Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact | Hacker News Reader

Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

newyorker.com

375 pointsux-app160 comments

There's a fascinating chapter in 'the strategy of conflict' by Thomas Schelling [1] about accidental nuclear war.

The theory is once both sides had nuclear submarines, any first launch would trigger mutually assured destruction - so no rational actor would ever launch first. And because of that, any threat to launch /intentionally/ sounds like a bluff.

So if you want to threaten your enemy (for example, to make them withdraw some missiles from Cuba) you use a randomized threat - the increased probability of accidental war - which you can demonstrate with lots of near misses.

Just look at a list of nuclear near misses [2] once you know that and you can see the message being sent to the Russians: Missiles in cuba = Defcon 3 = High chance of accidental launch = Not in your interests.

In other words, the capacity for accidental launches is a feature, not a bug.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Schelling#The_Strategy_... [2] http://nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/issu...

And then you had a certain incident after the fall of the wall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident

That all those official denials and assurances at the time were BS and lies, serves as a good reminder for how to treat similar assurances in the present.

Young folks today just don't believe how downright surreal (and scary) the cold war was to live through.

Look, just read this wikipedia entry about the British Blue Peacock nuclear device, and boggle:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peacock

Yes. It's a chicken-heated atomic landmine. Not a joke: it was a Real Thing.

And so was this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_%28nuclear_device...

The M-29 Davy Crockett tactical nuclear recoilless rifle. (Jeep-mounted, no PALs, the rocket's flight range was less than its lethal radius of effect: the crew were supposed to fire it over a hill then dive under their jeep for cover.)

People not only imagined these things, they built them and deployed them in the stone-cold expectation of using them in anger.

That reminds me of the pigeon-guided missile.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon

I see your pigeon and raise you a bat. As in bat-shit-crazy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb

When they tested them, the bats incinerated an Air Force base.

Wars would be a lot better if guys would say to themselves sometimes "Jesus, I'm not going to do that to the enemy. That's too much."

-Kurt Vonnegut

The problem is that in some wars, if you don't, the enemy will strike you just as hard or harder.

Surely a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You have just described the philosophy behind the fire bombing of cities, nuclear escalation, and mutually assured destruction - which given Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five was surely what he was talking about when he made that comment.

The "guys" in the above sentence include your enemies.

Fortunately the political leaders on both sides knew that they could never use nuclear weapons. Reagan was horrified and changed his policies, much to his credit, when he realised that the Soviets really were terrified of an attack from the West.

Even Khrushchev, who had a lot of blood on his hands, couldn't sleep for days after he had been briefed on what a nuclear war would actually mean - he only calmed down once he realised that the things would never be used by either side.

You're missing a 'probably' in there somewhere.

I think it's just my retrospective naive optimism!

That is why I shoot their women and babies.

A large chunk of modern military training is explicitly to prevent guys from saying that reflexively.

It actually has toned down some, if you can believe it (at least in the Marine Corps).

I guess it had to happen, given the "police actions" undertaken these days.

it's always been like that, step one is to de-humanise your enemy so your soldiers do not feel guilty for killing them.

Why couldn't they just bury the mine below the frost line?

Because the problem wasn't "ice," the problem was "cold," especially when you're dealing with finicky moving parts regarding pressure switches and tilt switches. There are tons of components of the era that were subject to thermal variance: oil-and-paper capacitors, wire coils in transformers and inductors, etc etc. We take solid-state reliability for granted these days, but there was a time before.

For once I applaud the British and their shitting engineering!

...the rocket's flight range was less than its lethal radius of effect

Reminds me of an old RPG called Paranoia, which featured nuclear hand grenade bombs. I never realised that weapons similar to that joke actually existed!

Send in the clones!

My father commanded a heavy weapons company on the Fulda Gap that included M-29s. Despite the fact that the Davy Crockett was very patently a suicide machine, the military did not explain to its soldiers that the warheads' radius of effect was larger than the gun's maximum range. However, since the gun operators were chosen from the most academically-accomplished of the enlisted ranks[1], they figured it out pretty fast (as did the platoon officers, who resolved to be very, very far behind the FEBA if the war went hot).

As my father pointed out, the concerns were really academic; if the Soviets did invade Western Europe, US war plans in the 1950s and 1960s involved so liberal a use of tactical and operational nuclear weapons that you wouldn't be safe anywhere between Bonn and Berlin. Victory measured out in teaspoons and kilotons.

[1] As opposed to his heavy mortar platoons, one of whom managed to nearly drop a round on the command tent during an exercise after a private failed to understand the operation of a compass. At least, that was his excuse....

Addendum: I should point out that pretty much every warplan the US came up with in the 1950s was a variation on "use nucs to slow down the Soviets until the Turkish military can mobilize." It wasn't until the professionalization of Western European forces, public hostility towards turning Europe into a smoking crater, and the use of game theory to describe how mobilization could become nuclear escalation that nuclear weapons as a standard battlefield play went away.

