Doomsday Men

by P. D. Smith

  At the beginning of the week, President John F. Kennedy had addressed the American people on radio and television in what the New York Times justifiably described as a ‘speech of extraordinary gravity’. President Kennedy’s eighteen-minute address was ‘of a grimness unparalleled in recent times’, said the newspaper.2 It was not just America that was listening to his every word, but the whole world. The strain of the last few days was etched into the President’s boyish face.

  On 14 October 1962, an American U-2 spy plane had photographed what was clearly a missile launch site under construction on the island of Cuba. Nearby, a Soviet medium-range ballistic missile was pictured waiting to be lowered into its firing position. Photographs taken five days later showed four sites where missiles were ready to fire at a moment’s notice. From the Caribbean they could hit Washington in under twenty minutes.

  In his address to the nation on Monday 22 October, President Kennedy accused Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev of a ‘clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace’. Until the missiles were removed, he said, the world would stand before ‘the abyss of destruction’. In the meantime, he announced that a naval blockade had been set up around Cuba to prevent any more missiles from reaching the island.

  The President had resisted calls from the military for immediate air strikes on the missile sites, an action that we now know would have provoked an immediate and devastating response. Even so, imposing the blockade (suggested by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara) was not a risk-free operation, and Kennedy did not hide the real dangers from his people: ‘No one can foresee precisely what course it will take or what costs or casualties will be incurred,’ he told them.3

  In the Pentagon’s War Room, presided over by the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Curtis E. LeMay, five screens constantly displayed the nation’s state of combat readiness. The screen for DEFCON 2 – Defense Condition 2 – was illuminated that week in October 1962. The next step was DEFCON 1 : war. On the balcony of the War Room were eighteen upholstered chairs reserved for the generals. From there they could watch the fate of the world in comfort:

  Panoramic screens scanned US outposts around the globe, bulb-clustered boxes showed troop movements, lighted maps flashed with blobs of color, each indicating a nuclear warplane or missile aimed and ‘cocked’ at millions of human beings who lived on in ignorance of their peril. The target: the Soviet Union. Detonation: hours away.4

  A radar early warning system would keep track of any Russian missiles that were fired and would estimate the likely scale of casualties. In the jargon of the day, casualties were measured in megadeaths – not thousands, but millions of people killed. A map of the United States displayed information from a nationwide network of sensors, and could immediately show the location of nuclear detonations.

  It was here in the Pentagon’s War Room that the presidential order to go to DEFCON 1 would be received. When the signal arrived, a procedure would be set in motion in which each movement was as precisely choreographed as a dance of death. Observed from above by the top brass on the balcony, two officers would remove keys that were kept on chains around their necks. Then they would ‘unlock separate padlocks on a red box, two feet by six inches, take out five-inch-square plastic bags, tear them open, and pull out the same typewritten message to all Strategic Air Commands from Alaska to Guam, Spain to England. The coded message: go to war.’5

  While this happened, two officers stood by armed with .38-calibre pistols, the only weapons allowed in the War Room. But their snub-nosed, bone-handled weapons were not for use against invaders. They were to be used against any member of the War Room staff who panicked or tried to start World War III prematurely.

  At the end of October 1962, it seemed to many people that the presidential order to go to DEFCON 1 was just hours away. Over the Atlantic, up to a hundred B-52 bombers were kept permanently in the air, waiting for the coded signal to proceed to prearranged targets. Each bomber carried up to four bombs of between 1 and 24 megatons. Some five hundred more B-52s waited on the ground, armed and ready to fly. From submarines under the cold grey waters of the North Atlantic and from launch sites across the United States, hundreds of nuclear armed missiles were trained on targets in the Soviet Union. In the words of Robert Oppenheimer, Russia and America were like two scorpions in a bottle. Now the world held its breath as these two armoured warriors prepared for their final battle.

