by P. D. Smith
In an allusion to President Kennedy’s campaign slogan about a supposed missile gap, the Ambassador cites fears of a ‘doomsday gap’ as the reason for building a doomsday device. Reports in the New York Times convinced the Soviets that the Americans already had one. Thanks to the articles by its journalist William Laurence, the New York Times had indeed led media speculation on the development of Szilard’s idea.
In Peter George’s novel, the Soviet Union has secretly constructed a doomsday machine beneath the Urals – at least twenty massive hydrogen bombs jacketed with cobalt. The American President in Red Alert collaborates with the Russians in tracking down the rogue bombers until just one remains. In Kubrick’s film, the bald-headed President Merkin Muffley (described by one reviewer as ‘a meek, worried leader of men’26) is strongly reminiscent of Adlai Stevenson. In the novel he even agrees that if a Russian city is destroyed, Soviet bombers will be allowed to destroy Atlantic City, New Jersey. This tit-for-tat exchange of cities is remarkably similar to a plan Szilard first proposed in 1957 to the first Pugwash Conference (a forum for discussing how to reduce armed conflict) as a way of preventing an uncontrolled nuclear war. He later published it as a story called ‘The Mined Cities’.27
George’s tense and convincing thriller takes the reader to the edge of the abyss, as the final B-52 manages to evade the Soviet air defences. The fate of the world depends on shooting this plane out of the sky before its bombs cause the Russians to set off their doomsday machine. In the end, apocalypse is postponed when the badly damaged B-52 crashes in open countryside. One of its H-bombs partially detonates – but for now at least, Atlantic City and the world are safe.
In Kubrick’s more pessimistic film, the world doesn’t get off so lightly. Major T. J. ‘King’ Kong, the Texan commander of the B-52 played by Slim Pickens, heroically rides his bronco of an H-bomb down onto its Soviet target. This is a superbly comic moment, and also one of the darkest in the film. At this instant the cold-war shibboleths of patriotism and progress appear at their most vulnerable. In the great American novel of the 1950s, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield calls himself a ‘pacifist’. If he is forced to join the army, Holden says, he intends ‘to sit right the hell on top of’ the atomic bomb. Major Kong, the all-American hero, does just this. But instead of saving the American way of life (as he hopes) by riding the bomb to its target, his action destroys the world.28 The discoverer of deuterium, Harold Urey, told Time magazine in 1950 that although he was unhappy that the H-bomb was to be built, ‘I value my liberties more than I do my life.’29 The crazy logic of the cold war provided Kubrick with the inspiration for his film’s dark, doomsday humour.
Dr Strangelove ends with an awesome display of mushroom clouds erupting across the face of the earth, as the cobalt bombs of the Soviet doomsday machine explode. News footage of H-bomb tests is accompanied by British forces’ favourite Vera Lynn singing ‘We’ll Meet Again’. The brutal reality – fully understood by the film’s audience in 1964 – was that there would be no reunions after World War III. The age of saviour scientists and winning weapons was dead. Nuclear war could have only one outcome: mutual annihilation. It was the same point Leo Szilard had made back in the doomsday decade, when he first conjured up the spectre of the cobalt bomb.
