Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was True (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was True (2014)

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187 pointsfortran7759 comments

Dr. Strangelove is the origin of what I consider the most brilliantly absurd one-liner in cinematic history.

'Gentlemen, you can't fight in here - this is the war room!'

My work would insist on calling the incident response or monitoring room a "war room". And I would quote this every time it was mentioned. It gets old, but I literally can not stop myself from repeating the quote when i hear the phrase "war room".

We had a major incident go down during our Christmas party, of the "We've got $50M of payload slamming into a wellhead at 1,400m, please advise" variety.

Our service hotline was overwhelmed, and promptly proceeded to provide the rather irate (for very valid reasons!) customer the personal cell numbers of half the engineering departement.

Thus, as we were in a bar in advanced stages of inebriation, all of our cell phones started ringing. Oops.

The bartender was brilliant, realizing that something very out of the ordinary had just happened, came over, got the basics from a panicking engineer, threw the other guests out of the pool /pinball lounge at the back, put on coffee (lots!), found some paper and pens and left us to sort it out as best as we could.

The disbelief at the customer end as they heard Motörhead in the background while we were on the phone with them? Priceless.

We eventually had a couple of laptops taxied in and set up a sort of proper war room, still with Motörhead blaring in from the bar.

Good times. We even got the system offshore going again before the wellhead called it quits.

I've also had a customer service desk rep give my personal cell number to a customer. Fun times. Chalk it up to "cultural differences": the CSD rep simply could not understand why I might be incensed that a debt collection agency who believes I am singularly responsible for some hiccup in their collection software now has a direct line to me.

There are euphemisms for everything.

Senior citizens, defense department, correctional facility, adult entertainment...

Dr Strangelove is an absolute classic. The flight and build up to the bomb drop is both comic and tense. The finale with the bloke riding the bomb like a bucking bronco is near genius: slapstick armageddon. I think I need to watch it again.

There are quite a few contenders for your award. Might I proffer:

"I'm Brian and so's my wife"

It was a Dadaist film, through and through. Wrong time period, but the influences are striking, down to Strangelove's own physical appearance [1]. Interesting thing to have caught my eye while I was reading about something else entirely.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada , specifically the painting in front of Hanna Höch. It's almost unthinkable that Kubrick or Peter Sellers didn't run across this image at some point.

Although not a one-liner, I'm partial to:

"Buck, should I get it?"

"Yeah, you have to!"

Command and Control by Eric Schlosser[0] was a fascinating (and chilling) read about many of the incidents people have mentioned in the comments here. It focuses closely on the 374-7 Damascus Incident, but covers many many other “Broken Arrow”[1] incidents that have occurred.

It’s not a short read, but it’s eye-opening from the engineering perspective that nuclear arsenals are wildly complicated beasts with on-going maintenance, like any machine.

EDIT: It’s also available as a documentary on Netflix[2] Not as in-depth, but it covers the Damascus incident pretty well.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143125788

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_nuclear...

[2] https://www.netflix.com/title/80107656

Eric is the author of the linked article

Heh, so he is! Totally missed that. The writing style (and subject matter) brought him back to mind.

The original “Fail Safe” is a great movie btw, if you’ve never seen it. As mentioned in the article, that and “Dr Strangelove” were based on the same book, with “Fail Safe” being the more sober interpretation. Amazing cast, and Lumet (“Dog Day Afternoon”, “Network”, “Twelve Angry Men”) is a legendary director.

Fail Safe is was based on a book called 'Fail Safe' while Dr Strangelove was based on one called 'Red Alert'. It's an easy mistake to make as they have incredibly similar plots which really hurt Fail Safe (which I agree is a great movie)

Ah, thanks for that — I’ve held that mistaken view for over a decade now. So in essence it was more of “A Bugs Life” / “Antz” situation.

Except Dreamworks did Antz specifically because they found out Pixar was going to do A Bugs Life, and they were taking every opportunity they had to stick it to Disney.

One key difference is that Red Alert/Dr. Strangelove has a mad general start the war. Fail Safe has the war caused by error, which is in a way scarier.

If I recall correctly there's also a remake, made in the same style.

You're referring to the George Clooney, er, teleplay (correct word?) right? It was filmed and broadcast live, if I remember correctly. It was excellent - and I say that as a big fan of the 1964 original.

I also think “Colossus: The Forbin Project” is ridiculously underrated/unknown in this genre, too, if a bit more toward the Blade Runner side of things.

I remain surprised more computer people don’t know about it.

Particularly because the Terminator series took the same basic formula (military computer realizes it can rule humanity rather than serve it) and was very successful (well, the first two movies at any rate).

I saw it the summer before college and found it impressive. During the first quarter of school, I would turn up at the computer center and find the mainframe down quite often. The failures were not at all correlated with the due dates of my assignments (Fortran IV, thanks), but it felt that way. The Forbin Project seemed steadily less plausible.

Previous Discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13051974

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8576707

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7109345

There's so many great scenes about this topic in "Yes Prime Minister". I think this one is the most valuable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKbDKsNsjac

I've understood the futility of MAD, but this scene helped me really grok it in such a short, practical way.

What the video describes is massive retaliation doctrine. Mutually assured destruction is not the same as massive retaliation doctrine. Massive retaliation was abandoned soon after the the Cuban crisis. Kennedy saw how impossible it was in practice and demanded more options.

At the time this episode of Yes Prime minister was written NATO had completely different strategy called flexible response.

