Part of my mind these days is deep in the mud, in sympathy
for those unfortunate folks in Montecito, California who’ve endured both fire
and rain. (I doubt many of them are looking forward to seeing the film Mudbound.) And another part is frankly
terrified by what almost happened in Hawaii, triggered by a false ballistic
missile alarm. No harm was ultimately done, except for a lot of jangled nerves
among those island-dwellers mistakenly alerted by the Hawaii Emergency
Management Agency. But in the wake of this very human error—not to mention the
currently strained relations between the U.S. and nuclear rogue state North
Korea—NPR broadcast an interview that made my skin crawl.
The interview was with William Perry, who for three years
served as Secretary of Defense in the Clinton White House. In 2013 he founded
the William J. Perry Project, a non-profit effort to spread the word about the
dangers posed by nuclear weapons. Perry
clearly knows whereof he speaks. During his White House tenure, he was aware of
three instances in which a small human error could easily have touched off
World War III. In one case, he accidentally uploaded test software in such a
way that it seemed like an announcement of a genuine nuclear attack.
Fortunately, an alert official caught the error and reversed it without
bringing it to the attention of the U.S. president, who’d theoretically have
about 5 minutes to decide on a retaliatory missile strike. In Perry’s era,
something similar happened in Russia, but the officer in charge was severely
reprimanded for avoiding the involvement of the Russian leader. As Perry makes
clear, we’re all too vulnerable to the possibility of a spur-of-the moment
nuclear decision made by a single individual, one who might not be willing to
accept the possibility that an announced enemy missile strike is actually a
careless mistake.
Back in 1964—a nervous time that I remember well—not one but
two movies dramatized how the Cold War might heat up as the result of an
accidental nuclear strike. Fail-Safe,
a thriller based on a popular novel, explored what would happen if a U.S.
bomber were accidentally ordered to drop a nuclear warhead on Moscow. This
serious and somber film, directed by the great Sidney Lumet, featured an
all-star cast, including Henry Fonda as the President of the United States.
Advertising posters featured an ominous line: “Fail-Safe will have you sitting on the brink of eternity!”
This was a time when Cold War paranoia was highly visible on
movie screens. Along with Fail-Safe,
1964 saw the release of John Frankenheimer’s equally starry Seven Days in May (“United States
military leaders plot to overthrow the President because he supports a nuclear
disarmament treaty and they fear a Soviet sneak attack.”) But a third 1964 film
approached the threat of nuclear disaster in an entirely different spirit. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love the Bomb was loosely based on a British thriller called Red Alert (aka Two Hours to Doom). The British novel was dead serious in positing
that a U.S. Air Force general, a victim of paranoid delusions, might unleash the first strike in World War III.
But, given the appearance in that same year of grim films like Fail-Safe, writer-director Stanley
Kubrick wanted to try something completely different. That’s why Dr. Strangelove shocked the American public by turning the threat
of nuclear war into outrageous black comedy.
Dr. Strangelove dared
to make fun of scientists, generals, nuclear weapons, and the U.S. president
himself. Moviegoing has never been the same since.
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