At no such time in American history has the idea of mutually assured destruction ever been as conceivable as the time when American was engaged in the political rivalry that is the Cold War. Mutually assured destruction, or MAD for short, was a foreign concept to the masses prior to the Chilly War. The scenario first made headlines and became a focal point of Cold Warriors when the Soviets successfully tested their own atomic bomb in 1953. With two nations having nuclear capabilities, it beckoned the American strategist to realize that no nuclear attack could ever completely disable another nation with nuclear weapons and that upon a successful first strike the targeted nation would still be able to launch a counter attack resulting in the nuclear devastation of both the attacker and the defender. This provided people with an all too precise image of what nuclear war with the Soviets would bring: a devastating counter strike against the United States that could potentially destroy life as it was during that time.
With the view of mutually assured destruction in mind, many people posed the question of what would happen if there was an accidental launch of these weapons and could the United States survive if the said counter strike actually happened. Toying with this pickle, many novelists, playwrights, and screen writers used their accepted medium to explore the outcome. Because of this, the world was introduced to countless frightening and believable Frosty War fictions, most notably of these would be the novel Red Alert by Peter George, the Essence of Decision by Graham T. Allison, and the two movies Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Discontinue Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb and Failsafe. While each of these works had a purpose, the two movies were extremely successful in providing the most people with the terrifying idea of MAD thus having the greatest impact on the Cold War world.
Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Quit Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb and Sidney Lumet's Failsafe are both vitally important pop culture icons of the Cold War Era whose differences in presenting the same idea reflected the acceptable medium of film and catered to the largest audience. Both movies were released in 1964 and were financed and distributed by Columbia Pictures in a time when Cold War fears were at their highest. The ideas presented in both films are those of accidental nuclear warfare and mutually assured destruction. While the films discuss the same concerns of the Icy War Era they do so in completely different ways. Kubrick brings these ideas to life with humor and irony while Lumet uses his movie to express American worries using drama. These two influential movies reflected the significance of Cold War ideology and had an effect on the American view of the threats of the Chilly War.
Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove presents the serious concerns of a nuclear conflict during the Cold War to the American people in a way that they can enjoy and compose light of. The movie is a strong satire of the American government's plans for offensive and defensive action during the time. The movie follows the plight of a Frigid War America that has accidentally started a physical firing war by sending their B-52 bombers, armed with a fifty megaton load of nuclear weapons, into Russian airspace to attack Soviet targets. The movie is littered with quick one line jokes, parodies of pop culture, and a hilarious spoof of military and political protocol.
The movie opens with the introduction of Group Captain Mandrake, a British military exchange officer, and the completely neurotic General Jack Ripper. Ripper has announced to the base that he has enacted a military bombing protocol named Plan R and for all personnel on the base to be on guard for any Soviet posing as American military and to fire on any and all approaching forces. Conception R is a retaliatory nuclear strike on Russia to be implemented after the Soviets bomb Washington and sever the military's chain of command. The general orders Mandrake to confiscate all the radios on the sinister, to which Officer Mandrake does keep for his personal radio. He turns the radio on and instead of hearing a civil defense warning he hears the sounds of civilian music. Mandrake brings this to the attention of General Ripper who then locks Mandrake in his room so that he can not hinder the American attack on the Soviets.[1]
After the initial news of the strike gets to Washington D.C., the President calls an emergency meeting of all the top ranking officials of the United States military at the Pentagon. While in the war room, the President is told by General Turgidson the upright design of Plan R and the fractional possibilities of stopping the preemptive strike now that it is in motion. Turgidson also explains that because America would have the first strike, we could all but eliminate the Soviet threat and only suffer minimum amounts of civilian casualties. The President orders an army unit to forcefully enter General Ripper's ghastly so that he can call the attack force off. The President also calls in the Soviet Ambassador so they might get in touch with the Soviet Premiere. When they do get in touch with Premiere Kissoff he tells them of a Soviet built Doomsday Plot that will destroy the world after a nuclear attack on any Soviet ground. The search intensifies for the only abort codes that can stop the American planes which lie only in the mind of the delusional General Ripper. After this information is divulged, the President calls upon his resident scientist Dr. Strangelove who tells the horrified war room that such a device is possible. After the Doomsday device is brought into the picture, the American and Russian forces work together in bringing down the American bombers.[2]
