In his post “Almost Everything in ‘Dr. Strangelove’ Was True,†Eric Schlosser describes how closely the events in Stanley Kubrick’s movie mirrored what could have actually happened to America’s nuclear arsenal. Additionally, he writes about the long-secret documents that help explain the many risks America took with its weapons, and comments on clips from a little-seen film about nuclear-weapon safety. Here he deconstructs scenes in the film which we now know came close to representing the truth.
At the opening of the film, Kubrick included a disclaimer (“It is the stated position of the U.S. Air Force that their safeguards would prevent the occurrence of such events…â€). He then introduced the “doomsday device,†and turned the aerial re-fuelling of a B-52 into erotica. Pablo Ferro, a graphic designer, created the title sequence and drew the credits by hand.
After a rogue American general deliberately launches an attack on the Soviet Union, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, a British officer played by Peter Sellers, suspects that the bombers have been sent without proper authorization. He confronts the rogue general, Jack D. Ripper, who launches into a rant that parodies not only the military’s resentment of civilian control of nuclear weapons but also many of the right-wing tropes of the era. Sterling Hayden, the actor who played Ripper, served as a commando for the Office of Special Services during the Second World War. After the war, Hayden was briefly a member of the Communist Party.
The President of the United States, Merkin Muffley, is upset that a nuclear strike has been ordered without his consent. Muffley, also played by Sellars, demands to know how this could be possible. He’s reminded by an Air Force general, Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), that the authority to use nuclear weapons had been delegated to military commanders, with the President’s approval, in order to guarantee an American retaliation after a Soviet surprise attack. In this scene, Kubrick succinctly addresses the always/never dilemma at the heart of nuclear command and control, posits the existence of predelegation orders that were top secret at the time, and mocks the strategic thinking behind war plans like Plan R. Throughout the scene, on the table in front of Turgidson, there’s a binder with the title “World Targets in Megadeaths.†A megadeath was a unit of measurement used in nuclear-war planning at the time. One megadeath equals a million fatalities.
Kubrick’s scorn is directed at the Soviet leadership, as well. Despite the strong opposition of General Turgidson, the Soviet ambassador, Alexi de Sadesky, is allowed entry to the War Room in the hopes of defusing the crisis. Played by the British actor Peter Bull, Sadesky proves to be duplicitous, and the ensuing altercation between him and the American general leads to one of the film’s most memorable lines.
After the Soviet ambassador reveals the existence of a “Doomsday machine†that will automatically retaliate against an American nuclear attack, President Muffley asks his science advisor, Dr. Strangelove, if such a contraption might exist. Sellers gives a tour-de-force performance as a lunatic whose arguments about nuclear deterrence are perfectly rational. The character was based on a number of real people, including Herman Kahn, an expert on nuclear strategy at the RAND Corporation, and Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist whose skills had been put to use after the war at the Army’s Redstone Arsenal.
Eric Schlosser is the author of “Command and Control.â€
