Hello my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. Our Sunday supplement extra

this week is with the novelist Robert Harris, I'm talking to him about the V2 weapons

and the end of the Second World War. Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership

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Robert, in the seemingly endless amount of stuff that keeps being written about the Second

World War, I noticed there are two sort of nagging obsessions that people keep coming

back to. One, we might come back to this at the end, is the counterfactuals, the contingencies

of 1940, the way in which the start of the war, particularly those five days in May,

the whole 20th century history could have been different. The other, and it really connects

to your thrilling new book, is why do the Germans keep fighting? There's a nagging obsession

with 1944 and 1945 and the way that that war machine just kept going past the point where

it made any sense and the destruction just becomes so mindless and relentless. This book

about the V2, it taps into that. Lots of other things going on too. It's just a very exciting

thriller, but these rockets, what were they for? I mean, and it depends who we're talking

about, the people who built them, the people, the regime that used them. What do you think

they were for in the minds of the people who fired them? Well, in the minds of the engineers

who built them, there's no doubt that originally they were motivated by a desire to explore space,

...