However, the Soviets never took the operational and tactical use of nuclear weapons out of their play book; Soviet blitz doctrine in the late 1980s still envisioned using widespread nuclear attacks to soften up NATO forces or deny ground in the face of NATO attacks.

It seems a little troubling that the Turkish military was supposed to be the pivotal factor in World War III. Was there any particular reason for that, other than Turkey being right next to Russia and the Crimea? What if the Soviets went after Turkey first?

After WW2, the Turks were the largest standing army in NATO, had performed excellently in the Korean War, were a linchpin between Europe and the Near East, and had a longstanding historical antipathy towards Russia. Basically, the Pentagon trusted the Turks to be more effective war fighters than anyone else in NATO at the time, and to be able to get to any particular front line faster than any other ally. Eventually, the demilitarization of West Germany placed an effective front-line force in place, but in the early Cold War the NATO allies were not really very united.

Did you mean "remilitarization" ?

I did indeed, thanks. :)

To this day Turkey has the largest standing army after the US of NATO members, it's not been a pushover for some decades now. Its also got a rather large number of armored units with few rivaling NATO members with the US as exception. It lacks Nuclear weapons (although it has the capacity to build and deliver, and participates in Nuclear sharing treaties, a bit like the Netherlands) and it's not better funded than say the UK, but it's pretty massive. Together with the reasons you mentioned (proximity) it makes a pretty decent case.

That's very much incorrect. China, India, North Korea and the Russian Federation precede Turkey as well. South Korea and Pakistan are close (and so is Iran but not so well equipped).

I don't know if the comment was amended, but they're talking about NATO members exclusively. Turkey has a 'deployable military' of 495k according to this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_NATO#Military_...

No, my mistake, thanks for spotting that.

Those numbers...

F if i know how Norway manages to spend that much on military, when there is a constant complaint about it being underfunded.

Btw, i think you need to roll the next 7-8 into one before matching the US troop numbers. Nuts.

> Soviet blitz doctrine in the late 1980s still envisioned using widespread nuclear attacks to soften up NATO forces or deny ground in the face of NATO attacks.

Well, nowadays Russia considers "limited nuclear strikes" a form of de-escalation: http://thebulletin.org/why-russia-calls-limited-nuclear-stri...

I grew up right at the tail-end of it, the 1984 Red Dawn was a perfectly reasonable scenario. Whenever I think the hysteria was completely insane I think back to my parents and grandparents and some of the truly bizarre notions that happened during their youth: duck and cover, public bomb shelter drills, etc.

People actually paid significant parts of their yearly salary to build, stock and maintain nuclear bomb shelters in their backyards...in places like Ohio.

Something like this [1] was just seen as mildly eccentric, not something that would get you institutionalized with severe paranoia.

1 - http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-1970s-undergro...

People, large numbers of them, actually believed (and it may have been true) that extinction-level global war was an accidental launch away.

What's even more interesting is the long-term vestiges of these ideas have hung around, but without nuclear war being on the horizon they've morphed and latched onto other scenarios: a Republican-Democrat civil war, the Rapture, Zombie invasion, Disease outbreak, etc. These aren't just old shelters, these are brand new.

http://alpinesurvival.com/survival-shelters-for-sale.html

Though, I'm always struck with how everybody wants to outfit their end-of-the-world bunkers with modern living room entertainment centers complete with cable TV, wi-fi and comfortable home-office.

In any other scenario, somebody who spends millions of dollars to build 7,500 sq ft of underground EMP shielded comfortable living area with hidden and barricaded entrance, independent filtered air and water and multiple years of emergency food [2] would be dragged into emergency psychiatric care.

But instead these scenarios are talked about openly on major news networks, reviewed in popular magazines, and I can buy these supplies commercial and off-the-shelf -- there's industries that exist to do nothing but feed this demand!

2 - http://www.costco.com/32,000-Total-Servings-4-Person-1-Year-...

That emergency food supply would feed a family of four for a year, that's not "multiple years" of emergency food if you actually have a family of four. If you have a family of six it won't even last one year.

Emergency food supplies are also useful for things like earthquakes and other natural disasters where you might have to stay put for awhile but you won't be able to make it to the grocery store either. You might need a week of food instead of a year, but if you don't have one and your neighbor does you'd probably be grateful if he shares.

Alternatively, you could just eat it and reduce your food expenses to less than $84 a month.

who said people only buy one of these?

Or you might be doing it for religious reasons:

https://www.lds.org/topics/food-storage?lang=eng

(Devout Mormons are supposed to maintain a stockpile of food. I suspect Costco get much of their custom for this preparedness pack from members of the LDS ...)

Religious reasons are just insanity reasons proxies through family and friends.

Most successful religions have a small dose of insanity and identity carrying a payload of genuinely good moral and practical advice. Stockpiling food is a rational, practical thing to do. The "insanity" in LDS has more to do with things like transdimensional space gods or dodgy, ahistoric ideas about where the American Indians came from.

