In 1964, two movies depicted a future disaster: the failure of safety measures leading to a nuclear catastrophe. Both were based on earlier books. Red Alert, a 1958 novel that was based on the notion that a single person — a far-Right lunatic, for instance — could cause Armageddon. This book’s film rights were purchased by Stanley Kubrick, who turned it into Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. A short story by Harvey Wheeler titled “Of Bombs And Men Abraham ’59-A Nuclear Fantasy”, was noticed by best-selling author Eugene Burdick, who teamed with Wheeler to write Fail-Safe, based on the notion that nuclear safety measures were not infallible. The 1962 novel was picked up by Sidney Lumet, who turned it into the movie Fail Safe. All this helped contribute to anti-nuclear feeling, but also to an acceptance of these weapons. Here’s the story:
Peter George was a serving RAF officer when he wrote Red Alert, so he used the pseudonym “Peter Bryant” for the UK edition (originally titled Two Hours to Doom) and “Bryan Peters” for the French edition: 120 minutes pour sauver le monde. The novel focuses on the crew of the Alabama Angel, a new model, very good, Strategic Air Command bomber. [NB: nuclear war was a bomber, rather than a missile problem before 1960 or so.] A general has decided to make war on the Soviet Union, because he judges that the US could win, if it acts immediately. So the general sends out the planes and makes it impossible to recall some of them, like Alabama Angel. The general’s logic is more or less accurate, but there are things he doesn’t know. Most important: the Soviet Union has buried a string of cobalt bombs deep in the Ural mountains. Facing nuclear defeat, the Soviets would set off this “doomsday” device that will destroy the planet. So Alabama Angel must be stopped. Action is divided between the mad general’s SAC base, which has to be taken by force, so that people may find the recall code; Washington, where the President and the Soviet ambassador worry the problem; and the Alabama Angel, where the crew is desperately trying to hit its target. This is where the book goes wrong (I think), because after this plane is damaged and some of the crew dead from Soviet defenses, we start to root for it. The crew are better known to the reader than, say, the President. And they are making a valiant effort; we’re cheering for ’em! Nuke the Sovs! [Spoilers follow.] When it looks as though the bomber may hit a small Soviet city that has a missile base, the President says that the US will suffer no less than the USSR. Atlantic City, New Jersey, is the offered trade. We destroy your missile base, then we’ll destroy the Boardwalk as penance. But the Alabama Angel finally succumbs to defensive fire and goes down. The crew’s corpses are strewn across a Soviet mountain side. And… the book ends.
The concept of destroying one of your own cities in exchange for destroying one of the enemies, was the core of Wheeler’s “Abraham ’59 Nuclear Fantasy”. He compared this destruction to the sacrifice by Abraham of his son, Isaac. Some ink has been spilled concerning Wheeler’s use of this idea. I’ll have some more to say on the topic but it’s interesting that two people who had no contact that I can discover came up with the same concept. Perhaps these two very different people are simply following the terrible logic of nuclear deterrence.
Wheeler had written his story under a pseudonym in Dissent, a more-or-less liberal, depending on your definition, publication. Eugene Burdick was very anti-Communist. His Ugly American depicts the commies as inhuman terrible creatures who want to do evil for its own sake. In 1962, Burdick was saying, “Better Dead Than Red”. His attitude was mirrored by Peter George, whose American generals insult the Soviet Ambassador when he comes to the White House. Even though a rabid anti-Communist, Burdick thought the world was on the brink of nuclear disaster and he promoted nuclear disarmament as the best way out. Failing that, it seems death was his preferred option. [Bio details on Burdick here, down the page. Look for the ad featuring the “Ale Man”.]
