by P. D. Smith
For two days the world’s media speculated feverishly about what the Soviet premier had meant. Was this Leo Szilard’s cobalt doomsday bomb, which everyone had feared for so long? Were the fictions of Peter George and Stanley Kubrick finally about to become reality? Stung by accusations that he was threatening the world, Khrushchev eventually tried to clarify his comment. ‘I said the scientists showed me a terrible weapon,’ explained the Soviet leader, testily. ‘It is not nuclear… All I said was that I saw a terrible weapon which shows what mankind can do.’34
Precisely what apocalyptic weapon Khrushchev had been shown remains unclear. Perhaps it was a biological weapon that could wipe out whole continents with deadly viruses, the dream of General Ishii. Rumours swept through the Western media, but all that was certain was that another shot had been fired in the continuing cold war.
Twenty years after the release of Dr Strangelove, on 13 November 1984, a Soviet missile was launched from Kapustin Yar, east of Stalingrad. About forty minutes later an R-36M intercontinental ballistic missile blasted off from an underground silo in Kazakhstan. Familiar to Western intelligence experts as the SS-18 Satan missile, it was capable of carrying either a single 24-megaton warhead or eight independently targeted 600-kiloton warheads (known as MIRVs, for ‘Multiple Independently targetable Re-entry Vehicles’).
To the West’s spy satellites it was an unexceptional moment in the history of the arms race, and it was soon forgotten. Only after the Berlin Wall had been breached, and the ice of the cold war had begun to thaw, did military analysts realize the significance of these otherwise unexceptional rocket launches. They were the first operational test of what newspapers described as ‘Russia’s doomsday machine’.35
The details of the top-secret Soviet system were first revealed in 1993 by Bruce G. Blair, a former launch control officer for Minuteman ICBMs and now one of America’s foremost Russian arms experts. He told how, in the 1970s, the Soviet leadership had been disturbed by the possibility of a sneak attack by American submarine-launched missiles. Fired from the North Atlantic, such missiles could strike the Kremlin in thirteen minutes, wiping out the Soviet leadership.
Thirteen minutes gave the Soviet commanders little time to verify whether reports of missile launches were genuine, increasing the likelihood of an accidental war caused by nervous military chiefs. This dangerous situation was not unlike that faced by President Kennedy when missiles began to be sited on Cuba. To deal with this threat, the Soviet leadership authorized the construction of an automated system, nicknamed by its commanders ‘The Dead Hand’. Essentially it was a sophisticated system of sensors, communication networks and command bunkers, reinforced to withstand nuclear strikes. At its heart was a computer. As soon as the Soviet leadership detected possible incoming missiles, it activated the system, known by its code name ‘Perimetr’. Part of the secret codes needed to launch a Soviet nuclear strike were released and the computerized process set in motion. Then, like a spider at the centre of its web, the computer would watch and wait.
In the 1960s, Dr Strangelove had described how a fictional Russian doomsday machine might function. In Peter George’s book of the film, Dr Strangelove explains that the cobalt bombs were
connected to a gigantic complex of computers. A specific and clearly defined set of circumstances, under which the bombs are to be exploded, is programmed into tape memory banks… In order for the memory banks to decide when such a triggering circumstance has occurred, they are linked to a vast interlocking network of data-input sensors which are stationed throughout the country and orbited in satellites. These sensors monitor heat, ground shock, sound, atmospheric pressure and radioactivity.36
The Perimetr system, developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s, works in a very similar way. Its sensors monitor whether there have been nuclear detonations across Russian territory. The computer also checks whether communication channels with the Kremlin are cut. If the answer to both questions is yes, then the computer concludes that the country is under attack, and the Soviet nuclear arsenal is activated. All that is then needed is the final human approval from a command post buried deep underground. It would be a brave Soviet officer who, having been cut off from his superiors in the Kremlin, could ignore the advice of such a supposedly foolproof system. Once the duty officer releases the final sequence of the authorization code, the system becomes totally automatic. Bruce Blair describes what would happen next:
In a real nuclear crisis, communications rockets, launched automatically by radio command, would relay fire orders to nuclear combat missiles in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. The doomsday machine provides for a massive salvo of these forces without any participation by local crews. Weapons commanders in the field may be completely bypassed. Even the mobile missiles on trucks would fire automatically, triggered by commands from the communications rockets.37
The 1984 test firing was successful. The first missile fired by the Perimetr system broadcast a radio signal that launched the SS-18 independently of its commanders. If it ever had to be used in a real emergency, it would be not just one missile launched by remote control, but thousands. It would be the beginning of the end for life on earth.
The Perimetr system went fully operational in January 1985. It was eight years before anyone in the West knew that the system existed. Kubrick’s film described precisely the kind of sneak attack the Kremlin leaders feared most. Dr Strangelove is incredulous that the Russians have activated their doomsday machine without notifying the United States: ‘Yes, but the… whole point of the doomsday machine… is lost… if you keep it a secret! Why didn’t you tell the world, eh?’ Perhaps no one in the Kremlin had seen Stanley Kubrick’s film.