Stanley Kubrick visited the Institute for Strategic Studies at a time when the war of words between the superpowers had escalated to a new and dangerous level. In the previous month, the Soviet Union had shocked the world by resuming its programme of atomic tests, which both countries had suspended in 1958 because of concerns about the dangers of fallout, particularly strontium-90. For most observers, the Soviet resumption of testing meant one thing – that nuclear war had come a big step closer. Newsweek voiced the despair felt by many as the Soviets detonated their latest nuclear device:
Suddenly a light brighter than the sun obliterated every shadow, the ground shook, a hot breath blew across the landscape, and the familiar nuclear fireball burst over the Kirghiz Steppe of central Siberia. After two years and 301 days of respite, after 338 tedious meetings in Geneva to keep it bottled up forever, the atomic genie had once more been let loose by the Soviet Union. In one searing moment, the thin hope that the nuclear arms race could somehow be stopped vanished.30
Moscow blamed ‘the threatening attitude of the United States and its allies in the Berlin dispute’.31 That year the notorious Berlin Wall had been built, dividing the city like ‘a monstrous guillotine’.32 Privately the Russians were afraid that the Americans were outstripping them in the arms race. There was indeed a missile gap, but it was the Soviet Union, not the United States, that was lagging behind. Thanks to John von Neumann’s advice to the government to develop ICBMs, American magazines now regularly carried full-page advertisements from companies boasting of their role in building missiles such as the Titan or the Minuteman. Beneath a full-page picture of a Minuteman missile blasting into the sky, one company proudly claimed: ‘Through Thiokol engineered reliability, the nation’s power to deter war is moving up while anticipated costs come down.’33
In the first week of September 1961, Khrushchev’s rugged features confronted readers from the racks of every news-stand. Time showed him in tyrant mode, angrily jabbing his finger out of its cover, while behind him billowed a fearsome atomic fireball. On the same news-stands that week, Life contained a three-page profile of Leo Szilard under the headline I’M LOOKING FOR A MARKET FOR WISDOM. He had just published a collection of short stories satirizing the inability of politicians to meet the challenge of the atomic age. Szilard was now a familiar figure to the American public. In the article he was pictured lobbying opinion-formers in Washington with his plans for arms control. Unfortunately, there was scant interest in Szilard’s brand of moderate wisdom in the corridors of power on either side of the Iron Curtain. The voices of hawks such as Edward Teller and Wernher von Braun, ever keen to promote their latest projects, carried far more weight.
World opinion had been shocked not just by the resumption of atomic tests, but by Khrushchev’s claim that warheads ranging from 20 megatons to an enormous 100 megatons would be detonated. Headlines proclaimed the creation of a ‘superbomb’. The largest American test had been 15 megatons, back in 1954. The biggest bomb carried by B-52s was 24 megatons. Generally, missiles had smaller warheads than this, and by the late 1950s American scientists had decided that missiles were the weapons of the future.
President Kennedy immediately condemned Khrushchev’s ‘atomic blackmail’, and journalists were briefed that there was no military value in a 100-megaton bomb. Time magazine put it bluntly: ‘there is no major city in the world that cannot be wiped out with one well-directed 20-megaton bomb’. But Time also printed a picture of Major Yuri Gagarin’s six-ton space capsule, in which he had become the first to orbit the earth in April of that year. The caption asked, ‘would 100 megatons fit inside?’ The answer was yes. Moscow announced that the bomb could be delivered onto its enemies by the same mighty rockets that had carried its cosmonauts into space. Once again it seemed that a giant leap forward for science also meant a step backwards for mankind.34
On 30 October at 08.30 GMT, scientists in Europe detected what was described as ‘the biggest man-made explosion on record’. At Kew Observatory in the south-western suburbs of London, where the Victorians had created a botanical garden to rival Eden, officials said: ‘This was the big one all right.’ The air pressure wave hit Kew at 11.51 a.m. Instruments continued to register the force of the huge explosion for a quarter of an hour. ‘It is the largest such recording I have ever known,’ the observatory’s spokesman told The Times.35
On the same day, Khrushchev wrote a chilling letter to the British Labour Party warning that in any future war the United Kingdom ‘may be among the first to experience the destructive power of nuclear blows’.36 The presence of American nuclear-armed bombers and Britain’s own H-bombs (supplied to the RAF this year) made this green and pleasant land a certain target for S
oviet weapons, including the new 100-megaton bomb.
Newsweek described the superbomb as ‘Khrushchev’s monster’.37 On an aerial photo of Manhattan Island, the magazine mapped the extent of its awesome destructive power. The bomb had a yield of at least 50 megatons. It would leave a crater at least a mile wide and would raze to the ground buildings up to ten miles from ground zero. New York with its proud skyscrapers would – as Szilard had feared back in 1931 – be reduced to a radioactive wasteland. Later, Hans Bethe announced that the Russians had modified the bomb for the test; if it was ever used in war it would have exploded with a force of 100 megatons.