  President Kennedy’s television address to the nation was the most grave and disturbing statement any president has had to make to the American people. As Leo Szilard watched on that Monday evening, his face went pale. Szilard and his wife Trude were living in Washington’s newest hotel, the Dupont Plaza, in what was then one of the city’s most cosmopolitan areas, just five minutes by cab from the White House. All Szilard’s instincts cried out to him that Kennedy was making a terrible mistake by confronting Khrushchev. ‘A blockade is an act of war,’ exclaimed Szilard when the President had finished speaking to the nation. ‘An act of war.’6

  Szilard was deeply shocked. The 64-year-old was living on borrowed time. In 1959 he had been diagnosed with bladder cancer. ‘I don’t expect to live,’ he had told a reporter, ‘but I hope to be active for a few months and perhaps a year.’ But Szilard was never one to give up hope. He designed his own radiation therapy: ‘I’m the chief consultant on my own case,’ he told a friend.7 By the spring of that year his doctors declared him free of cancer. ‘I feel fine,’ he told Time, which reported that for most sufferers of this cancer only 5 per cent could expect a long-term cure. In medicine too, it seemed, Szilard’s insights worked wonders.8

  Even from his hospital bed, Szilard had continued his campaign for arms control and peace. But his battle with cancer had left him physically drained. He was thinner now, and his shock of brown hair had turned platinum grey. According to one reporter with a vivid turn of phrase, ‘his demeanor was that of a volatile owl’.9

  President Kennedy’s grim words that October evening prompted a group of students to visit Szilard in the hope that he could allay their fears. But Szilard had no comforting words for them. This time, he saw the situation as hopeless. In a moment of deep despair, he admitted that all his efforts to avert nuclear war had been in vain. He had tried and failed to institute controls on the power of the atomic energy he had helped to unleash. Within days, he predicted, this power would be used to kill millions in a holocaust of destruction unparalleled in human history. It might even mean the end of life itself.

  That night Szilard tossed and turned in his bed, his mind racing. By the next morning he had reached a decision. He told his wife that they should pack everything and leave for Geneva. For some years now his ‘Big Bomb Suitcase’, full of essential documents such as his patents, had been packed in readiness for a quick getaway.

  Old habits die hard. In 1933, as Hitler’s thugs terrorized the streets of Berlin, Szilard had lived with his bags packed and ready to go. Then it had paid off: when Hitler came to power, Szilard had grabbed his bags and jumped on a train bound for Vienna. He was just one step ahead of the secret police who soon began arresting Jews fleeing Germany. Now, in 1960s America, Szilard phoned his friends and advised them to leave as soon as possible. For the third time in his life, war was coming.

  The next day, Wednesday 24 October, as the Soviet ships headed for Cuba, Harrison Brown boarded a plane from Los Angeles to Washington. Brown had chaired the Chicago Round Table back in 1950. Now he had been asked to write an editorial for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The Chicago journal, with its distinctive doomsday clock still on the front cover, was planning a special edition to mark the twentieth anniversary of the first controlled release of atomic energy, on that cold December afternoon beneath Stagg Field football stadium. Brown wrote his editorial on the plane:

  This morning, the governments of the United States and Soviet Union were moving relentlessly toward armed conflict in the Caribbean. By tomorrow… the great all-out nuclear war, which
we have discussed and feared for twenty years, may be triggered. Never in history have people and nations been so close to death and destruction on such a vast scale. Midnight is upon us.10

  The next morning, Szilard and Trude boarded a flight to Europe. After diversion and delay caused by fog, they arrived in Geneva on what Robert Kennedy christened ‘Black Saturday’ – the peak of the crisis.11 Szilard headed straight for CERN, the European laboratory for particle research, where his old friend Victor Weisskopf was director. Although Szilard did have something of a reputation among his scientific colleagues for appearing when least expected, Victor was astonished when Szilard knocked on his office door in Switzerland. ‘I’m the first refugee from America,’ explained Szilard solemnly. ‘There’ll be nuclear war in a few days.’12