> People, large numbers of them, actually believed (and it may have been true) that extinction-level global war was an accidental launch away.

Considering the Cuba Missile Crisis, perhaps that wasn't an entirely unreasonable expectation...

Reminds me of a fascinating (and rather depressing) alternative history of the missile crisis I read a while ago. I couldn't stop reading: http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=...

A novel with a back-story of a similar scenario is Resurrection Day:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_Day

Wow, that guy could step into Tom Clancy's shoes. Why is he doing all that A-level creative writing for free?

Thanks for the links. But really, it would be terribly wrong to institutionalize people just because their choices seem irrational to us.

Extreme emegency preparededness is insane, but buying a yacht is not? I don't think there is anything wrong with someones hobby being building and stocking their secret fort in the back yard.

Actually people who compulsively buy things can have an identifiable mental illness.

Why would people who compulsively believe the world is about to end then spend all their money on emergency shelters, food and guns not?

Modern western civilisation is grounded on compulsive consumption. I can agree it's insane, but I don't think we're all mentally ill.

Makes one wonder where the line between mental illness and indoctrination goes...

I think that most people who buy a yacht then proceed to enjoy using it. Preparing for the end of the world is different because it is based on an arguably incorrect judgment call, and the investment will typically not pay off.

I remember when the monthly air-raid drills — first Wednesday of the month, 1:00PM — stopped, not because the Cold War had gotten any colder, but because the missile threat made the "I've got plenty of time to get to the shelter" bomber scenario almost laughable. I also remember the panic I felt, several years later, when the damned local siren went off (on the wrong day and at the wrong time of the day) because someone was digging where they shouldn't have been digging. I served in the Cold War military, and I'll admit to having an involuntary physiological reaction to hearing Slavic accents to this day. I mean, we knew that the apparent "sanity" of our leadership was really just a delicate spiderweb of constraints based on the desire to remain electable; we sort of hoped that there were similar little wire baskets holding the champagne-corks in place on the other side as well, even if they worked differently. And yes, we always suspected that somebody on the other side would go rogue, and had no reason to believe that the people on the other side didn't see us the same way. We feared an accidental launch, but we also feared that some idiot, somewhere, would decide that they could actually get away with a first strike. To me, this stuff is all "just the other day"; I really can't tell you how happy I am to hear that there's a whole generation or two of people who can't really understand a goddamned word I'm saying when I talk about the old days.

> We feared an accidental launch,

For a while I stood sentry at a post that, I always felt, was a candidate for attack. At least, we had a bomb shelter and drilled on relocating, and living in that thing.

At 03:00 on cold mornings I wondered if, looking up, I'd see the re-entry glow on a warhead.

I never lived more than ten miles away from a strategic target (in the UK -- which was going to be toast in that "limited tactical exchange") until the end of the cold war, in my mid-twenties.

Memories of that existential state make a really good wellspring for writers of horror fiction.

Fun fact -- the shelters in Montana shown on alpinesurvival.com are from a new-age survivalist cult (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Universal_and_Triumphant...). I know this because I grew up in it, and actually lived on the street shown in the photo. Everybody sunk their life savings into them and racked up the credit card debt in the late 80s. Yes, connected to the cold war, but for larger "karmic" reasons of course. You should thank them though, it was only through their prayers that nuclear war was averted! Needless to say, most people didn't believe that, and membership collapsed after the Berlin Wall fell. The shelter at CUT's headquarters reportedly was able to have hundreds of people live for decades, and was the largest private shelter in the US. A whole new level of crazy, folks.

Was it really that crazy considering all the "we were about to press the button but didn't" stories that have surfaced about that era since? It was a very real possibility.

>Was it really that crazy

'it' being what? Preparing for fallout is not crazy. Joining a cult is crazy.

Just because it "turned out well" doesn't mean that they were wrong. It also doesn't mean they weren't crazy.

One of my friends spent his teen years building those shelters. His mom was in the cult. Makes for a great story, in any case!

"People actually paid significant parts of their yearly salary to build, stock and maintain nuclear bomb shelters in their backyards...in places like Ohio."

See "Doomsday Preppers"[1][2]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Preppers

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=doomsday+preppe...

Ohio is right in the middle-ish of the country and would likely be affected by fallout (as would almost everywhere.) If you don't have a few inches of dirt or concrete between you and the fallout for a few days, your odds are not good.

I've no idea who made this map: http://img.4plebs.org/boards/tg/image/1376/37/1376372253480.... , but it looks like people who live in or near Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus or Cleveland would have signifcant concerns about direct nuclear strikes. Ohio is historically a major manufacturing center in the US. And Wright Patterson AFB is a major logistal and administration center of the Air Force.

Does anyone have any reasonable explanation for the concentration of strikes in North Dakota/Montana? I'm not American but I'm under the impression that both states are pretty much a whole lot of nothing, moreso back then. Only thing I can think of is ICBMs going up over the pole and launch sites are concentrated there?

