![]() ![]() Faced with the prospect of Earth becoming uninhabitable, no other country would risk setting off the device. The device would be triggered to detonate automatically if the nation that developed it was ever under nuclear attack. In a 1950 radio program, he envisioned superpowers warding off threats by means of a “doomsday machine,” a hydrogen bomb surrounded by a cobalt shell that would blanket the earth with deadly radiation if the bomb ever exploded. Just as apocalyptic fiction influenced Szilard, the physicist’s own strongly expressed apprehensions inspired further ghastly cultural references. As Smith points out, Szilard’s denunciation of the destructive forces he helped unleash mirrored the Wellsian ascension from devastation to utopia. Roosevelt urging the development of the bomb as a hedge against Hitler, and working ardently in the Manhattan Project, Szilard became a leading advocate for the international control of nuclear weaponry. Wells’ prediction that the horrors of global warfare would be followed by blissful universal peace profoundly affected the psyche of Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard.Īfter discovering the chain reaction, joining with Albert Einstein in composing a letter to Franklin D. Wells, anticipated the use of atomic weapons dropped aerially over major cities. Smith describes how “The World Set Free,” a prophetic 1913 novel by H.G. Smith masterfully chronicles the literary antecedents and cultural repercussions of the development of nuclear armaments. Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon, British historian of science P.D. ![]() Strangelove: Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb. Reflecting these anxieties, apocalyptic themes pervaded the books and films of the 1950s and 1960s, including Stanley Kubrick’s classic black comedy Dr. With the detonation three days later of a second bomb over Nagasaki, World War II ended and the Cold War soon began, ushering in an age of fear and distrust. Tens of thousands died immediately, and many more tens of thousands perished subsequently from radiation sickness, burns and cancer. 6, 1945, an atomic blast of unprecedented power instantly flattened the center of Hiroshima, set off a colossal firestorm that destroyed the city’s infrastructure, and spewed lethal radioactive material into the environment.
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