  Back in Washington, groups of demonstrators had gathered outside the White House. Pacifists, Cuban refugee groups and even a contingent from the American Nazi Party shouted conflicting advice to President Kennedy and his administration.13 That evening, as the crisis reached its peak, Robert McNamara took a break from the tense atmosphere of the White House situation room. ‘It was a beautiful fall evening,’ he recalled, ‘and I went up into the open air to look and to smell it, because I thought it was the last Saturday I would ever see.’14

  Kennedy and Khrushchev faced each other across the ‘abyss of destruction’, and then both stepped back from the brink. According to a White House insider, ‘we were eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked’.15 In the end, both leaders opted for compromise rather than conflict, ignoring the hawkish advice of their military advisors. The Soviets agreed to remove their missiles from Cuba, provided America removed its Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Robert Kennedy secretly visited the Russian embassy to agree the deal.

  The American military were furious. General LeMay effectively accused his President of cowardice. ‘It’s the greatest defeat in our history,’ thundered the Air Force commander. ‘We should invade today.’16 The biggest invasion force since World War II was poised in Florida, and its commanders were just itching for an excuse to attack Castro’s Cuba. What the American generals didn’t realize, however, was that the Soviet forces in Cuba had tactical nuclear weapons and they were under the control of local commanders. Any invasion would have triggered the world’s first nuclear conflict.

  President Kennedy clearly didn’t trust his military commanders. At one point he even asked an aide to ensure that the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not start a war without his authorization. ‘I don’t want these nuclear weapons firing without our knowing it,’ he said, with shocking candour. ‘I don’t think we ought to accept the Chiefs’ word on that one.’17

  Trust was in short supply during the cold war. Conducted beneath a cloak of secrecy, the arms race bred a culture of fear and suspicion. In novels and movies, the anxieties of the age were expressed through two shadowy professions: the spy and the atomic scientist. The first James Bond film, Dr No, featured a sexy mix of spies and scientists that would prove an enduring hit at the box office. It opened in the month of the Cuban Missile Crisis. With its story-line of a secret base on a Caribbean island, powered by a nuclear reactor, and an evil scientist bent on sabotaging America’s missile programme, it was eerily prescient. Ian Fleming was a personal friend of Kennedy’s, and, according to Time magazine, Bond was the ‘President’s favorite fictional hero’.18

  As it had in the 1950s, the cobalt doomsday bomb symbolized people’s concerns about what further technological horrors the secret alliance between science and power politics might create. In the early 1960s, many feared that one of the superpowers, or even a newcomer to the nuclear game such as China, might develop such a weapon. Now, as weapon systems became increasingly automated and response times ever shorter, Szilard’s cobalt bomb was reinvented for the computer age as the doomsday machine.

  Throughout the story of weapons of mass destruction, we have seen how popular culture played an important role in inspiring the dream of the superweapon. Similarly, the doomsday machine has its origins in fiction and film – in Peter George’s best-selling thriller Red Alert (1958) and Stanley Kubrick’s cold-war classic (based on George’s novel) Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). By removing human agency and making even the push-button warriors redundant, the doomsday machine took Szilard’s cobalt bomb to a new level of inhumanity. But it also posed an irresistible scientific and technological challenge to Strangeloves on either side of the Iron Curtain.

  On 5 October 1961, a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis took the world to the brink of nuclear war, Stanley Kubrick called at the offices of the Institute for Strategic Studies, housed in a Georgian building in central London near the Strand Palace Hotel, where 27 years before Szilard had written his patent on the atomic chain reaction.

  Kubrick was a ‘slightly ageing wunderkind from a middle-class Bronx family who, with his ill-fitting clothes, shaggy hair, and wonder-filled eyes, gives the impression that it still wouldn’t be too late for him to enrol in a school for gifted children’.19 Although he had failed English at school and couldn’t get a place at college, the 33-year-old Kubrick had just finished filming one of the twentieth century’s literary classics – Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. He had been working in England on the film at Shepperton Studios in west London for over a year now. For the director of Paths of Glory (1957) and Spartacus (1960) it had been his first attempt at black comedy, a genre ideal for expressing the anxieties of the doomsday decade.