The next scene is back at General Ripper's military base where the General shows Officer Mandrake exactly how insane he is. In this scene, the General tells Mandrake about the Soviet's activities of fluoridating water within the states which steals the essence of men and taints the bodily fluids within all people. Directly after this dialog, the Army unit sent to retrieve Ripper arrives and is attacked by the wicked personnel. While still discussing the fluoridating scheme of the Soviets, Ripper hears the gun fire outside and pulls a machine gun from his golf bag to assist. After the action has calmed, Mandrake begs for the abort code but instead of giving it to him, Ripper goes to the bathroom and kills himself and takes the code with him to the grave. But after time with the statements of, "preserving our essence," said over and over by Ripper, Mandrake discovers that the abort code for the quickly of planes is some derivative of POE. After being discovered by a suspecting army officer, because of his British uniform, Mandrake manages to get the codes to Washington.[3]
All surviving planes are called off by using the abort codes and are returning to their failsafe positions when a new pickle is discovered. It turns out that one plane that had been engaged by the Soviet forces still remains, and that because of damage taken to its radio it is unable to receive the abort codes and is still moving towards its target. The President places another call to the Russian Premiere which instills alarm into the room again. Finally, the suggestion comes that focusing all the Russian anti-air mercurial on the planes primary and secondary targets will be able to stop the plane. However, the plane that was damaged in the first Russian anti-air scuffle has leaked enough fuel that it can no longer create those targets and the pilot decides to drop the bomb on the closest Russian target. The plane gets to the fresh target, and even after difficulty with the bomb bay release door, drops the bomb and destroys the ICBM site. The scene shows the pilot, Major Kong, riding the nuke to its target like a cowboy rides a bull.[4]
Directly before the payload is dropped the scene cuts away to the war room once again. This time the audience finds the President and his cohorts discussing a concept should the nuclear bomb be dropped and what course of action they should choose in order to maintain the American lifestyle. The war room comes to the conclusion of taking refuge in an underground bunker in order to wait out the radioactive fallout of the bomb, which would take roughly one hundred years. They decide on transporting a number of the most fertile, most significant members of the country, mainly themselves, to the bunker so that they might procreate and reestablish modern life once the radiation has faded. A humorous slant on this scene is the men only agreeing to this strategy after the ratio of women to men is decided, which will be ten to one, all in the name of procreation. Once this is decided upon we are left with the men filing out of the room in order to prepare for life underground. The final scene is one of countless numbers of nuclear explosions set to the tune of a pop culture song of the era.[5]
For this movie, Stanley Kubrick was the Producer and the Director, among other jobs, and worked his roles diligently. For example, both the pictures Dr. Strangelove and Sidney Lumet's Failsafe were released in 1964, but seeing the consequence of two movies focused on the same thing, Kubrick insisted that his be released before Lumet's Failsafe. This brilliant act of producing caused the film to reap high rewards at the box office as well as bring in several rewards. This film was nominated for several Academy Awards and made several lists for its memorable moments. As far as directing goes, the cast and the crew are quoted as saying that, "Kubrick would often show up to work at seven in the morning," and, "would often work as though he were possessed."[6]
While the success of the movie is note salubrious, it is vitally important to discuss the reason Kubrick decided to execute this satire about the Cold War relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. Kubrick, who was born in New York in 1928[7], was in his early twenties when the first instances of a global superpower struggle emerged in the form of post WWII disputes and Korea. In a work on his achievements, it is noted that,
"Kubrick had been interested in the problems of the nuclear arms hurry for six years before starting Dr. Strangelove, including reading over seventy books on the subject of nuclear combat and control, and subscribing to Aviation Week and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists."[8]
While interested in the struggle of the superpowers, it was not until Kubrick read the recent Red Alert, on which the movie is based, that he decided that he needed to make a movie that made light of the entire understanding and the darkly droll irony of so called 'people's governments' utterly destroying their citizens because of political policy.[9]
On the flip side of the humor there is dark and dramatic story telling, the medium in which Sidney Lumet chose to set his movie Failsafe in. Failsafe is a thrilling movie that visits the same type of scenario as Dr. Strangelove in that accidental orders are given to a bomber wing that is en route to Moscow to destroy the city. However when the error is recognized, and the abort codes given, the planes simply continue to their target thinking it is a Soviet ploy to stop the bombing. At the climax of the movie, one bomber destroys the Soviet city and an American cover-up plan that calls for the destruction of New York City is carried out in order to conclude the mutual annihilation.