Missiles. Lots and lots of missiles up there.

Reminds me of this excellent PKD story

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster,_You%27re_Dead!

> truly bizarre notions that happened during their youth: duck and cover, public bomb shelter drills, etc.

Duck and cover wasn't bizarre, in context: it's a way to survive a nuclear explosion that isn't in one's lap.

Public shelter drills, also: if one expects one's country to be bombed, then knowing where one's nearest shelter is makes sense.

Let's keep in mind that people have actually not ony conceived but carried out heious atrocities including genocide with far more ordinary devices.

Why?

His point is to illustrate the depths of depravity to which cold-war weapons designers were allowed to dive. What is yours?

If the Cold War had gone hot, it would have surpassed all prior genocides, wars, and other atrocities since written history began, combined.

It was bad enough just the way it was, with 80 - 100 million people being killed by the communists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...

Living in Middle Europe was not less surreal at all in this times. While the US people thought, that their Minuteman, other missiles and strategic bombers would give some protection, in Germany many people knew, that a third world war could not only start there, but also be the main place where it would be fought.

When in some era (I think, it was in Reagan's era, maybe a little later), the Generals where thinking, that a third world war could be limited to some territory (meaning: Middle Europe/Germany) and thus would not be the end of the world -- it was a void feeling for many people, that knew, what that could mean for Germany -- to be the designated place of nuclear destruction for the bigger nations.

In deed, it was a surreal time for the whole world it was. That is also one reason, that many in the 90s believed now humanity would rest in peace ....

Same for the UK - optimistic estimates for the impact of a nuclear attack on the UK had under 5% of the population surviving in the long term (NB Threads was very optimistic!).

Threads is probably the most chilling nuclear holocaust movie I've ever seen. Highly recommended (if you can find a good copy).

Actually, the BBC did one documentary that was in some ways even scarier than Threads: Q.E.D. - A Guide To Armageddon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GJttnC8PoA

It goes through the details of what would happen if a 1MT bomb exploded the center London - which is, of course, completely catastrophic. Then it calmly mentions that London would have probably been hit by at least 30 bombs...

...and there's Peter Watkins' The War Game (BBC again), still an incredibly powerful and disturbing piece of filmmaking.

Wiki: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game Clip here (first airburst over Kent): http://youtu.be/WcmZ1vhoqkY

> While the US people thought, that their Minuteman, other missiles and strategic bombers would give some protection,

Well .. _I_ never thought that.

MAD is great theory, but it's got some some really bad failure modes.

To be fair, the use of chickens in this project would have been perfectly reasonable. The chickens simply act as a heat source to protect the mechanism, they do not power it. An engineer today would likely make use of the thermoelectric effect to generate heat through electricity. Why use chickens instead? A few reasons might be: Materials were not as advanced then, so an electric mechanism would have been less reliable and more prone to failure; an electric mechanism would require its own power source, which could create its own problems; an electric solution could generate noise or otherwise be observable; a chicken is sufficient.

Why would chickens be sufficient? In winter the temperature a small distance underground is reliably stable, and warmer than temperature above ground. They likely would have been able to get a good idea of what the operating temperature would be and what they would need to offset it. Luckily, the heat output of a chicken is also reliably measured/estimated.

On the other hand, the whole notion of creating a nuclear mine is completely bad. No way to justify that.

If this had been the states, why not make it a homeless shelter?

> No way to justify that.

Sure there is. Like this ..

We need to be able to destroy a lot of Russian tanks, and logistic tail.

We'd like to be able to do this when they are beyond artillery range.

Rockets are unreliable. Airplanes can be shot down.

Thus, nuclear land mine.

That’s pretty amazing

This is my favourite picture of the Davy Crockett:

http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Da...

It's the bigger dick foreign policy at work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CghWWWXSUUU

That's a total riot!

Some parts are true. The rest are too close to being true.

God I miss Carlin.

Yep. My fix is that I play his stuff with some regularity. Check out Billy Connolly as well if you haven't discovered him yet.

I don't know. Our generation certainly had our fair share of military madness. What about the Gay Bomb? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_bomb

The Davy Crockett is one of the most scary devices ever made. You could smuggle that thing into just about anywhere with relatively little chance of detection. I assume they kept good track of where those ended up, that's as close to a suitcase nuke as there ever existed (as far as I know). That's a proliferation nightmare and the only good thing about it is probably that it's very hard to make a small nuke work reliably.

Not a suitcase, but a backpack bomb existed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Muni...

That's the same warhead.

The very existence of flamethrowers proves that sometime, somewhere, someone said to themselves, “You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.” - George Carlin

There's an excellent little book with those two and many others equivalently bizarre accounts on nuclear weapons and nuclear energy: http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nuclear-Folly/dp/16121...

I think the scariest part is the insistence on using the past tense. As if the US (and it's antagonists) can't still destroy the world several times over.