The Soviets nicknamed their superweapon the Tsar Bomba, ‘King of Bombs’. Andrei Sakharov, who designed it under direct orders from Khrushchev, called it simply the Big Bomb. There could be no more dramatic conclusion to the series of twenty-six nuclear tests conducted by the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1961. Kubrick now had no doubts that his next film would be about nuclear war. It was the subject on everyone’s lips. Newspapers were full of stories about the threat of nuclear Armageddon: ‘Almost everybody in this country, it seems, is thinking or talking about what to do in case war starts and nuclear bombs fall on the US,’ reported one.38 A Manhattan boutique sold out of ‘bright, warm, comfortable things’ for women to wear in the public fallout shelters that were now marked in American cities by yellow signs. Strongly recommended were ‘gay slacks and a dress with a cape that could double as an extra blanket.’39
In America, government agencies reported that public enquiries about fallout shelters increased from 3,000 in May to 100,000 by that October. The Nobel prizewinning chemist and former AEC commissioner Willard F. Libby told a reporter, ‘You’d better tell your readers to build bomb shelters now.’40 During the Cuban missile crisis, Szilard was greatly amused when he read that Libby’s own shelter had been left unusable by a mere brush fire.
In 1994 Edward Teller visited Chelyabinsk, home of one of Russia’s two nuclear weapons laboratories. He is pictured here next to a model of the Tsar Bomba, the biggest ever hydrogen bomb, developed by his Soviet counterpart Andrei Sakharov.
Groucho Marx was one who took Libby’s advice seriously and invested in a personal shelter. But few could afford the cost, of at least $1,000. According to the usually bullish US News and World Report, despite what scientists such as Libby and Teller were saying about the survivability of nuclear war, most people were pessimistic about their chances. Few thought that shelters were worth the money. Most were of the opinion that it was better to die quickly above ground, than slowly in a shelter.41
A British film, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, which was made during the Soviet superbomb tests, captured the mood of public anxiety. In the film, two simultaneous American and Soviet nuclear tests (‘anything you can split, I can split better’, quips one character42) shift the earth on its axis by 11°, pitching it into an orbit which takes it ever closer to the sun. In an earlier and more optimistic age, Pax, the saviour scientist in The Man Who Rocked the Earth by Arthur Train and Robert Williams Wood, had threatened to do this unless war was abolished. In 1956, Adlai Stevenson had challenged Eisenhower to ‘state whether he proposed to develop the cobalt bomb or some more terrible weapon that might thrust the earth off its axis’.43 It was the words of Stevenson, now Ambassador to the United Nations, that had inspired writer-director Val Guest.
Filmed partly in the Fleet Street offices of the London Daily Express (the paper’s former editor, Arthur Christiansen, plays himself), Val Guest’s film captures the edginess of the age with its cliffhanger ending. When the film finishes, two different front pages are made up ready for the presses, headlined WORLD SAVED and WORLD DOOMED. But as anarchy – the dreaded social breakdown – and the sun’s atomic furnace threaten the future of humanity, the film leaves its audience uncertain whether the attempt to correct the earth’s orbit using further atomic explosions has been successful. As A. H. Weiler wrote in the New York Times, ‘atomic Pooh-Bahs’ could question the science in the film, ‘but its pleas make sense in a world awesomely aware of possible destruction’.44
Stanley Kubrick read Peter George’s thriller in October 1961, as Soviet scientists prepared to test their superbomb. He was impressed, and wrote to the author of Red Alert as soon as he returned to New York the following month. Having read the American paperback edition, Kubrick had expected George to be an American. He had hoped to meet George on home ground, but now their meeting would have to wait. Addressing him as ‘Mr Bryant’, even though he knew full well it was a pen name, Kubrick said that he had enjoyed his novel ‘immensely’. He told the ex-RAF officer, ‘I found your book to be the only nuclear fiction I’d come across that smacked of knowledge.’45
Kubrick and George had one thing in common – an obsession with nuclear war. Kubrick reeled off a list of books he’d been reading, including heavyweight studies by war strategists Bernard Brodie, Henry Kissinger and Herman Kahn. He also took out subscriptions to specialist journals such as War/Peace Report and Missiles and Rockets. Interviewed in Glamour magazine, the film’s designer Ken Adam said: ‘Stanley’s so steeped in his material that when we first met to discuss it, his conversation was full of fail-safe points, megadeaths, gyro-headings, strobe markings, and CRM-114s. I didn’t know what he was talking about.’46 Kubrick had been bowled over by Adam’s design of Dr No’s control room and nuclear reactor in the Bond film and was keen to work with him.