Failsafe begins with General Abraham Black having a dream of a matador killing a bull and awakes to the realization that the dream is foreshadowing an event in his own future. From here, the audience is taken to a tour of the Strategic Air Suppose headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska where General Bogan is giving a tour of the installation to a congressman. While the tour is happening, the headquarters gains knowledge of an aircraft with unknown intentions and unknown origins on its way across the Atlantic. This information forces Air Force jets to scramble to meet the incoming plane in order to obtain information of its origins and its mission, if it in fact has one. The pivotal share of information given here is that the planes are not to go past a designated point, called the failsafe point, and once the unknown plane has been identified, a recall order will be sent for the planes to return. The unknown plane is in fact identified as a non-combatant and the recall order is sent to the bomber wing. However, an electrical problem causes the heinous order to be sent, and instead of returning to their noxious, the bomber wings navigate towards the USSR to drop nuclear bombs.[10]
News of this error spreads lickety-split through the ranks of not only the SAC but the entire Government. Shortly after the planes depart past their failsafe points, the President is notified and immediately begin hearings to not only discuss plans to end the attack but the ramifications that such an attack will have on the Cold War world. It is at this point the information of the failsafe protocols, which almost mirror those from Dr. Strangelove, are thoroughly identified; severely hindering the ability for the Bombing wing to be called away from their standing orders. Grimly, there are only two mumble courses of action to be taken, follow through with the attack or work in concert with the Soviets in bringing the bombers down before disaster. While the latter promises to give top-secret information away to the Russians, it is decided on as the best method. American interceptor jets are sent to try and bring the bombers down before they enter Soviet airspace but all attempts fail because they can not catch up with the bombers.[11]
With the bombers calm on their draw to Russia, the President has no choice but to get in contact with the Russian Premiere. Once he tells the premiere of the accident and assures him that it is indeed what it had been, the President offers aide in stopping the bombers. The President radios the pilot of one of the bombers, a Jack Grady, and tells him that the attack codes sent were a mistake, but Grady belays the President's pleas as a Russian coup to stop the bombing and progresses on. The Soviets light up the sky with missiles and planes in order to bring the American bombers down, and four bombers are brought down, but this leaves one bomber and a 'support' plane left to complete the mission objectives.[12]
The bomber, under the leadership of Grady, makes it to Moscow and detonates the bomb inside the plane to ensure its destruction. The President then must obtain a decision to show the Soviets, and the world, that the bombing was indeed a mistake. After deliberating on this idea, the President decides to release a bomb in New York City, killing not only millions of citizens but his own wife. General Black is appointed to the task of doing so giving his matador dream meaning in the end causing him to kill himself. The film ends with a montage of pictures of people and places in Current York site to the countdown of the bomb, and finally a still shot of each.[13]
The movie Failsafe was a film that was a victim of the times. Because of Dr. Strangelove opening eight months before Failsafe, the movie opened to negative acceptance at the box office[14]. However this does not mean that the movie was not as good as or better than Kubrick's, it simply means that the public most likely judged one from the other. In fact, the film opened to widely acclaimed reviews because of Lumet himself in the directing chair as well as the A-list cast of the movie which included Henry Fonda and Walter Matthau.
Sidney Lumet wanted to portray an accurate scenario of the horrifying mutually assured destruction in his film. This is precisely what he did, using a completely fictional yet extremely believable story coupled with the horror like effects of nuclear warfare. Lumet was a student of all mediums of show business, simply because his career in it began at the age of four, but his forte was work in the field of the dramatic thriller. Lumet, in all of his strongest works, portrayed men in crisis[15]; however instead of portraying a lone man in crisis, in Failsafe Lumet portrayed a world in crisis. In fact, in a biographical literary work, one critic commends Lumet for, "emphasizing the psychological and moral aspects of human crisis even more prominently in the film than Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler do in the novel."[16]
The Cold War spanned a time in history when the two remaining global superpowers were engaged in a complete and sigh domineering rivalry. The rivalry sparked some of the fastest growing technological advances in history such as the Arms Race, which saw the creation and implementation of nuclear weapons. The nuclear bomb was by far the most imposing and significant tool in the Icy War because of their destructive power. The hydrogen nuclear bomb was a grade above the devastating atomic fission bomb in that its yield would be at least one hundred times stronger when measured in destructive force and compared to the tonnage of TNT it would take to equal such destruction. Therefore, if an atomic fission bomb was detonated and did the harm equivalent to 500,000 tons of TNT, a nuclear hydrogen bomb would yield a damage equivalent to fifty million tons of TNT[17]. The knowledge of this was not kept completely secret and the public found out exactly how destructive a nuclear bomb could be heightening fears of mutually assured destruction when the Soviets successfully tested their first in 1953.
Cold War scenarios had pulled American to the brink of nuclear war by the time these movies were created. For example, the Berlin crisis of 1961 when American and Soviet forces were in dueling positions along the border of East and West Berlin did a lot to strengthen the fear throughout the American public of the Soviet nuclear threat. The border that they were on was nicknamed Checkpoint Charlie by American forces. President Kennedy and the Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev were each waiting for the other to attack first. If the attack had ever come by either side, it is believed that nuclear weapons would have come into play. However, each seeing the brevity of the situation, the two superpowers pulled their forces off of the line averting potential nuclear holocaust.
