Empire Of Secrets British Intelligence The Cold War And The Twilight Of Empire

This article discusses Bond’s relationship with technology, arguing that it is not enough to focus on the various technological projects and technical objects/gadgets which surround the character – and which are made so much of in the paratexts and reception contexts of the films – but that it is essential to take into account Bond’s technical practice. Bond, then, is read as an embodiment of a form of Stieglerian prostheticism: a human being who produces the technological field and practises technics by way of being human.

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Things Are Not Enough: Bond, Stiegler, and Technics

Perhaps no scientific development has shaped the course of modern history as much as the harnessing of nuclear energy. Yet the twentieth century might have turned out differently had greater influence over this technology been exercised by Great Britain, whose scientists were at the forefront of research into nuclear weapons at the beginning of World War II. As award-winning biographer and science writer Graham Farmelo describes in Churchill's Bomb, the British set out to investigate the possibility of building nuclear weapons before their American colleagues. But when scientists in Britain first discovered a way to build an atomic bomb, Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not make the most of his country's lead and was slow to realize the Bomb's strategic implications. This was odd--he prided himself on recognizing the military potential of new science and, in the 1920s and 1930s, had repeatedly pointed out that nuclear weapons would likely be developed soon. In developing the Bomb, however, he marginalized some of his country's most brilliant scientists, choosing to rely mainly on the counsel of his friend Frederick Lindemann, an Oxford physicist with often wayward judgment. Churchill also failed to capitalize on Franklin Roosevelt's generous offer to work jointly on the Bomb, and ultimately ceded Britain's initiative to the Americans, whose successful development and deployment of the Bomb placed the United States in a position of supreme power at the dawn of the nuclear age. After the war, President Truman and his administration refused to acknowledge a secret cooperation agreement forged by Churchill and Roosevelt and froze Britain out of nuclear development, leaving Britain to make its own way. Dismayed, Churchill worked to restore the relationship. Churchill came to be terrified by the possibility of thermonuclear war, and emerged as a pioneer of detente in the early stages of the Cold War. Contrasting Churchill's often inattentive leadership with Franklin Roosevelt's decisiveness, Churchill's Bomb reveals the secret history of the weapon that transformed modern geopolitics.

Churchill's Bomb: How the United States Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race

Already anticipating the effects of algorithmic calculation and other computer management of human life, the James Bond films regularly pit Bond's human talents against electronic villany, where Bond - and the human - inevitably win the day. From the first film in the series,  Dr. No , Bond films have evinced a nostalgia both for a human aegis over computing machines and for a past of human endeavour and victory already stylised as the tropes of the films themselves: prolonged chase scenes, Bond's physical capabilities and inventiveness, his occasional capture and escape, massive explosions, and ultimate triumph over megalomaniac villains. The nostalgia for both human aegis and for a time before computers is not only the basic plot of the Bond films, it is also an intrinsic part of the Bond film ambiance and a continuing cultural reminder about the potential dangers of computing machine rule.

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Physiques/Physics over Figures: Some Thoughts on James Bond's Nostalgia

This article explores Ian Fleming’s fluctuating views on technology and his disillusionment with scientific work following the Second World War. Focusing on the James Bond novels, in which Fleming nursed his fears of a post-Cold War, dystopian future, it configures Bond himself as a cypher for human agency in negotiating the technological changes of the twentieth century – a triumphant symbol of Fleming’s belief in the ingenuity of the individual. This article also reads the Cold War context of mutually assured technological destruction (in which Fleming set most of his novels) against the contemporary context of the Covid-19 pandemic, a biological threat of global proportions which is interpreted, here, within a Bondian framework.

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André Millard

Papers

James Bond and the End of the World