Fail-Safe begins in Washington. Something is going on, we won’t know exactly what for fifty pages or so, but there is a flurry of activity at the White House. Three men (and a useful female secretary) are at the center of the action: The President (no name given); his translator, Buck; and Air Force General Black. Also lurking around the edges is Groteschele, a planner and advocate of nuclear war. We’ll come back to them, but here’s what happens [Spoiler alert]: A strange blip has appeared on US radar screens. The US goes on nuclear alert — bombers take to the skies, a Titan missile is readied — then the blip is identified as a civilian airliner. The alert is called off. Bombers return to base; the Titan is unreadied. But one bomber group is not returning, instead it is headed toward Moscow. A hardware glitch has rendered the fail-safe callback useless. So, as the personalities in the White House clash and The President remains imperturbable, two bombers get through. The President bids his ambassador in Russia farewell and Moscow is nuked. Now what? The President is on the line to the Russian premier and says, “Sorry. How about I blow up New York as a sign of our good faith?” And he does. General Black flies the plane and commits suicide. The President’s wife is in New York, she’s blown up, too. (There are suicides and noble sacrifices all over the place. You got to wonder about Burdick’s fascination with this stuff.)
Now let me just pause here to note that I read Fail-Safe in October, 1962, when it was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post. I got to the end where The President calls for a New York City strike and thought, “Bullshit!” No American president would ever give that order. Never. Can you imagine Truman (who bombed Japan), Eisenhower (who viewed nukes as just another weapon), or Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon — any US Cold War president saying, “Okay, bomb New York.” The president in this case was Kennedy, who was dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis at the exact same time Fail-Safe was appearing in the Post. So I was disgusted with the book for being such absolute nonsense. I have softened a bit over the years, allowing that this was a fable exposing the foolishness of nuclear stand-off, but it’s still BS.
Books and films published through the 1950s depicted the aftermath of nuclear war: science-fiction including Ward Moore’s 1953 short story, “Lot”, that depicted the scramble to leave the city after a warning is broadcast, and there was plenty of post-war survival in, for instance, Pat Frank’s novel Alas, Babylon, or the 1955 movie, The Day the World Ended. End-of-the-world scenarios were around long before nuclear weapons. Some, like M.P. Shiel’s 1901 novel, The Purple Cloud, were turned into nuclear fantasy. Shiel’s book became the 1959 movie, The World, The Flesh, and The Devil, one of two films that year whose plot concerned three survivors of a nuclear war: two men and a woman. The public was well-saturated with apocalyptic scenarios. But the big post-nuke book was Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel On The Beach, made into a very successful movie in 1959.
Shute’s book and movie have different reasons for the nuclear exchange. The book talks about small nations attacking one another with nukes and the big, powerful states being drawn in. This concept is still part of military thinking. The movie says, no one knows how it started, probably a technical glitch, thus laying the groundwork for Fail-Safe. People were used to post-apocalyptic tales, but this disaster was caused by a stupid machine. By 1962, many people owned stupid machines such as gas-guzzling vehicles that were “unsafe at any speed”, according to Ralph Nader; such as “instant-on” TVs that didn’t need to warm up but had a tendency to catch on fire; such as X-ray machines in shoe stores that gave kids cancer. People knew that machines were stupid and not to be trusted.
Meanwhile, the US military was experimenting with strategies based on math such as game theory. Because math cannot be questioned, right? Two plus two always equals four, unless you are sorting apples and oranges, or there is some other nuance to be reckoned with. Relentless either/or machine logic is not the proper tool for most human problems. (Here is a brief intro to Game Theory, There’s lots more all over the Net.)
Peter George and Eugene Burdick had military backgrounds and they discuss the professional military with understanding and sympathy. But Burdick had no use for the number-crunchers now making military plans out of game-playing strategies. At one point he names some of them: “Henry Kissinger, Herman Kahn, Herbert Simon, and Kari Deutsch.” Burdick combines the worst theorizing of each of these people and molds the nasty character, Groteschele. It is hard to exaggerate the venom Burdick directs at this character, who is conniving, without principles except as they further his ambition, and likes deathsex — or whatever his girlfriend calls it. There is stuff here about the great dark beast of death, but Groteschele has the ultimate answer: he will ward death off with his personal amulet, i.e., America’s nuclear arsenal. If he must die, then everyone else in the world will, too. This kind of talk is really exciting to his girl friend. [Others suggest Werhner von Braun and Edward Teller as additional models for Groteschele and Dr. Strangelove. No one mentions John Nash — later portrayed in A Beautiful Mind — whose Game Theory equilibrium strategies were the basis for MAD].