Makes sense. I guess what I confuse or don't understand well is how there's anything but MAD. The moment you push any button for any amount of nuclear usage, aren't you basically triggering MAD?

The only possible responses are conventional ones, right?

Flexible response means that the response is proportional to the threat just like in normal war. Nuclear bomb is just a big bomb after all.

First comes conventional response. If that fails to stop Soviet advance, tactical nukes are used. If tactical nukes fail, war escalates but no counter value targets are hit (no cities doctrine). Only after all these steps are exhausted and enemy escalates, nuclear war expands to total nuclear war.

Nuclear sharing is political side of this. If Soviets attack West Germany, US president hands keys to nuclear gravity bombs to German Chancellor and German pilots who have been trained to deliver those bomb are delivering them. If Germany uses nukes, Soviet union would retaliate against German nuclear attack, not the US based attack. Alternative Germany may choose to surrender and not to use the weapons. In that case NATO withdraws from Germany.

Everyone is giving book recommendations but nobody has mentioned The Doomsday Machine Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg?

> “We don’t care if things go properly,” a launch officer told RAND. “We just don’t want to get in trouble.”

Who would you rather have in control of the nukes: people who don't care, or people who care a whole, whole, WHOLE LOT?

People who care _that_ much are also more prone to emotional reaction lacking thorough evaluation of a situation that impacted them personally. So, I'm actually really not sure. At least the ones who don't want to get in trouble are motivated by the fact that they are beholden to others in some fashion.

If you like "Dr Strangelove" and "Fail Safe" I highly recommend "The Bedford Incident".

As was everything in Eyes Wide Shut.

It is one of my favorite movies, so I'm curious about others' take on it. In what sense do you find it true/accurate?

Lots of rich assholes get together on private estates to do demented sexual shit. Not included in the movie: occasionally one of them oversteps some bound that we subjects don't even know exists, and then is fake-suicided while in federal custody. (Great idea for the sequel!)

There’s a book, Command and Control, which tells the story of USA’s nuclear arsenal safety and security over the years. Lots of scary stuff, including how it was discovered that it’s been possible to break into Titan centre and launch stuff with a credit card-shaped object and small team of unarmed man.

This article was written by the author of Command and Control.

The movie really is a great illustration of the gap between "policy" and implementation, especially in a time of crisis, and how ultimately it still boils down to human decisions.

There are some lessons to apply to tech's "on-call", 5-9s culture...

Anyone interested in a quite good, serious film with similar themes to and released around the same time as Dr. Strangelove, should check out Seven Days in May.

And what's even more scary is what's true beyond the movie. Like dropping nuclear bombs on Goldsboro, NC.

Bombs were not purposefully DROPPED on Goldsboro. The B-52 transporting those broke up in mid-air and as a result lost the cargo of the couple of megaton-range bombs. Thank you for purposefully misaligning the actual event with your words of intent attack on the city.

Thank you for adding sarcasm to your comment, it really helps.

No one said purposefully, and they were dropped.

It's the sort of incident Dr. Strangelove predicted might accidentally cause a nuclear war.

Pretty sure you have to purposely arm them before there's any chance it would go off for just such a scenario.

Otherwise every time you transport one it could end in disaster.

That's the intention, yes. But in at least one case, the fail safe came very closing to failing, and not in a good way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash

> Information newly declassified in 2013 showed that one of the bombs came very close to detonating.

> In 2013, Revelle recalled the moment the second bomb's switch was found: "Until my death I will never forget hearing my sergeant say, 'Lieutenant, we found the arm/safe switch.' And I said, 'Great.' He said, 'Not great. It's on arm.'"

If I'm reading the article right, the other bomb also had the other three arming steps happen and was stopped only by the arm/safe switch, so between the two bombs, each of the four safety steps failed.

For modern nuclear weapons yes. For the ones we were still carrying around in 1960 much less so.

Please don't cross into personal attack or post snarky comments to HN. Your comment would be just fine with just the first two sentences.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Also—it's a smaller point, but while I have you: can you please not use uppercase for emphasis on HN? That's also in the guidelines, and it looks like your comments have done that a lot. As the guidelines explain, if you want to emphasize text, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized. Using allcaps is basically yelling, and it has the effect of evoking worse from others.

Generals and other Pentagon reptiles lie about the dangers of their massive death spending programs. Film at 11.

"You're going to have to answer to the Coca-Cola Corporation"

I consider the storyline that one of the generals has in regard to: water supply contamination, as a main plot.

Alternately, we have a much less credible scenario in Broken Arrow.

(2014)

Wasn't there an event recently when a U.S. bomber took off with six nuclear tipped missiles which at the time were thought to be inert?

And then landed with only five?

Not recent, but in 2007 a B-52 took off with six AGM-129 cruise missiles. [1] All were recovered. The root cause:

"A later investigation found that the reason for the error was that the electronic production system for tracking the missiles 'had been subverted in favor of an informal process that did not identify the pylon as prepared for the flight.'"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_States_Air_Force_n...

This sounds like the 2007 incident[0], but the Wikipedia article doesn't say anything about one going missing. That sounds like the sort of thing that would get added as part of the regular mutation in story transmission, and would likely be pretty well-documented if it were true.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_States_Air_Force_n...

or it could be actively suppressed:

[0] http://911blogger.com/news/2007-09-09/nuke-flight-major-issu...

By the lizard people, naturally.

Did they land with a USAF major missing as well?

He wasn't supposed to wear a cowboy hat...

There's this thing called a checklist? might want to get a few, they're kind of a big deal.

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