The Voice of the Dolphins and Other Stories, by Leo Szilard, 1961. Expanded edition, Stanford University Press, 1992, $17.95 paperback. Still available on Amazon and other on-line sources.
Doomsday Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon, by P.D. Smith, 2007. St. Martin's Press, $29.95 hardcover.
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Introduction
We try so hard, we really do. We pursue green and earnest fantasies of bicycles and public transit after peak oil. We reduce carbon emissions and eat local produce. We eliminate toxic carpets and ban second hand smoke. Yet somehow in our zeal to save the world we manage to ignore the bomb quietly ticking away in the basement. .
Two books, written 47 years apart, are stark reminders of our forgotten folly.
The Voice of the Dolphins and Other Stories
by Leo Szilard, 1961. Expanded edition, Stanford University Press, 1992, $17.95 paperback. Still available on Amazon and other on-line sources.
by Carol Van Strum
"Pi Omega Ro asked whether it would be correct to assume that Americans were free to say what they think, because they did not think what they were not free to say. On another occasion, he asked whether it would be correct to say that in America honest politicians were men who were unable to fool others without first fooling themselves."
From The Voice of the Dolphins by, by Leo Szilard
After fleeing Nazi persecution in 1933, Hungarian-born physicist Leo Szilard invented - and patented - the process for neutron chain reaction that would release the power of the atom. He subsequently assigned the patent to the British Admiralty in order to keep it from the Nazis. Later, goaded by fears that Germany would develop its own atomic weapons, Szilard moved to the U.S. and worked feverishly on the secret Manhattan Project, proving that a chain reaction could be initiated and developing the first atomic bombs.
Szilard was more than a physicist, however. With astonishing prescience, he foresaw the deadly political implications of atomic weaponry, the near-certainty of a nuclear arms race, and the threat such weapons posed to humanity and all life. Before the American bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he argued passionately against their use on inhabited targets. Appalled at the results of those bombs, he spent the rest of his life desperately trying to cork the terrible genie his invention had unleashed.
Undeterred by official refusals to take his warnings seriously, the irrepressible Szilard turned to fiction to deliver his message. The Voice of the Dolphins collects stories published between 1949 and 1961 in The University of Chicago Magazine, University of Chicago Law Review, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and other journals. The satire, humor, and serious issues in these stories are as relevant today as they were forty-some years ago - a sorry reflection on our failure to heed the words of the wise.
One of the great delights of Szilard's stories is his uncanny, detailed mapping of the ripple effects of singular events. In the title story, Russian and American scientists collaborate in the Vienna Institute, a project to establish communication with dolphins, tapping their superior intelligence to resolve international conflicts and global crises. The dolphins' solution to overpopulation and world hunger is the development of a nutritious, tasty, cheaply produced algae product that happens also to be a contraceptive. With royalties from the sale of the dolphins' algae, the Vienna Institute shamelessly bribes politicians to act in the public interest and buys television stations all over the world in order to broadcast "The Voice of the Dolphins" - the dolphins' discussions of geo-political issues:
"Thereafter, the television programs of these stations carried no advertising. Since they no longer had to aim their programs at the largest possible audience, there was no longer any need for them to cater to the taste of morons. This freedom from the need of maximizing their audience led to a rapid evolution of the art of television, the potential of which had been frequently surmised but never actually realized."
The future issues that the dolphins address encompass the gamut of Szilard's amazing predictions, from the Cold War to German reunification, oil wars, revolution in Iraq, American invasion of the Middle East, economic depression triggered by overconstruction, and the effects of disarmament on the U.S. economy. Overshadowing all these crises is the threat of nuclear war and its potential to annihilate all life on Earth.
Szilard's other stories focus on the absurdities of academic funding, the bizarre interpretations future explorers will make of our relics, the danger human tinkering poses to the structure of the universe. "The Mined Cities," added to later editions, carries the notion of nuclear deterrence to its preposterous logical conclusion. Of particular relevance today, the ethical dilemmas arising from development and first use of atomic weapons are the heart of "My Trial as a War Criminal," in which Szilard faces an international tribunal after America is defeated in World War Three.
So long as a single reactor or nuclear bomb remains on earth, may Szilard's tales remain in print. And so long as irrationality and senseless aggression continue to infect human affairs, may the Voice of the Dolphins be heard in the land.
