Dr. Manhattan: Super-Powers and the Superpowers is an essay by Milton Glass regarding the existence of Doctor Manhattan and the threat he poses in the Cold War.
History[]
Milton Glass, who hired Jon Osterman to work at Gila Flats, writes about how he doesn't believe that Doctor Manhattan is going to end wars; he thinks he is going to "end worlds." Glass' analysis states that Manhattan's role in the Cold War and his presence alone have escalated the arms race and made the world less safe than before. Even if the Soviet Union sent several nuclear warheads to the United States at once, for example, Manhattan wouldn't be able to stop them all. Parts of the United States would be destroyed, and the United States would unleash nuclear warheads on Russia in return. Both countries would suffer excruciating losses, and most of the Northern Hemisphere would be lost to nuclear fallout. Although Glass knew Osterman before he became Doctor Manhattan, he, like many others, views the blue "Superman" as being more than human; he sees him as both a weapon and a god. Therefore, Manhattan's mere presence isn't something to be admired but rather something to be deeply feared.
Trivia[]
- The cover of Milton Glass' book references Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, based on Vitruvius’ ideas that human proportions form the basis of architecture.
- Glass notes parallels between quantum physics and Eastern mysticism, echoing works like Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics and Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters. The root of this resemblance lies in the complementarity discovered by physicist Niels Bohr and inherent in the theories of supersymmetry, which is similar to the Yin and Yang concepts at the heart of Taoism. So-called "new age" philosophers have made much of this resemblance, but Eastern mysticism has not in itself produced any new insights in physics.
- According to Glass, to understand the Russian attitude to the possibility of a third world war, one must first understand their attitude to the second. After Adolf Hitler broke the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact with the 1941 invasion, Soviet forces suffered catastrophic losses: 750,000 casualties in three weeks, 4.5 million by year’s end, and millions captured or starved. The siege of Leningrad alone claimed over 2 million lives. In total, the USSR lost 26 million people, including 16 million civilians.