  Kubrick explored the possibilities of film with as much subtlety and brilliance as Nabokov did the written word. It could have been Nabokov speaking when Kubrick talked passionately about the power of film at this time. ‘A really great picture has a delirious quality in which you’re constantly searching for meanings,’ Kubrick told a journalist. ‘It’s all very elusive and very rich. There’s nothing like trying to create it. It gives you a sense of omnipotence – it’s one of the most exciting things you can find without being under the influence of drugs.’20

  Lolita, starring James Mason as Humbert Humbert and the fourteen-year-old Sue Lyon as his nymphet muse, had finally been passed by the censors in September. It was released in England the following year with an X certificate. Kubrick’s next project was to be a film about a nuclear war that started by accident. He had been fascinated by the idea since at least 1958 and had read widely on the subject. According to his biographer, Vincent LoBrutto, ‘the idea of an impending nuclear holocaust often crept into his already dark and pessimistic vision of the world’.21

  When Kubrick visited the Institute for Strategic Studies in autumn 1961 in search of inspiration, Alastair Buchan, the institute’s head, was not at all sympathetic towards his proposed film. Buchan told Kubrick bluntly to drop the idea. According to Buchan, it would be impossible to show ‘precisely what precautions the United States or other nuclear powers take to guard against the danger of accident or false command’. No matter how ‘amusing or skilful’ the film was, he feared that it would ‘mislead anxious people all over the world’.

  Kubrick was not to be put off so easily. When he was researching a film, Kubrick’s interest in a subject would grow and mature slowly until it attained a critical mass. After that point it would become an all-consuming obsession. Dr Strangelove was on the verge of going critical. Kubrick’s visit to the research institute was by no means wasted, though. As he was about to leave, Buchan handed him a paperback novel – Peter George’s Red Alert. It came with a health warning: ‘parts of it are quite implausible’, said Buchan disapprovingly.22

  Red Alert, which the British writer had published under his pen name, Peter Bryant, had already sold 250,000 copies in its American Ace paperback edition. In Britain it was published in 1958 as Two Hours to Doom. George’s crime and mystery novels, with titles such as The Big H and Hong Kong Kill, had sold millions of copies around the world. He once said that ‘if you learn how to construct a mystery, you learn how to write’.23 Pete
r George had joined the RAF at the age of 18 and had served in Malta and Italy. Rumour had it that he also worked for British intelligence. He was 34 when Red Alert was published. Like Kubrick, George had developed a dark obsession with the subject of nuclear war, and became an active member of CND.

  The 1958 thriller Red Alert by Peter Bryant (aka Peter George). This undated Ace edition was published at about the time that Stanley Kubrick began filming Dr Strangelove.

  George shared President Kennedy’s distrust of America’s military commanders, an opinion he formed while he was in the RAF. He once described American generals as ‘war hungry psychopaths of the lunatic fringe’.24 In his best-selling thriller Red Alert, George describes how World War III might be started by a maverick military commander. Terminally ill and suffering from depression, General Quinten (the psychotic General Jack D. Ripper in Kubrick’s film) orders his B-52 bombers to attack the Soviet Union. He is able to do this because it is sanctioned in an emergency war plan designed to be used if the President and his chiefs of staff were killed in a sneak attack.

  But it was Leo Szilard’s notion of a cobalt doomsday bomb that symbolized the precarious cold-war balance of terror in both Red Alert and, later, Dr Strangelove. As Ambassador DeSadeski explains in the film, ‘If you take, say, fifty H-bombs in the hundred megaton range and jacket them with cobalt thorium G, when they are exploded they will produce a doomsday shroud. A lethal cloud of radioactivity which will encircle the earth for ninety-three years!’25