[Peace-discuss] Strangelove

[C. G. Estabrook]

[I've thought for a while that the poets get there first.  Kubrick was a
poet in Shakespeare's sense.  --CGE]

	Truth Stranger Than 'Strangelove'
	By FRED KAPLAN
	Published: October 10, 2004

"Dr. Strangelove," Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film about nuclear-war plans run
amok, is widely heralded as one of the greatest satires in American
political or movie history. For its 40th anniversary, Film Forum is
screening a new 35 millimeter print for one week, starting on Friday, and
Columbia TriStar is releasing a two-disc special-edition DVD next month.
One essential point should emerge from all the hoopla: "Strangelove" is
far more than a satire. In its own loopy way, the movie is a remarkably
fact-based and specific guide to some of the oddest, most secretive
chapters of the Cold War. Advertisement

As countless histories relate, Mr. Kubrick set out to make a serious film
based on a grim novel, "Red Alert," by Peter George, a Royal Air Force
officer. But the more research he did (reading more than 50 books, talking
with a dozen experts), the more lunatic he found the whole subject, so he
made a dark comedy instead. The result was wildly iconoclastic: released
at the height of the cold war, not long after the Cuban missile crisis,
before the escalation in Vietnam, "Dr. Strangelove" dared to suggest -
with yucks! - that our top generals might be bonkers and that our
well-designed system for preserving the peace was in fact a doomsday
machine.

What few people knew, at the time and since, was just how accurate this
film was. Its premise, plotline, some of the dialogue, even its wildest
characters eerily resembled the policies, debates and military leaders of
the day. The audience had almost no way of detecting these similiarities:
nearly everything about the bomb was shrouded in secrecy back then. There
was no Freedom of Information Act and little investigative reporting on
the subject. It was easy to laugh off "Dr. Strangelove" as a comic book.

But film's weird accuracy is evident in its very first scene, in which a
deranged base commander, preposterously named Gen. Jack D. Ripper (played
by Sterling Hayden), orders his wing of B-52 bombers - which are on
routine airborne alert, circling a "fail-safe point" just outside the
Soviet border - to attack their targets inside the U.S.S.R. with
multimegaton bombs. Once the pilots receive the order, they can't be
diverted unless they receive a coded recall message. And only General
Ripper has the code.

The remarkable thing is, the fail-safe system that General Ripper exploits
was the real, top-secret fail-safe system at the time. According to
declassified Strategic Air Command histories, 12 B-52's - fully loaded
with nuclear bombs - were kept on constant airborne alert. If they
received a Go code, they went to war. This alert system, known as Chrome
Dome, began in 1961. It ended in 1968, after a B-52 crashed in Greenland,
spreading small amounts of radioactive fallout.

But until then, could some loony general have sent bombers to attack
Russia without a presidential order? Yes.

In a scene in the "war room" (a room that didn't really exist, by the
way), Air Force Gen. Buck Turgidson (played by George C. Scott) explains
to an incredulous President Merkin Muffley (one of three roles played by
Peter Sellers) that policies - approved by the president - allowed war
powers to be transferred, in case the president was killed in a surprise
nuclear attack on Washington.

Historical documents indicate that such procedures did exist, and that,
though tightened later, they were startlingly loose at the time.

But were there generals who might really have taken such power in their
own hands? It was no secret - it would have been obvious to many viewers
in 1964 - that General Ripper looked a lot like Curtis LeMay, the
cigar-chomping, gruff-talking general who headed the Strategic Air Command
through the 1950's and who served as the Pentagon's Air Force Chief of
Staff in the early 60's.

In 1957 Robert Sprague, the director of a top-secret panel, warned General
LeMay that the entire fleet of B-52 bombers was vulnerable to attack.
General LeMay was unfazed. "If I see that the Russians are amassing their
planes for an attack," he said, "I'm going to knock the [expletive] out of
them before they take off the ground."

"But General LeMay," Mr. Sprague replied, "that's not national policy." "I
don't care," General LeMay said. "It's my policy. That's what I'm going to
do."

Mr. Kubrick probably was unaware of this exchange. (Mr. Sprague told me
about it in 1981, when I interviewed him for a book on nuclear history.)
But General LeMay's distrust of civilian authorities, including
presidents, was well known among insiders, several of whom Mr. Kubrick
interviewed.

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