I recently saw Dr Strangelove for (I think) the third time. It had been at least ten years since my last viewing, and I'm not sure what I thought before, but I'm pretty sure I didn't think the movie was in any way realistic. This time I thought that the humor and satire tend to obscure documentary aspects of the movie.
For example, the doomsday machine that sets off the sequence of exploding bombs and burgeoning mushroom clouds with which the movie ends did not come out of the mind of Stanley Kubrick. According to deterrence theory, no one will launch a nuclear first strike, since it would elicit a nuclear retaliation--everyone is protected by this doctrine of "mutually assured destruction" with the unintentionally apt acronym (MAD). But what if a first strike is launched anyway? This is the general situation depicted in Dr Strangelove, and the movie plainly indicates that the reason for launching the retaliatory strike vanishes once deterrence has failed to prevent a breach of the nuclear threshold. The targeted country is doomed by the incoming missiles. It doesn't make any moral or strategic sense to retaliate in the minutes before doom settles in. Why should the body count be twice an unimaginable number instead of just an unimaginable number? Moreover, the retaliatory strike might include the explosions that trigger nuclear winter, thereby bringing down the curtain on human civilization. The whole point had been to prevent the weapons from being used. Soon as they are nevertheless used, everything crumbles. The logic of deterrence is self-cancelling.
Nuclear strategists like Hermann Kahn, author of On Thermonuclear War, put forward, without recommending, a doomsday machine to repair this hole in the logic of deterrence. Instead of relying on a human actor to order a senseless retaliatory strike, you determine beforehand to make the senseless response automatic. In Dr Strangelove, it's revealed that the Russians have accomplished this with buried atomic bombs connected to a computer network and an instrument, akin to a seismograph, that can detect a nuclear explosion anywhere on Russian territory. Once the instrument detects a nuclear explosion, the buried bombs, which are coated with cobalt to increase radioactive fallout, are detonated by the computer network, and the earth is rendered uninhabitable by an enshrouding radioactive cloud that doesn't dissipate for around a hundred years. That should deter a first strike by a rational actor. In the movie, however, the Russians hadn't yet gotten around to informing the US that they had constructed such a device.
Kahn thought that the US could construct an actual doomsday machine for around ten billion dollars. It would have the benefit of making a retaliatory strike automatic and thus wholly credible. On the debit side, it would remove a final decision from the realm of human rationality, since what we call "human rationality" would already have been irrevocably exercised in the decision to construct and deploy the doomsday machine. There is also the danger of an accidental triggering of the handiwork. Kahn didn't recommend the construction of the doomsday machine, but he took seriously what he considered to be its principle advantage--namely, the need to augment the logic underlying deterrence and MAD.
Some have said that Kubrick based the character of Dr Strangelove on Henry Kissinger, which is impossible: at the time the movie was written and produced--1963--Kissinger was still an academic who had never worked in government or formulated policy. A better candidate is Hermann Kahn, whose field guide to nuclear war had been published by Princeton University Press in 1960. Dr Strangelove shows that a relatively straight treatment of the ruminations of nuclear war's most respected theorists falls easily, outside a think tank, into the genre known as black comedy.
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