Herman Kahn was a major source for Groteschele. Groteschele says, “In a full-scale nuclear war between the US and Russia, a hundred million people, more-or-less, will be killed… Things will be shaken up. Our culture…would not be the same…” BUT Groteschele goes on, The United States “would be the victor in that it would be less damaged than its enemy… Every war, including thermonuclear war, must have a victor and a vanquished.” So the United States would lose its “culture” and millions would be dead but, hey! Victory is sweet. This is exactly Herman Kahn’s view: America wins by losing less.
Herman Kahn wrote The Book on nuclear warfare: On Thermonuclear War in 1960. Later, he wrote tracts on surviving such a war after the deaths of many millions of human beings. Kubrick put some of his words in Dr. Strangelove’s mouth where they fit perfectly. It was Kahn who came up with the Doomsday Machine, the cobalt bombs that would automatically blow up and destroy the planet if anyone attacked anyone else. Of course, said Kahn, this was a thought experiment, not a real plan. Okay. Then he says, “The fact that more than a few scientists and engineers do seem attracted to the device is disquieting…” Indeed. It is very, very disquieting.
MIT and the RAND Corporation were leaders in applied game theory. Kahn left RAND to form his own think tank, the Hudson Institute, where a young analyst named Donald Brennan began to look at the projected war plans which called for the US to hit back hard as it could after a nuclear strike, and proclaimed them “MAD” for “Mutual Assured Destruction”. He thought people would understand why this was a MAD venture. They didn’t understand; they thought Brennan had cleverly given them a product name, something they could use to sell the idea of mutual annihilation. After all, this is America and everything is marketable, even death.
The heyday of the game theory analysts faded by 1971. “In 1961 the promise was high…Yet in 1971 it is fair to say that their performance has not lived up to their promise. And that’s putting it mildly.” Human beings are not programmed; they are not always rational; everyone has their reasons. But the analysts talked about “rational men” making decisions that will decide the fate of the human species. They assumed that everyone would be as rational as they thought themselves to be. And they believed in technology. They believed in it with irrational fervor.
Fail-Safe attacked both faith in technology and the notion that MAD was rational. The number crunchers fought back, issuing their own propaganda. The Air Force produced a (never-shown) film, “SAC Command Post”, and Sidney Hook, professor of philosophy at NYU, was tasked with criticizing the book Fail-Safe. There are only about 25 pages in his critique, The Fail-Safe Fallacy, much of which is taken up with defending Kahn and attacking Khruschev. Hook’s argument is that technology can be trusted and that Burdick and Wheeler are telling a great lie when they say that nuclear war is “inevitable”. Here’s what the Fail-Safe authors actually said:
“…accidental war is possible and …its probability increases with the increasing complexity of the man-machine components which make up our defense system. …Men, machines, mathematics being what they are, this is, unfortunately, a “true” story. The accident may not occur in the way we describe but the laws of probability assure us that ultimately it will occur.” [from the preface to Fail-Safe]
Hook is all over this: “We cannot build a machine which, by means of logic, we can prove will never fail.” Quite true, but Hook goes on “…it is perfectly feasible to set up six machines so that a malfunction in any one of them will be registered and checked with the speed of an electric impulse by the other five.” Sidney Hook has clearly not thought through the problem of the “increasing complexity of the man-machine components” of defense strategy. And, Hook agrees, that if there is a malfunction, then yes, there could be a problem, BUT says Hook, “…the probability of a mechanical failure in the defense system…” is so small as to be immeasurable. No source is given for this factoid (though Hook does name drop Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in the next paragraph). Many officers and others with military connections knew this statement to be untrue, that there had been numerous mechanical mishaps in the nuclear defense system, which Burdick and Wheeler also mention in the preface to Fail-Safe.