I toured Stalin's secret bunker this summer in Moscow where USSR'S top generals held up during the entire Cuban Missile Crisis. This bunker was the control center for the Soviet's nuclear arsenal at the time. According to the guide, the top leaders debated back and forth whether to preemptively strike the United States.

The entire thing was surreal - complete with a freighting nuclear attack simulation (America strikes first, of course) that included clips from Dr. Strangelove, genuine nuclear launch terminals and original bunker sirens going off. It was emotionally heavy realizing how close the end actually was.

If you're ever in Moscow, go take the Bunker42 tour: http://www.bunker42.com/index.php?lang=en

"the top leaders debated back and forth whether to preemptively strike the United States"

At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis the strategic balance between the US and the Soviets was very one sided - the US had the capability to completely destroy the Soviet Union whereas the Soviets only had a very small number of functioning strategic weapons systems.

However, the Soviets could have done an incredible amount of damage to Western Europe with medium range missiles.

"Fifty years ago, the Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster. During the standoff, US President John F. Kennedy thought the chance of escalation to war was "between 1 in 3 and even," and what we have learned in later decades has done nothing to lengthen those odds. We now know, for example, that in addition to nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, the Soviet Union had deployed 100 tactical nuclear weapons to Cuba, and the local Soviet commander there could have launched these weapons without additional codes or commands from Moscow. The US air strike and invasion that were scheduled for the third week of the confrontation would likely have triggered a nuclear response against American ships and troops, and perhaps even Miami. The resulting war might have led to the deaths of 100 million Americans and over 100 million Russians."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Post-cris...

That's the only estimate I've ever seen that says that the damage the Soviets could have inflicted on the US was anything like as severe as what the US has planned for the Soviets. Of course, the US could have faced a lot of damage, but nothing like the complete annihilation that would have been visited on the Soviets and other socialist countries.

The US consistently over-estimated the strategic threat the Soviets posed to the US for most of the Cold War - particularly the infamous "Bomber Gap" and the "Missile Gap":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_gap

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap

Not too long after Hiroshima some US decision makers actually proposed "pre-emptively" bombing the USSR with the nuclear bombs. Why? Well, the communists are dangerous, that's enough, better earlier than later(!) The idea was rejected with the apparent main argument that the US didn't have enough nuclear bombs to annihilate the whole USSR: too many soldiers would continue to fight!

US eventually produced enough nuclear bombs to wipe out the whole USSR, but by that time the USSR managed to produce just enough nuclear bombs to make some damage to the US.

(I don't have the links, if I remember I've read the above in the books or seen in some documentary. Somebody here maybe knows the exact names of the proponents.)

John von Neumann, one of a handful of people most responsible for the existence of your job, proposed a pre-emptive strike. He needed fast digital computers to calculate bomb parameters and effects, so he helped invent them.

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1179883.ece

quote:

This unsettling scenario might be pre-empted by a more apocalyptic one: nuclear Armageddon. George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral [1] reveals how the computing torch was passed after 1945 from Turing (himself an excellent marathon runner) to John von Neumann (who preferred driving fast cars; Dyson observes that he bought “a new one at least once a year, whether he had wrecked the previous one or not”). While Turing may have been a victim of the Cold War, von Neumann was its champion, influencing the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction from his commanding positions at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study and the Atomic Energy Commission. Born to a wealthy family in Hungary in 1903, he experienced at first hand the Communist government that briefly came to power after the First World War, and became an ardent foe of Communism. He acknowledged that atomic weaponry was a “monster” but perceived it as the lesser of two evils, advocating a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the USSR. Hoping to create a hydrogen bomb, he needed a stored-program electronic computer, and in 1945 began to construct one at the Institute.

[1] I highly recommend the reviewed book, Turing's Cathedral. Besides copious vintage tech porn, the social, political and personal background was surprising to me.

Von Neumann was a brilliant guy, and we owe him much about our profession... but I can't say I like him as a person. Or anyone who advocates preemptive nuclear bombing of a country "just in case", or because we don't like its government.

Come to think of it, I'd dislike anyone who advocates preemptive nuclear bombing of even the worst, most aggressive dictatorship in the world. There are people living in there, too.

I don't think survival at all costs, no matter what, is a worthy cause.

Exactly. A survival at all costs mentality can create exactly those costs. A self-fulfilling curse.

Still, Von Neumann was certainly not the only one advocating this, the most recent discovery is: Winston Churchill, 1947:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2826980/Winston-Chur...

"A previously unseen memorandum from the FBI’s archives revealed that Winston Churchill urged the US to conduct a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union to win the Cold War"

"The memo is published for the first time in a book called When Lions Roar: The Churchills And The Kennedys, by award-winning investigative journalist Thomas Maier. It is due to be published in Britain next month."

That insanity obviously wasn't in only one person's mind.

>He acknowledged that atomic weaponry was a “monster” but perceived it as the lesser of two evils,

Backing Hitler, preemptive nuclear strike, what is it with communism that drive people to such extremes against it?