But again in 1962, the nations would find themselves at the brink of nuclear war once again. This time the incident was powerful more serious and should the issue had reach to war, it would have promised the use of nuclear weapons between the two nations. The incident was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and began when American spy planes photographed Soviet medium range ballistic missiles being set up on Cuban ground. When probed about why the missiles were taken to Cuba, Soviet Premiere Khrushchev stated that the Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro had asked for Soviet assistance in protecting its borders after the Bay of Pigs incident. After discovering the missiles in Cuba, American officials including the President decided that immediate action must be taken. They devised a list of options including a ground invasion, strategic bombing of the missile sites, and a naval blockade of any ships bound for Cuba and it was decided that the first two options would most likely lead to war than the third.
The US imposed a naval blockade of Cuba on October 22, 1962 to stop any and all Soviet vessels that could be carrying weapons into Cuba. The tension between the two nations escalated because of a strong worded Soviet response to the blockade where Khrushchev stated that the American act of piracy would ultimately lead to war[18]. However, once the crisis got to this point it was a stalemate, like Berlin before it, where both nations were on the brink of war but no one wanted to fire the first shot. The stalemate would cause negotiations to begin between the Soviet Union and the United States. These negotiations would see a compromise that stipulated the Soviet missiles would be taken from Cuba if American missiles be taken from Turkey. Although kept secret, the negotiations succeeded in stopping a nuclear war before it started.[19]
As can be seen from the two incidents above, the nation had been to the brink of a mutual nuclear war twice prior to the release of these films. By 1964 however, the thought of doing so after the crisis's had past their climax and the world was still superb seemed almost comic. It is in this regard that Dr. Strangelove did so well. The tensions of both the Berlin Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis had in a way desensitized the American people to the threat of nuclear war and seeing the insanity of world destruction could be entertaining. The nation was ready to get on with life after the crises and Dr. Strangelove created an outlet for pulling the seriousness from these incidents. In a review found in The New York Times, one critic calls Kubrick's movie, "one of the cleverest and most incisive satiric thrusts at the awkwardness and folly of the military that have ever been on the camouflage."[20] So this idea of making mutually assured destruction a laughable institution would help ease the grip of tension that had held the nation in the previous years.
Failsafe on the other hand is not so widely accepted due to the earlier release of Dr. Strangelove because they dealt with an almost identical instance. Audience turnout was lower than expected at the box office and this is pointed to as the main reason why. Also, one can attribute the tumultuous times of the early sixties and the seriousness of the crises that occurred then as an issue with audiences who were trying to move on from them. As Dr. Strangelove made moving on possible through the use of humor, Failsafe simply reminded them of the terror of nuclear war. However reviews of the movie, one in particular found in Variety state that the movie is, "a absorbing narrative realistically and almost frighteningly told," and that it, "deserves to be seen," because of this reason. So while Dr. Strangelove's dark humor and absurdity pulled people in, the seriousness, suspense, and believability of Failsafe pushed people away.
The two movies discussed above were definite icons of the Cold War and even though each had their strengths and weaknesses, one can not discount the importance they play in isolating a Frosty War mentality from people who lived through the climax of the era. While audiences and critics were both found to adore and hate the films, it is famous to realize that should they be re-released now, they would stand as true cinematic visions of a world in crisis and would serve to educate the younger generations to the struggles and terror that the Cool War is known for. Because of this fact, both films have such been integrated into many college history programs for this reason and serve to effectively lay a foundation of knowledge through an approved medium for students to build a strong plan of the times of the Cold War.
[1]Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Stopped Worrying and Treasure the Bomb, dir. Stanley Kubrick, 94 min., Columbia Pictures, 1964.
[2]Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick.
[3]Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick.
[4]Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick.
[5]Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick.
[6] Norman Kagan, The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick, (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2000), 112.
[7] Nicholas Thomas, International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers: Directors, (Chicago: St. James Press, 1991), 2: 472.
[8] Kagan, 111.
[9] Kagan, 111.
[10]Failsafe, dir. Sidney Lumet, 112 min., Columbia Pictures, 1964.
[11]Failsafe, Lumet.
[12]Failsafe, Lumet.
[13]Failsafe, Lumet.
[14] Whit, "Fail Safe," Variety, 16 September 1964.
[15] Thomas, 534
[16] Frank R. Cunningham, Sidney Lumet: Film and Literary Vision, (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 138.
[17] David Alan Rosenberg, "American Atomic Strategy and the Hydrogen Bomb Design," The Journal of American History 66, no.1 (June 1979): 81.
[18] MarcTrachtenberg, "The Influence of Nuclear Weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis," International Security 10, no. 1 (summer, 1985): 143.
[19] William J. Medland, "The Cuban Missile Crisis: Evolving Historical Perspectives," The History Teacher 23, no. 4 (August, 1990): 440.
[20] Bosley Crowther, "Dr. Strangelove," New York Times, 31 January 1964.
Related Posts
Filed under Heartworm Medicine Side Effects by on Feb 11th, 2011. 