And the big question, which Hook dodges, is that no matter how small the risk, the entire planet is what’s at stake. No matter how great the odds in your favor, you’re going all in forever. Best not to play. I think the game theorists at MIT might even agree with me here.
Hook then attacks Fail-Safe as defeatist, and winds up equating Burdick and Wheeler with Communist agents and suggesting that Fail-Safe might win the Order of Lenin Prize. Such was philosophical debate of the day; if all else fails, call ’em a Commie.
Hook claims that the hero of Fail-Safe is Nikita Khruschev, head of the USSR. He says that because, in Fail-Safe, Khruschev is depicted as a human being with a sense of the moral gravity of the decisions being made. This is too much for those who want to depict Communists as evil monsters. It was almost too much for Eugene Burdick, who hated Communism as much as any American and more than most. Harvey Wheeler talked him around, saying that the Soviets could only be reasoned with if they were human and not caricatured bogeymen. Burdick knew that the arms limitation he favored could only be realized through negotiation, so he agreed, and Fail-Safe has a human Khruschev.
Presidents Kennedy, Truman, and Eisenhower had been trying to calm nuclear fears since 1948. Eisenhower organized evacuations of cities identified as targets. After one exercise Ike announced that, had there actually been a nuclear exchange, only 8.5 million Americans would have died. No one was comforted. Then there were the Duck-and-Cover ads, featuring Bert the turtle, telling schoolchildren how to survive. There were fallout shelters; build one in your backyard or basement if you have the cash, otherwise a book-lined room can offer some protection. Amid all this the CIA reported that the political elite, the decision-makers, did not have enough bomb shelters. I wonder if they, like their constituents, thought this was all nonsense. A common set of instructions was often quoted by ordinary citizens:
“In case of nuclear attack
1) Sit down.
2) Put your head between your knees.
3) Kiss your ass goodbye.”
Eisenhower’s official strategy was deterrence, but the Air Force visualized a first strike (when they had enough weapons) that would hit every Soviet town of 25000 or more population, and all of China’s cities, and some attacks on East Europe. Official estimates were that more than 600 million people would die, including many West European allies who would die from radiation and Soviet nukes. This 600 million did not include any US deaths; that was a separate calculation. At the time Earth’s total population was a little over 3 billion. The Soviet response was a “dead-hand” defense: a strike on Moscow would immediately launch all the missiles that were left after the first strike. Death estimates for the US varied wildly, depending on how many Soviet missiles and bombers might escape destruction. The US Joint Chiefs said only 10 million US deaths. This first-strike capability was important to military planners and many, like the General in Red Alert/Dr. Strangelove, were ready to attack.
When newly-elected Kennedy was informed of current US nuclear plans, he was horrified. He had read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, about the causes of World War I and how each move by a nation caused countermoves by others, each time bringing total war closer. Kennedy claimed that only one person could push the button. And that was the President. This was not true, as Daniel Ellsberg discovered. Every theater commander each had a button he could push; some had subordinate units empowered with nuclear decision-making. Kennedy maintained this, as did Johnson and Nixon. Eisenhower’s strategy faded, but never vanished. Either First Strike capability or Launch On Warning has been the cornerstone of US nuclear strategy since the late 1940s.
Meanwhile, in 1963 Stanley Kubrick had decided that he could not film the story as written and turned it into bitter black comedy. At some point he talked with Herman Kahn, who, I am told, was very personable and amusing. Kubrick said that Kahn told him about the Doomsday Machine that would destroy the entire planet if anyone bombed anyone else.
Now Kubrick was ready to release Dr. Strangelove, but the assassination of John Kennedy interrupted, and he was asked to hold off. He did. Then he learned that the movie Fail Safe was due for release in 1964. Kubrick sued, claiming that Fail Safe had stolen his idea. The lawsuit was settled with an agreement that Kubrick could release his movie first, which he did.
People watched Dr. Strangelove and laughed. This was a source of consternation to some movie critics who couldn’t quite fit the film into their categorized thinking. Then Fail Safe was released but did not do as well as expected. Moviegoers saw the Kubrick film as truth, the Sidney Lumet film as melodrama.