Bruce Blair has described Perimetr as ‘an amazing feat of creative engineering’ and has speculated that President Bush’s December 2001 proposal for a new generation of weapons, the robust nuclear earth penetrator, or bunker buster, might be intended to knock out the Russian underground command posts that control the system.38 After facing fierce opposition, the Bush administration withdrew its request for funding at the end of 2005. However, some military analysts believe that research is continuing into these weapons.
If the Soviet Union were ever attacked, 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 late 1970s. The possibility of a malfunction making the system think that it is under attack is truly frightening. Such a malfunction occurred in another Soviet defence system on 26 September 1983, when the Soviet Oko early-warning satellite mistakenly reported that a massive salvo of ICBMs had been fired at the Soviet Union from America. The Russian officer on duty that day decided to ignore the repeated warnings, and disaster was narrowly averted.39 Although, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, nuclear stockpiles have been reduced, as far as Western analysts are aware, the Perimetr system remains ‘combat alert’ today.
Despite reductions, there are still some 30,000 nuclear weapons in existence, and ever more nations are keen to join the nuclear club. We now know that a large-scale nuclear exchange, like that envisaged by the designers of the Perimetr system, would result in severe damage to the earth’s ecosystem, perhaps causing a life-destroying nuclear winter. Leo Szilard saw that the real challenge for scientists, as for all humankind, was to create a world which has no need for weapons of mass destruction. Until we succeed in this goal, the spectre of a doomsday device will remain with us as a warning of where the dream of the superweapon may lead.
Epilogue
‘The Tragedy of Mankind’
Since war begins in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.
UNESCO Constitution, 1945
On 9 April 2004, a sunny spring day, I joined others in Trafalgar Square in central London to hear the voices of those opposed to nuclear weapons in the twenty-first century. Fift
y miles away, at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment in Aldermaston, Britain was secretly preparing to design a new generation of nuclear warheads. This year the Aldermaston Peace March had been revived to draw attention to the fact that at the beginning of a new century we were about to repeat the mistakes of the last.
At Easter 1958, before the first peace marchers left Trafalgar Square for their four-day trek to the military laboratory, 10,000 people had thronged the square. The year before, Britain had joined the thermonuclear club by exploding its first H-bomb in the Pacific. Now, forty-six years later, barely a thousand turned up, and only four hundred of those took part in the march. ‘It makes me angry to see the number of people who have come to support the march today,’ said Damon Albarn, lead singer of Blur. ‘It’s not even raining.’1
Clearly, the world had changed. In 2004 a lone Japanese woman held up a placard in Trafalgar Square, but she was not calling on people to remember the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Instead she was reminding us of the plight of Japanese hostages being held in Iraq. As I looked around at the people who were applauding well-known speakers such as Susannah York, Corin Redgrave and Tony Benn, I couldn’t help noticing that many were grey-haired. The event felt rather like a reunion of old school friends.
At the end of the doomsday decade, the threat from nuclear weapons was apparent to everyone. Today that threat seems less urgent to many people. After all, the cold war is over – the Russian bear has padded back to its cave, and Uncle Sam has taken his cruise missiles back home. In the end, H. G. Wells got it wrong. The Last War did not start in 1956. Those apocalyptic stories and films of the 1950s – many inspired by Leo Szilard’s vision of a cobalt doomsday bomb – convinced leaders around the world that the price of war was too high. In a sense then, the fear of superweapons did prevent another global war. For forty years, the world teetered on the brink of doomsday, but then drew back, frightened by what it saw in the abyss below.
The nuclear weapons are still there, of course, in their bomb bays and silos. They could yet start falling, this year or next. For now, at least, there are no global wars, but the sciences of mass destruction continue to spread around the world. As is clear from the last century, knowledge knows no borders. The confrontation between India and Pakistan in 2002 brought the world closer to atomic war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the Middle East, Israel already has nuclear weapons and Iraq began developing them in the 1990s. In Iraq, the United States and Britain have waged war on weapons of mass destruction, a unique and, as it turned out, misguided undertaking. It will probably not be the last war against superweapons. Iran is now taking its first steps on the road to atomic power, despite the fact that it is one of the most oil-rich nations in the world. In the Far East, North Korea claims to be developing nuclear warheads for the missiles it has already built.
Terrorists too are said to be actively seeking weapons of mass destruction. Even before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Szilard had raised the possibility that atomic bombs might one day become so small that they could be smuggled into a city and exploded without warning. Commuters travelling on the Tokyo underground have already fallen victim to the nerve gas sarin, released by a doomsday cult whose members also tried to develop bioweapons and buy nuclear bombs. Today, no one is safe from the sons and daughters of Fritz Haber, Shiro Ishii and Robert Oppenheimer.
The year before he died, Leo Szilard disagreed that it is ‘the tragedy of the scientist’ to bring about great advances in our knowledge which are then used for ‘purposes of destruction’. This is not the tragedy of the scientist, he said, ‘it is the tragedy of mankind’.2 We cannot blame scientists alone for weapons of mass destruction. As we have seen, the dream of the superweapon is a fantasy which goes to the heart of our culture. In a real sense Szilard was right – we are all doomsday men.
