accident.86 Retaliation is ordered automatically by a computerized defence system. It was, says X-127, ‘the battle of the gadgets’.87 The machines destroy themselves along with all life on the surface of the planet. As we shall see, Roshwald’s doomsday machine clearly anticipates the one built by the Soviets in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove. Indeed, it is the classic tragedy of the techno-scientific age, Dr Frankenstein’s tragedy: to become the victim of one’s own ingenuity. The important difference is that in the atomic age, Dr Frankenstein and Dr Strangelove don’t die alone – they take the rest of the world with them. At the end of Level 7 even the narrator on the deepest level of his underground bunker dies of radiation sickness. ‘I am dying, and the world is dying with me. I am the last man on earth, the sole surviving specimen of homo sapiens. Sapiens indeed!’88

  There came a point in the 1950s when people realized that humankind could, for the first time, create weapons which might end life on earth. Those same scientists who had been praised for curtailing World War II with the atomic bomb now held the fate of the world in their hands. Their undoubted inventiveness and insight into the laws of physics had been transformed into instruments of mass destruction. To many people, the saviour scientists had become mad scientists. Leo Szilard’s vision of the cobalt bomb was a key ingredient in this radical change. Bertolt Brecht summed up the dilemma facing cold-war science and society in his great play Life of Galileo (1955). In the future, predicts the father of modern physics, the scientists’ euphoric shouts of Eureka! will be greeted by ‘a universal cry of horror’ because people will have learnt that, rather than improving the lot of humanity, science now leads to ever more terrible weapons of mass destruction.89

  From novels such as Level 7 to blockbuster films such as Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Leo Szilard’s cobalt bomb became the ultimate symbol of the threat posed to life on earth by science and power politics. The cobalt bomb made real the fear of a doomsday of our own devising that had intrigued writers of speculative fiction since World War I. As a concrete symbol of planet earth placed in jeopardy by humankind, the cobalt bomb also gave powerful impetus to the nascent ecological movement.

  Journalists and military personnel witness the Charlie nuclear test, part of the Operation Tumbler series, on 22 April 1952. This 31 kiloton explosion was the first to be broadcast live on national television.

  The fear of the cobalt bomb lived on long after the 1950s. For many writers who grew up surrounded by the doomsday anxieties of this period, the cobalt bomb became a defining experience, the ultimate symbol of man’s inhumanity to man. Even the work of travel writer Bruce Chatwin reveals its powerful influence. Chatwin’s autobiographical book In Patagonia (1977) describes how his interest in Patagonia began during the cold war. He was looking for ‘somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up’, a land ou
t of reach of the fallout from the cobalt bombs.

  At school, Chatwin had watched ‘the civil defence lecturer ring the cities of Europe to show the zones of total and partial destruction. We saw the zones bump one against the other leaving no space in between… we saw it was hopeless. The war was coming and there was nothing we could do.’ Chatwin continues:

  Next, we read about the cobalt bomb, which was worse than the hydrogen bomb and could smother the planet in an endless chain reaction.

  I know the colour cobalt from my great-aunt’s paintbox… She did lots of St Sebastians, always against a cobalt-blue background…

  So I pictured the cobalt bomb as a dense blue cloudbank, spitting tongues of flame at the edges. And I saw myself, out alone on a green headland, scanning the horizon for the advance of the cloud.90

  19

  Khrushchev’s Monsters

  A child of the nineteenth century would quickly go mad with fear, I think, in the world of today… What has become of us?

  Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon (1959)

  The Air Force Captain took the escalator to the lowest level of the Pentagon. He continued down some grey concrete steps and then strode briskly through the labyrinth of featureless corridors. He stopped abruptly outside a green door identified as Room BD 927 and jabbed his finger on the buzzer. As he spoke his name into the microphone beside the door, the officer stared impassively into a two-way mirror and waited for the door to be unlocked. He went through this routine every working day, but today it had a new significance. Today, as he passed through the door to the War Room of the United States Air Force, the officer wondered if he would ever see his wife and kids again.1