DOOMSDAY MEN by P.D. Smith

Somewhere along the 2000-mile drive I recently took from Wisconsin to Nevada, I managed to lose my copy of Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman with just a couple of chapters of this intriguing memoir to go. Naturally one of the first things I did after finding a permanent residence here was to visit the Spring Valley branch of the Las Vegas - Clark County Library District and get a card. And one of the first books I requested via the library district's online catalog was Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.

Since the book had to come from another LVCC library, I borrowed Spring Valley's copy of Doomsday Men by P.D. Smith, a British "independent researcher and writer." You can find out more about him at this website, www.petersmith.com. Now physics was one of my h.s. washouts and I was able to avoid it in college.

Basically I never found out if I could cope with the subject since fitting it into my schedule senior year was preventing me from taking the French and Spanish courses I wanted. The situation was not helped by the fact that the instructor, who'd been my freshman year homeroom and religion teacher, and I never got along with particularly well.

Turns out I might have stuck with it if P.D. Smith had written his book 40 years sooner. The late 60's were a fascinating period of time for the "science of the 20th century." Physicists had gone from being the "saviour scientists" of popular culture and the public imagination to being "Dr. Strangeloves." Over the course of 2 world wars and the Cold War, physicists had moved away from backwater lab benches and entered into a Faustian partnership with politicians and the military in order to continue their research.

Smith traces the history of the physics and its all-compelling search for the superweapon to end wars, a replacement for the chemical warfare which had failed to end the "war to end all wars." Discovery built upon discovery yet secrecy was also the order of the day. The author takes us on an exciting, incredible journey into effort to get to the heart of the atom and then the nucleus.

Along the way readers are introduced to a variety of fascinating and a few repellent characters but the most unforgettable physicist in Mr. Smith's rendering has got to be Leo Szilard, a Hungarian by birth, citizen of the Weimar Republic by choice and finally refugee from Hitler's Europe in England and then the U.S. Szilard knew everybody in the field in those years and his scientific insights and political attitudes have had enormous impact on modern physics, even if his name is less familiar than Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Teller, Oppenheimer and others, all of whom Szilard considered colleagues, if not friends. From the Curies to General Curtis LeMay, Doomsday Men takes the reader on an eye-opening trip through 20th century battlegrounds, labs and research centers, and into the dead-dealing nexus of politics and big science.

Darn, I wish I could have worked that senior year schedule out a little better, not to mention been more willing to tackle a subject that required more work on my part than most of what I studied in high school.