Experts, like Kahn, had lied to people for years, and people knew it. It wasn’t hard to read On Thermonuclear War and find instances of Kahn not being truthful. For instance, the claim that the US had a great defensive plan that could protect most of the population. There were plans, of a sort, but they were never implemented. The vast shelters that needed to be constructed were never built. The dosimeters and other radioactivity detection devices that were essential to Kahn’s plans, were never available in anything like the necessary quantities. Although Kahn produced lots of mathematical notions, most were based on numbers he pulled out of his ass. For example, Kahn had tables of data about radiation deaths and genetic malformation, even though very little was known about the effects of radiation at the time. There was no Chernobyl to study.
And Kahn shows a considerable lack of understanding of human beings. He suggested that food be sorted according to radioactive contamination — the least-contaminated food would go to infants and small children; the most contaminated to the older members of the population (40 – 50 years old) because, said Kahn, their bones are grown and thus not as susceptible to damage. “Bones” are mentioned because Kahn has some awareness (but little understanding) of strontium-90 which causes bone cancer.
Sometimes a bit of sense intrudes: an Army officer asks Kahn how much extra you would have to pay for the less radioactive food. Kahn says, “About five cents a quart.” “More like fifty dollars,” says the officer who has a clearer view of the world he lives in. Kahn says that it would be inefficient to make non-radiated food an economic focus. That would result in a lower standard of living, he says.
Then there are tables showing that, with only 2 Million dead, the US economy will recover in a year; 5 Million, two years; 20 Million, ten years; 80 Million, fifty years; 160 Million, 100 years. At the time, the US population was 180 Million. What does it mean to say that the “economy will recover”? Will the economy produce dosimeters? Or oncologists specializing in bone cancer? Or is this just more BS?
But Kahn had an answer for his critics. He claimed they were attacking him for pointing out the problem, not for pretending to have an answer. He claimed that, in Victorian England, “white slavery” was rampant and “One reason why this lasted as long as it did was that it could not be talked about openly in Victorian England…” So everyone who criticized Kahn was trying to stifle the truth, like in Victorian times. (Do I need to mention that the entire “white slavery”/Victorian attitude thing is bullshit?)
People knew they were being lied to, they knew they had no way to influence military planning, they were helpless pawns. If they were among those surviving a nuclear exchange, then they would probably be the ones doing the work, toiling to restore the economy. Unless they were privileged, they would be getting more contaminated food than their overlords. Kahn has little to say about the structure of post-nuclear society, but military governance seems to be the plan. (Kahn just refers to “government” without clarification.) People accepted that war would result in death, genetic mutation, economic destruction — all the things mentioned by Kahn. They were prepared by years of popular literature and movies on the topic. Kahn said, it’s not so bad, you can survive, and to survive is to win! Ordinary folks were not persuaded; they saw that nuclear war was a horror.
Some Cold Warriors claim that MAD was a great strategy that prevented nuclear war, but this does not stand up to examination. The warning machinery suffered many breakdowns and near disasters. For example, in 1960 the US was demonstrating the new BMEWS radar system that was designed to give fifteen minutes of warning of missiles coming over the North Pole. If a red numeral 1 appeared on the screen, it meant objects were approaching US air space. A red 3 meant a high threat level. Red 5 meant a 99.9% chance that the US was under attack. This had to be correct since it was a computer-generated number. Some important civilians were among the witnesses as the system passed from 1 to 2 to 3, each level meaning an attack was more likely. At level 5, the visitors were escorted into another room, They believed World War III had just begun. The military men knew that was unlikely (Khruschev was in New York at the time) so they chose to ignore the warning. Turns out, the technology was confused by its own radar signals bouncing off the moon. But it was people, not technology, that prevented a war. [This incident provided some of the background to a scene in Fail-Safe, I think, as Congressional leaders and others witness the technical failure of the warning system.]
