A History of Bombing Sven Lindqvist Granta, 224pp, £14.99 ISBN 1862074151

At a time when fashion seems to favour histories of small things - the potato, the pencil, the zip - it is refreshing to see someone having a go at a big one. The prizewinning Swedish author Sven Lindqvist is of the generation who, as children, shivered beneath the daily possibility of aerial bombardment. The shivers have never quite left him, and his new book is a disquieting ramble through the long and inglorious love of blitzkrieg that is one of the truest hallmarks of western civilisation. It is learned, yet concise; doom-laden, yet light. He begins with the earliest Chinese attempts to fire pellets out of bamboo canes, and ends with the snazzy American missiles that went screaming into Iraq. In between, he ticks off (in both senses of the term) the technical advances that have fuelled our colossal urge to kill.

Lindqvist calls it "the dream of genocide", and in his hands this does not seem an overstatement. He lays down an impressive barrage of quotations from popular literature, all of them soaked in eager fantasies of extermination. Ever since man first dreamed of flight, it seems, he also dreamed of dropping bombs on the hapless crowd below (saturation bombing does appear, alas, to be a distinctively male trait). The historic rules of war outlawed (in theory, at least) the butchering of tame civilians: women and children. War, these rules held, was a game between armies. Lindqvist follows the icy path taken by the world's strongest nations away from this pragmatic principle, in favour of the calculated massacring of innocents. The ideal, in recent times, has been to deliver the biggest blow with the smallest risk. Soldiers are too precious to lose. Whole populations must be incinerated to keep them safe.

This is a sobering and important argument. In the 20th century, more than ever before, technology allowed our direst dreams to come true, and death rained with escalating ferocity from the skies over Africa, Europe and Asia. We all know about Hiroshima, and Dresden, and Guernica, and the London blitz, and Vietnam - or at least we think we do: Lindqvist is a cool exposer of the myths deployed to support these deadly adventures. Many of the other bombardments whose sorry stories he tells are not even famous, let alone infamous. I had forgotten, I am ashamed to say, that we British dropped 35,000 tons of defoliant bombs on Malaya in the run-up to national independence in 1962. It did nothing but hurt people. An RAF review even concluded, without irony, that it did "more harm than good".

Doesn't it always? Lindqvist looks on appalled not just at the morality of high-powered blanket bombing, but at its dismal record of success. Germany's V-2 rockets killed 4,000 Britons, more or less at random: the same money could have bought 24,000 fighter planes, enough to check the invasion of Normandy and render the aerial pummelling of German cities out of the question. Chief among the reasons given for Bomber Harris's enthusiasm for reciprocal attacks on cities, rather than on military installations, was that cities were about the only things large enough to hit. When the RAF obliterated Dresden on 13 February 1945, the one useful military target was a railway bridge over the Elbe, handy for troop transport. Yet 100,000 people were roasted in a night, while the bridge survived.

By then, the world's military and political elites had long been in the grip of a single demented strategic imperative: the need for an even bigger bomb. And they still are. Time and again, superior forces have attempted to batter populations into submission. Time and time again, as Lindqvist remarks, they have "proved to be helpless against irregular forces with primitive weapons".

It is all immensely sobering and grave. A line on the cover from John Pilger urges us to read it to "understand militarism", but this seems like petty scandal-mongering in the context of Lindqvist's own grander, more sorrowful tone. To him, it is more than a wicked establishment plot: nothing less than a dismal part of human nature. He speaks of his own urges to preserve his children; but children, too, he might have noticed, have a built-in urge to throw bombshells from afar. The desire to stay out of harm's way is matched only by the fear that the other fellow might chuck his first. As he narrates the crazy logic of escalation, and the reflexive sense of denial that permits people to feel aggrieved rather than guilty, Lindqvist plots a clear path towards the ever more horrendous holocausts that lie ahead. It is gripping stuff.

Having said all that, I hate to spoil the party by harping on a weakness. But it is hard not to mention that Lindqvist has done his best to ruin the great distinctions of his work by chopping up his narrative and burying it in - of all things - a "labyrinth". Readers are advised to follow a crazy-paving sequence of advances and retreats, and are directed through the maze by arrows and numbers. Thus chapter two begins on page two (so far, so good), but continues on pages 24-25, 28-29, 32-33, 62, and ends on 65-68. Presumably, this is intended to replicate the aesthetic of the internet, and in one sense it is a triumphant success, since it is every bit as jerky, cumbersome and maddening as the web itself. The virtues of Lindqvist's style and intelligence - his elegiac brevity and sober restraint - are sacrificed in this sudden rash explosion of clever-cleverness. It is almost as if all that talk of fragmentation devices has gone to his head.

The labyrinth, I hardly need add, is already one of the most pretentious cliches in modern literature, and in this case we can't help but get lost in it. I told myself that it was an interesting experiment. I flicked this way and that, fighting the urge to read on, losing my place, snagging on bits I had read already, before giving up in dismay. In the end, I plodded through from beginning to end, using the traditional but underrated method of turning one page at a time. A delightful truth emerged. The book is already a perfect technology: simple, portable, elegant and user-friendly.

Lindqvist has written an exceptionally good one. It is such a shame that, by the end, when an annoying little arrow points us cheekily back to the beginning, we half-wish for the well-placed bomb that might shake it all back into the right order.

Robert Winder writes monthly in the NS

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