Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 70

26 July 1928—7 March 1999

Satirizing Nuclear Madness

Herman Kahn’s 1960 On Thermonuclear War wasn’t exactly a best seller, but it did ratchet up the Cold War a degree or two. Kahn, a RAND military strategist, argued that a thermonuclear war was winnable. True, the killing power of such a conflict would be so great that its destructiveness, Kahn argued, would have to be measured in terms of “megadeath.” But eventually one side would emerge victorious from the rubble.

Four years after Kahn’s book, and two years after the world nearly tested Kahn’s theory in the Cuban Missile Crisis, reclusive film director Stanley Kubrick made a movie that showed just how dangerous and ridiculous the idea of a winnable nuclear war was. The film carried the bizarre title of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Of Kubrick’s thirteen films, three (counting Strangelove) were stridently anti-war—the other two were Paths of Glory in 1957 and Full Metal Jacket in 1987—but Strangelove was the best. Although the Cold War gave rise to an entire genre of apocalyptic films about nuclear war, Kubrick’s stands out as the only one that uses satire and dark humor to protest nuclear proliferation. Kubrick himself described it as a “nightmare comedy.” In terms of writing, directing, cinematography, and acting, it’s a genuine tour de force.

The plot turns on a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union engineered by General Jack D. Ripper, an insane Cold Warrior. (Kubrick’s insinuation is that all Cold Warriors are insane.) He sends nuclear bomb–laden B52s to Russia, deceptively telling the pilots that the Soviet Union and the United States are at war, and refuses to surrender the radio codes needed to order the pilots to abort the mission. His justification for launching the strike comes straight from Kahn: although the nuclear war that’s bound to ensue will kill thousands of millions of Russians and Americans, it’s winnable if the U.S. hits first.

The film shifts back and forth between Ripper’s headquarters at the fictional Burpelson Air Base and an operations room, presumably at the Pentagon, where the U.S. president, an ex-Nazi named Dr. Strangelove (both played by Peter Sellers), and a cabal of generals and advisors gather to figure out how to deal with the rogue General Ripper’s nuclear launch. Along the way, the Soviet ambassador to the United States reveals that his country’s scientists have invented a Doomsday machine, fifty fail-safe nuclear bombs buried around the world that will automatically detonate if the Soviet Union is attacked. But there’s no calling the American pilots back. They drop their payloads on Russia, and the film ends with nuclear mushrooms from the Doomsday machine blossoming all over the world. Kubrick’s message was clear: there may be survivors in a nuclear standoff, but they won’t be human. The idea of a winnable nuclear war is as absurd as it is terrifying.