Have you read about Churchill's extreme ideas? Here he wanted to kill around 200 million people at once:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2826980/Winston-Chur...

Churchill was certainly no communist.

That looks really interesting

I worked with a guy who was part of the crew of an Atlas missile control center. I remember talking over drinks at his retirement party, and he recalled now pissed he was at the time that he didn't get to vaporize some Russians.

I found that more disturbing than Dr. Strangelove.

This is also true for Enemy of the State. Watch it again. Your jaw will hit the floor: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120660/

> This is also true for Enemy of the State.

Uh, no? None of what happened in the movie is based on a real story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)#Real...

Who said anything about "based on a real story"? Did you read TFA?

Dr. Strangelove's plot is not based on a real story either.

It's about getting the details right, not about being based on any particular real life story or persons.

You are right. I just watched it the other night and I was blown away by the accuracy at which the movie portrayed surveillance and even wondered if that movie was giving out more information than what the government wants out nowadays compared to back then. We were more skeptical that these things existed back then, but now that we know they do it makes that movie dead on.

I remember watching this film, just a few years after it came out and thinking, "All of this is technically possible ... but they probably wouldn't go that far, or have the infrastructure in place". Now I know better.

I was indeed recently pondering I should watch it again, just to see what my reaction would be.

Heh, I watched it when it came out and thought it was mostly the typical hollywood computer sci-fi they put into computer films to make it more exciting for the average viewer. Sadly I was wrong.

It is strange how in the US we really do get many of our issues out in film, both propaganda and progression. Movies are great and let people experience an issue through a story.

Movies are America's original pressure release valve to deal with issues and dream, could be one of our secrets to success over time. The internet is also one of those releases, the whole world needed it. Books weren't used or pop enough to really be the cultural tracking. Movies really do tell our history.

Enemy of the State also had lots of starting actors, yes Jack Black was a NSA agent linking your transactions, Jamie Kennedy, Seth Green also agents.

Enemy of the State is a still a Michael Bay film though. A bit restrained, but still a bit too explosion-ey.

Nope. Tony Scott. But, I get what you mean. Still, it's got this thin film of political intrigue / thriller across the top that really holds the plot together. Bay would have skimmed that right off.

Also, I'm not a fan of Tony Scott at all, but boy can cast the hell out of a movie. He's got great actors in every tiny role.

Sorry, they all looks the same to me. Those directors, I mean.

Bay did The Island, and it suffers from the same thing, it could have been awesome with other director.

It's based on The Conversation (or vaguely related to it?). I remember being mildly entertained when Gene Hackman turned up partway through the movie.

Hmm, that film was on my watchlist, I'll take a look.

I'll have to rewatch. My family and I were also discussing this same idea in relation to Minority Report. Are these instances of life imitating art?

Minority Report is (good) SF, remote precognition seems far-fetched at best (hence the 'F' in SF). Enemy of the State is more of a 'could happen' scenario, it contains no technology that wasn't present when the movie was made afaik.

We're not to Minority Report yet, but we're laying the groundwork: collecting massive data-sets that will someday be used for Bayesian predictive algorithms to determine pre-crime.

While the current population would vehemently reject such a scheme, it's quite feasible that public perception will shift after a particularly shocking crime/terrorism incident which "could have been prevented".

I also recommend watching Coppola's 1974 film The Conversation, which was a heavy influence for Enemy of the State: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071360/

The technology presented is obsolete, but the film is far more haunting because it's a deeply psychological experience.

I read Rosenbaum's "How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III"[1] and it contains a number of pretty sobering details of just how crazy the cold war was, and how not much has truly improved since. The Soviet's perimeter system gets a mention, along with a story of how supposedly it set of a chain of events that very nearly did cause the launch of Soviet nukes, had it not been for a Soviet commander questioning whether the data received by the system was in fact accurate.

As well, no mention of Dr. Strangelove, the cold war, or just nukes in general should go without also mentioning Major Harold Hering[2] who was discharged from the for asking:

> How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?

Indeed.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/How-End-Begins-Nuclear-World/dp/141659... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Hering

For those who are still interested after reading the article the information is taken from the author's book [1], which I just finished and thoroughly enjoyed/was terrified by.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Illu...

Both my wife and I somehow managed to avoid seeing Dr. Strangelove before this summer. While watching it, I was repeatedly struck by the same realization as in the article: for all the reputation as a wild farce, there was a rather disturbingly small gap between the film and history which has subsequently been publicly released – and Dr. Strangelove came out decades before we reached the point of having an astrologist in the loop for international decisions.

The far more serious story of Stanislav Petrov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov) has received a fair of coverage but is still somewhat under-appreciated; it's now my default cautionary response anytime you read a novel or watch a movie and say “oh, that'd never happen in real life”.

Another film manages to do this and was nearly written off by the screenwriter for being too "Strangelovian" at times. Network.