In December 1961, Bertrand Russell’s Committee of 100 organized demonstrations across Britain, including one at the USAF Wethersfield airbase in Essex, where they believed H-bombs were stored. There and at other NATO bases, what was called ‘mass civil disobedience demonstrations’ were planned.3 The authorities deployed nearly 6,000 military and civilian police at Wethersfield alone to meet the ‘threat’. On the day, 300 cold and damp protestors sat in the fog outside the gates of the base for about four hours. ‘I wish they would get violent,’ muttered a bored and ‘hulky’ London policeman.4 There were seventy-three arrests for obstructing the Queen’s highway. Among them was Pat Arrowsmith, who in 2004, now aged 75, addressed the Aldermaston marchers assembled in Trafalgar Square.
In 1961, Lord Russell praised the nearly 6,000 non-violent protestors across the country who had stood (or rather sat) ‘for the survival of Britain and western Europe and for the prevention of an unparalleled disaster to the whole world’.5 My father, Bernard Smith, joined the day of action at Wethersfield, four days before his 36th birthday. It was not the first time that he had made a stand for peace. He had been 14 when World War II was declared. The following year he left school with no qualifications. In 1943 he stood up in court before a judge and denounced warfare: ‘I believe war to be morally wrong and a crime against humanity. Whatever may be the result of a war, war itself can never be reconciled to any worth-while moral code nor the destruction of human life be justified.’6
Bernard was registered as a Conscientious Objector at the age of 18. At the same age, in 1906, his father had joined the Grenadier Guards. Company Sergeant Major Albert Edward Smith went to France in 1915 and served there throughout World War I. He first saw action at Loos, where British forces used the new superweapon, poison gas, for the first time, yet still suffered an appalling toll of 50,000 casualties. Albert was himself wounded in 1917, but returned to the front and was mentioned in despatches. He was eventually awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal.
Company Sergeant Major Albert Edward Smith, around 1915.
What Albert Smith saw and experienced in World War I can only be imagined. He never talked about it with his three sons. I can still remember as a boy being shown the Luger pistol he brought back from the trenches as a war trophy. It was the first time I had held a real gun in my hands. It was as heavy as a lump of lead, and an ugly thing by any standards. Perhaps it was the same type of pistol that Clara Haber had used to shoot herself through the heart.
There’s a snapshot of my father aged about six with his chest thrust out like a sergeant major, saluting with one hand and holding a Union Jack in the other. That was the nearest he came to following in his own father’s footsteps. Albert didn’t live to see his son hauled away from the road outside the American airbase by a burly London copper. By then, Bernard had a child of his own, a nine-month-old baby daughter. In one of his first letters to my mother in 1959, before they were married, he had mentioned seeing the film of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach He had been struck by the scene near the end of the film, ‘with the man and wife huddled in each other’s arms’.7 No family was safe in the nuclear age. In December 1961 the Soviet Union had just resumed its programme of atmospheric nuclear tests, and the dangers of fallout were no doubt in his mind. At the end of October the Soviets had detonated the biggest ever H-bomb.
And so my father sat down in an Essex road on a cold winter’s afternoon in 1961. It was a small protest. Did it stop the arms race? Of course it didn’t. But to me – now that the cold war has ended and Bernard has himself died of the same cancer that killed John von Neumann – it makes a difference. As the protest of a man whose father experienced the horrors of the war to end wars, it is important. As the protest of a father afraid of invisible fallout polluting the very air that his new-born daughter was breathing, it is important. And as a protest against the infernal ingenuity of doomsday men everywhere, it is important.
That is my history. It’s a different kind of history from the story I have told in this book. But it is a reminder that the story of superweapons is of interest not only to historians. It has touched the lives of everyone during t
he last century. Your parents and grandparents will have fought in wars, cowered in air-raid shelters clutching their gas masks, and protested against superweapons. Although there turned out to be none in Iraq, the weapons of mass destruction have not gone away. 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. And as the memories of Ypres, Harbin and Hiroshima fade, the temptation to use those weapons may grow.
Bernard Smith saluting the flag in about 1931.
Notes
Abbreviations
For brevity, the following abbreviations are used in the notes and bibliography:
BAS — Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
CP — Einstein’s collected papers (see the Bibliography)
CW — Szilard’s collected works (see the Bibliography)
NYT — New York Times
Prologue
1. Hans Bethe, Harrison Brown, Frederick Seitz and Leo Szilard, ‘The Facts about the Hydrogen Bomb’, text of 26 Feb. broadcast on NBC network, BAS, 6 (Apr. 1950), 107.
2. Frederick Soddy, The Interpretation of Radium: Being the Substance of Six Free Popular Experimental Lectures Delivered at the University of Glasgow
(London: John Murray, 1912; 1st edn 1909), 251.
3. Leo Szilard, ‘Answers to Questions’, dictated, 9 May 1963; in CW2, 229.
4. Edwin M. McMillan to Wilfred Mann, 3 Jan. 1952; quoted in J. L. Heilbron, Lawrence and his Laboratory: A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 199.