Kubrick couldn’t have chosen a better cinematographic designer. From the interior of the B-52 to the War Room, the information needed to create the sets for Dr Strangelove was classified top secret. Ken’s final designs were based on gleanings from military journals pieced together using informed guesswork. The accuracy of his designs made some military specialists extremely uncomfortable. The dramatic set for the War Room in the White House, with its huge round table – all 380 square feet of it – became an unforgettable symbol of cold-war power politics. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 and was given a tour of the White House, the first thing he asked to see was the War Room. Unfortunately, it only existed in the imaginations of Ken Adam and Stanley Kubrick.
In November 1961, the month that Kubrick and George first made contact and started discussing the script of Dr Strangelove, Leo Szilard began an American lecture tour entitled ‘Are we on the road to war?’. He left his listeners in no doubt about the answer to that question: ‘Our chances of getting through the next ten years without war are slim,’ he told them.47 The future looked so bleak that Szilard’s friend, James R. Newman – described by Newsweek as the ‘brilliant 54-year-old mathematician, lawyer, and editor of the World of Mathematics’ – suggested that all American children should be shipped off to the southern hemisphere to protect them from the coming war. His ‘bitter, ironic expression of protest and horror’ to the Washington Post created quite a stir in the capital.48
In the same month, an article on nuclear weapons appeared in one of the specialist journals Stanley Kubrick now subscribed to, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The author, W. H. Clark, raised timely fears about nuclear proliferation in countries just joining the nuclear club, such as China. Large, ‘dirty’ nuclear bombs were much cheaper, easier to build and would kill more people, said Clark, than guided missiles with low-yield warheads. Monster bombs which maximized fallout – the kind Edward Teller had been designing in 1950 – might be used to blackmail the superpowers. It was a farsighted warning. Four years later, North Korea set up a nuclear research reactor to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons.
Doomsday devices, especially Leo Szilard’s ‘famous cobalt bomb’, were top of Clark’s list of future threats. Such devices were now easily within the reach of ‘amateurs’. According to Clark, ‘any nuclear power can easily destroy the US’ using fallout from a cobalt bomb – although, he added, ‘the extermination of the human race is a much more difficult task’. For anyone planning doomsday, at least fifty huge bombs (or ‘mines’) would be needed – the same n
umber as the Russian ambassador DeSadeski quotes in Dr Strangelove.49
The Bulletin’s respected editor, Eugene Rabinowitch, added a timely and chilling note to the article. The ‘first steps toward the Doomsday machine’, he wrote, ‘are the 50 and 100 megaton bombs that premier Khrushchev has described’.50 To many it seemed that the Soviet Union’s latest thermonuclear test showed that they were on their way to building just such a machine.
Also included in the article was an entry from the RAND Corporation’s Glossary of Terms on National Security, which defined a doomsday machine as ‘a reliable and securely protected device that is capable of destroying almost all human life and that would be automatically triggered if an enemy committed any one of a designated class of violations’.51 For Stanley Kubrick, back in New York with Red Alert fresh in his mind, it was clear that the time was ripe for a film about the doomsday machine. It was just a matter of time before fiction became reality, and someone constructed the ultimate weapon.
According to the Russians, the RAND Corporation was ‘an American Academy of Death and Destruction’.52 RAND was the world’s first think tank, or as it was known then, a ‘think factory’. Its name came from Research and Development. For writer and physicist Jeremy Bernstein (a friend of Kubrick’s), it was ‘like a malignant university’.53 Set up after the war by the US Air Force and initially placed under the control of General Curtis LeMay, RAND prided itself on applying science to the art of warfare.
The scientists and engineers at RAND had played a leading role in the development of the US missile force. Its analysts had also come up with the idea of the failsafe procedure in which bombers are kept airborne but proceed to their target only when ordered to do so. (In Dr Strangelove, the CRM-114 device is part of this secret procedure. Ken Adam designed it from articles he had read in the military journal Jane’s.) RAND also devised the nationwide system of detectors that flash warnings of nuclear explosions on American soil to the Pentagon’s War Room. By 1963, full-page civil defence advertisements in British newspapers boasted that no citizen was ever more than five to ten miles from a bunker that was constantly monitoring for nuclear explosions.