Highly prescient film. Both Network and Strangelove are mandatory watches, IMHO.

This can't be upvoted enough, Network is just outstanding.

Thirded.

However, Network is more of an economic conspiracy movie and less of a military conspiracy one, and it's got nothing to do with nuclear weapons or war.

> we reached the point of having an astrologist in the loop for international decisions.

I'm a little bit curious, did you mean to say astronomer or does the US government have an astrologist advisor?

Reagan got advice from an astrologer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Quigley

Meet Joan Quigley. White House astrologer to the Reagan White House. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Quigley

This makes me realize that there is probably a lot more that I missed in "Stranger in a Strange Land", just by virtue of my age and not having been born in the USA.

"Stranger" was published in 1961, 20 years before Reagan, but still has many good insights on social and political patterns in the US. For a more dated, but more detailed and insightful view by a stranger, try: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_America

Also see Philip K Dick's books from the 50's and 60's, which include actors as American Presidents.

Huh, I didn't realize that. That's oddly prescient, then.

There's a novel like this...

Oh yes, Stranger in a Strange Land. I am pleased to find that this Joan Quigley character "was called on by First Lady Nancy Reagan in 1981", twenty years after Heinlein's book was published.

> [Alice Douglas][1] — (sometimes called "Agnes"), wife of Joe Douglas. As the First Lady, she controls her husband, making major economic, political, and staffing decisions. She frequently consults an astrologer, Becky Vesant

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land#Cha...

edit: Oh, I see other people have posted about this already. Well that's the character's name, anyway.

If you read the article, this wasn't a white house staffer, this was somebody that Nancy Reagan, Ronald Reagan's wife, would talk to sometimes.

Sorry, that was a bit terse – adrianhoward already provided the link to Joan Quigley's bio. I'm not particularly upset by it – Reagan certainly received far worse advice from Very Serious People – but but the idea that “every major move and decision the Reagans made … was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment” seems like the kind of thing people would reject in a movie as too implausible.

“This is absolute madness, Ambassador,” President Merkin Muffley says in the film, after being told about the Soviets’ automated retaliatory system. “Why should you build such a thing?”

In the case of the Russian "Dead Hand", one of the stated purposes was to reduce the potential for nuclear war, by allowing the command-and-control structure to delay the decision about retaliation until it is clear that a possible attack is, in fact, a real attack.

If you think "I have 30 seconds to decide whether to launch a retaliatory strike", you're far more likely to make a bad decision than if you think "I don't need to do anything, because if the blips on our radar are ICBMs then a retaliatory strike will happen after I'm dead".

It's missing the point somewhat. Dead Hand is Russia's nuclear deterrent against Russia. It would make no sense to broadcast it's existence to US.

Why would Russia need deterrent against Russia? Some people in charge were wary of America and wanted a preemptive nuclear attack, to thwart chance of total nuclear annihilation. Dead Hand in theory allows Russia to deliver a Strike from beyond, thereby removing need for premature nuclear annihilation.

The other thing to consider that the same capability probably exists in the US for the same purpose.

Otherwise, those flocks of geese on the DEW line and similar screw-ups would have brought on nuclear annihilation.

The character Dr. Strangelove is itself worth an entire movie, he was supposed to be the combination of the following:

- Edward Teller (Father of Hydrogen Bomb "the super")

- John von Neumann (legendary mathematician and computer scientist)

- Werner von Braun (designer of V2, and later on Saturn V5 for NASA)

the 1900's to 1960's was an amazing time to be in a STEM field, hell being a Physicist was so freaking cool. Now everything's about Finance and Wall Street...

My Dad worked with Edward Teller, and Teller was often at our house while I was growing up. The Peter Sellers character was totally different than Teller in real life. Teller was a refined gentleman. Peter Seller's character was funny, and not at all like Teller.

BTW, I think that we are fortunate to have all survived the cold war!

The book "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" doesn't present Teller in a particularly favorable light - he is presented as being very political, scheming and rather two faced (i.e. being perfectly civilized directly to Oppenheimer while working closely with those people who undermine Oppenheimer).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Prometheus

"Teller was one of the strongest and best-known advocates for investigating non-military uses of nuclear explosives, which the United States explored under Operation Plowshare.

One of the most controversial projects he proposed was a plan to use a multi-megaton hydrogen bomb to dig a deep-water harbor more than a mile long and half a mile wide to use for shipment of resources from coal and oil fields through Point Hope, Alaska...

A related experiment which also had Teller's endorsement was a plan to extract oil from the tar sands in northern Alberta with nuclear explosions, titled Project Oilsands."[1]

Truth is stranger than fiction.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Teller

And also Herman Kahn, RAND Corporation nuclear strategist.

I agree Dr. Strangelove is a great character, but I don't know if my takeaway from this is that the 60s were "an amazing time to be in a STEM field". My takeaway would be "STEM in the 60s had some brilliant but also cruel, paranoid and just plain deranged individuals that nearly destroyed the world"...