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Doomsday Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon
by P.D. Smith, 2007. St. Martin's Press, $29.95 hardcover.
by Carol Van Strum
"Homo sapiens is the only species that knows it will die. The thought obsesses us. From the earliest marks made on cave walls to our most sublime works of art, the fear of death haunts our every creation. And in the middle of the twentieth century, human beings became the first species to reach that pinnacle of evolution - the point at which it could engineer its own extinction."
Thus begins this saga of humanity's most nearly successful effort to destroy the entire planet or die trying. Myths, art, and holy writ from the dawn of civilizations reveal men's dreams of wielding the powers of earth and heaven to annihilate - in one spectacular blow - their competitors and enemies.1 P. D. Smith traces the dream's nuclear manifestation back to 19th and early 20th century science fiction writers, in particular H.G. Wells, who coined the term "atomic bomb" in 1913, and predicted its use to demolish entire cities. In Wells's tale, the resultant horror is enough to produce permanent world peace.
Profoundly influenced by H.G. Wells's fiction, Leo Szilard wholeheartedly embarked on development of the first atomic weapons. By the time of the first bomb tests in the New Mexico desert, however, Szilard had recognized the fallacy of Wells's prediction of world peace and raised a vehement warning of the coming nuclear arms race. Even before the bombs were dropped on Japan, a division had formed in the scientific world between those like Szilard who adamantly opposed the use of nuclear weapons for any reason, and those like Edward Teller who played the collective role of Dr. Strangelove, willing to destroy the planet rather than lose face or concede a battle.
Such a scenario was eminently possible, Leo Szilard warned in a 1950 radio broadcast. A single cobalt-clad hydrogen bomb, he noted, would blanket the entire planet with enough radiation to kill all life forms. Szilard's broadcast inspired a veritable orgy of best-selling novels, pulp fiction, movies, television programs, and songs. From Agatha Christie to Neville Shute, Philip Wylie, and, of course, Stanley Kubrick, the "doomsday machine" became a dominant theme of popular culture, lovingly catalogued by Smith with a kind of warped nostalgia.
Fast-forward to 1985, twenty years after Kubrick's classic was released, when a Soviet doomsday machine, eerily similar to that featured in "Dr. Strangelove," was completed and went fully operational. Code named Perimetr, this was a fully automatic system in which "the launch of its estimated 2,000 strategic nuclear warheads, with a total destructive power as much as 50,000 times greater than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, would be decided by a computer system designed and built in the later 1970s," Smith writes. "The possibility of a malfunction making the system think that it is under attack is truly frightening."
Equally frightening, he notes, is the fact that even after reductions of nuclear stockpiles, there are still some 30,000 nuclear weapons in existence, "and ever more nations are keen to join the club….Today, cold-war tensions may have faded from the public mind and the media may be preoccupied with global warming, but the weapons are still out there, and the doomsday men are still at work developing new ones."
Doomsday Men is a powerful reminder of such folly. It is also a comprehensive review of Cold War cultural history that should reawaken interest in a number of out-of-print books and old black and white films. The last word, though, comes from none of these but from long-forgotten children's books of the same era. Unlike the macho posturing of adult entertainment, in two books from 1949, for example, the children get it right.
Enid Blyton's The Mountain of Adventure2 tells a wild tale of four children who escape the clutches of a mad scientist, his financiers, and a team of mercenary paratroopers who are developing a powerful anti-gravity device deep in the Welsh mountains; afterward, the children agree that the device had a strange allure but should be destroyed as something too dangerous for anyone to meddle with. And in Robert Lawson's The Fabulous Flight3, a small boy named Peter and a seagull named Gus steal a superweapon the size of an aspirin tablet, powerful enough to wipe out all of Europe:
"'Gus,' Peter said suddenly. 'I've been thinking about that capsule. We've got it and nobody else can get it and I don't think we ought to give it to anyone - even our own Government. It's just too terrible.'
"'Ben sort of thinkin' the same thing myself,' Gus replied. 'Of course I ain't eddicated, but seems to me that ain't a thing anybody ought to be let loose with."
1 Mostly men, anyway, at least from the records available.
2 First published Macmillan & Co., 1949; copyright Darrell Waters Ltd., 1949.
3 Little, Brown & Company. Copyright Robert Lawson 1949.
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