“FIRST we got the Bomb and that was good, because we love peace and motherhood,” sang the satirist Tom Lehrer in 1965. In Doomsday Men, a history of weapons of mass destruction – chemical, biological and nuclear – culture is as crucial as science. Militarised scientists like Fritz Haber and Edward Teller mesh with prophetic writings by H. G. Wells, sci-fi and the darkly comic film Dr Strangelove. Apparently President Truman was influenced to drop the bomb on Japan by Tennyson’s utopian poetry mixed with Jack London’s writings on the “Yellow Peril”. A chillingly compelling, if sometimes repetitive read.
Doomsday Men…