Arthur C. Clarke, who knew both Stanley Kubrick and Wernher von Braun, reported in his autobiography, Astounding Days, that Kubrick once asked him to "tell Wernher I wasn't getting at him." Clarke added that "I never did, because firstly, I didn't believe him, and secondly, even if Stanley wasn't, Peter Sellers certainly was."

What about General Power who, while head of SAC, said:

Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_S._Power

If this article piqued your interest definitely have a look at "The Dead Hand" (http://www.amazon.com/The-Dead-Hand-Untold-Dangerous/dp/0307...).

"The Dead Hand" combined with "Command and Control" (http://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Illu...) makes for very sobering reading. Put the two together, and it's a genuine miracle that nothing bad happened. Of course, we're not out of the woods...

Both are excellent books, BTW, so I agree with the parent poster's recommendation.

Also "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War" - which is pretty alarming even when we know how it all worked out:

http://www.amazon.com/One-Minute-Midnight-Kennedy-Khrushchev...

The author completely missed a major point of the movie (along with the people in this thread), that it was the United States military who was pursuing research on a 'doomsday device' (computerized nuclear armageddon). The S.A.G.E radar defense system, adjusting for inflation, is the most expensive computer system ever assembled. The Q-32 was the crown jewel of the whole operation and it would also later become the first node in the network that today is referred to as the internet. SDC is responsible for the firsts computer implementations of relational database (KWIC), semantic networks, the first WAN & time-sharing device(Sage & Q-32) and the first complete speech recognition system (Synthex). They also trained 22,000 of the first 25,000 programmers in the United States. The term hacker was actually coined by business and military personnel to describe the decline in professional programming standards that occurred with creation of computer science department in the 60's and the unskilled students they produced who didn't properly document their code. Little computer history for all you.

... Really?

Can anyone else corroborate any of this? Or cite sources. Certainly interesting stuff if true.

Worth noting that even with system like SAGE in place "The bomber will always get through" was probably fairly accurate - in a secret exercise in the early 1960s a small number of UK strategic bombers managed to "bomb" New York, Washington and Chicago even though the entire air defence system was looking for them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Skyshield

Anyone who enjoyed Dr. Strangelove would probably enjoy a much lesser known film along the same lines: Seven Days in May.[1]

It doesn't have Peter Seller's brilliant acting, and it wasn't directed by Kubrick, and it's not a comedy.. but many of the themes are quite similar and both were released within days of each other, in Jan and Feb of 1964, a little over a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis.[2]

According to Wikipedia, "President John F. Kennedy had read the novel and believed the scenario as described could actually occur in the United States."[3]

[1] - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058576/

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_missile_crisis

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_in_May

As a German born in 1985 I find the US far scarier in retrospect than the Soviet Union. For the Soviets, as for Europeans, it was very obvious that a nuclear war would in any case result in massive numbers of deaths locally. Even if they magically weren't hit, attacking Europe would have lethal consequences.

A lot of the historical "near misses" involved carelessness by the US or the US-led NATO. Plus the general attitude towards atomic technologies was far more unquestioningly positive in the US than in Europe.

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

John Oliver: Nuclear Weapons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-yF35g

Kind of a link-bait headline from the New Yorker. "There were glaring weaknesses in America's nuclear security during the cold war, some of which were used as the basis for the movie." True. "

Almost everything ... uh ... first thing that came to mind is whether a nuke was dropped with a soldier riding it like a horse. No? So what else...

This topic was covered earlier and in a more comprehensive manner by Wired IIRC.

I agree with you (though obviously a bunch of users don't). But comments on link-bait and misleading headlines are more helpful when they suggest a better headline, or how to fix it. e.g. Replace "true" with "based on fact"? We can try that.

Actually, there was at least one incident that is pretty similar (although not identical) to that scene:

"The task was doomed from the start; later testimony indicated Kulka had no idea where to find the locking pin in the large and complicated bomb-release mechanism. After a tense 12 minutes searching for the pin, the bombardier decided, correctly, that it must be high up in the bomb bay and invisible because of the curvature of the bomb. A short man, he jumped to pull himself up to get a look at where he thought the locking pin should be. Unfortunately, he evidently chose the emergency bomb-release mechanism for his handhold. The weapon dropped from its shackle and rested momentarily on the closed bomb-bay doors with Captain Kulka splayed across it in the manner of Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove. Kulka grabbed at a bag that had providentially been stored in the bomb bay, while the more-than-three-ton bomb broke open the bomb-bay doors and fell earthward. The bag Kulka was holding came loose, and he found himself sliding after the bomb without his parachute. He managed to grab something-he wasn't sure what-and haul himself to safety. Moments later the plane was rocked by the shock wave of the blast when the bomb hit the ground."

http://io9.com/5904633/in-1958-america-accidentally-dropped-...

NB Of course, only the chemical explosives in the bomb exploded.

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