There was nothing good about any of this; was there a Plan B? Arms limitation was the hope of Burdick and Wheeler. Complete disarmament was unlikely or unadvisable, said the military, but we might decommission a few warheads. The first real moves to disengage from nuclear disaster occurred in 1986, in Reykjavik.
Meanwhile, nuclear accidents and close-calls continued. In 1962, Vasily Arkhipov refused a launch order on a Soviet submarine during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was probably the closest to nuclear war that the world has come, so far. But there were many other people, ordinary soldiers and civilians, who looked at their radar screens that indicted a nuclear attack and decided, like Arkhipov, that this must be an error. Of course, people knew that nuclear war was madness, so orders to engage in it must be a mistake. Meanwhile, the military began turning over final approval to committees of officers. Arkhipov had been one of three officers, all of whom had to agree in order to launch. US submarines had a similar process, one examined in the movie, Crimson Tide.
There were many other close calls over the last five decades. Human beings always checked things out and refused a hair-trigger response. November, 1961: Several communications and radar stations quit operating at the same time. Possible attack? No, a single relay in the system had failed and taken out the system. And so on, a bear is mistaken for an intruder and sets off security procedures, someone sounds the wrong alarm, and the base is scrambling planes for a nuclear attack; solar flares set off warning devices at another base; and the failure of a 46 cent computer chip — twice! — causes NORAD alerts, which is close enough to Burdick and Wheeler to make them prophets. December, 1984: A Soviet missile gets away from a training mission in the Barents Sea and heads south toward Germany, perhaps. The missile passes through Norwegian air space, NATO territory. It explodes — shot down, perhaps?– over Lake Inari, Finland. If it was shot down, was it by a Soviet fighter, perhaps also passing through NATO airspace? Everyone laughed it off. “Cruise missile takes a cruise.” Ha, ha.
People had become used to the idea that the framework of nuclear war would be around forever, and they just had to live with it. After investigating the NORAD alerts, a State Department investigator remarked, “…false alerts of this kind are not a rare occurrence. There is a complacency about handling them that disturbs me.” People were complacent because they knew that machines don’t always work, but no sane human would push the button. And that is where nuclear deterrence is right now.
Russia has re-established the semi-Doomsday Machine around Moscow, the Perimeter system, a Dead Hand that would launch everything left in Russia’s arsenal. According to recent Russian news reports, that includes a super-missile capable of taking out the entire island of Britain and “sink it once and for all”. Herman Kahn died in 1983, shortly after a group of scientists published predictions of a Nuclear Winter that would follow an exchange of thermonuclear weapons. The sky would be blanketed with thick soot, no sunlight could get through, nothing would grow. It would be the death of most or all of our planet’s life, depending on how many warheads exploded. In other words, the Doomsday Machine exists in several forms.
During the late 50s, Khruschev was asked why so many air raid drills. He answered that it was to get people used to the idea of nuclear war. Now we are all used to it. Nuclear war would destroy the Earth, and we live with that possibility. We don’t think about it much. But somewhere, right now, some fool is probably designing a nuclear alert system operated by Artificial Intelligence.
NOTES:
Fail-Safe, Wheeler and Burdick.
Red Alert, Peter George
The Fail-Safe Fallacy, Sidney Hook This is an embarrassingly bad book for a professional philosopher to put his name on. The basic message is “trust authority”. Hook had been involved with Left politics before World War II. He spent the rest of his life desperately proving his loyalty to the US.
On Thermonuclear War, Herman Kahn Another bad book. The worst thing about it is that people believe that it’s an example of great thinking. It isn’t. You can buy a copy or borrow from the Internet Archive. There are many clips by or about Kahn on YouTube: 1, 2, 3
The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Daniel Ellsberg You might want to take some of this book — like the nuclear winter business — with a grain of salt. But it has an awful lot of good stuff in it. The Arkhipov story, plus other stuff about the Cuban Missile Crisis, are detailed, as is the Berlin crisis of 1961. Ellsberg is on YouTube.
Treasure Island
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Shrine of Dreams 