Doomsday Men

by P. D. Smith

  It was a strategic analyst at RAND, Bernard Brodie, who defined the cold-war theory of deterrence. According to the Prussian war theorist Carl von Clausewitz, war was nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means. But after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Brodie could see that the costs of nuclear war for both sides would cancel out any political gains. Faced with the appalling aftermath of a war fought with nuclear weapons, it was obvious that there could be no winners. Writers such as H. G. Wells had fully realized, even before World War I, that this would be the effect of creating the atomic bomb, and now so did the organization that advised the US armed forces. ‘Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars,’ wrote Brodie in 1946. ‘From now on its chief purpose must be to prevent them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.’54 The idea of deterrence through strength governed nuclear thinking up to the mid-1950s, when it began to be challenged by civilian theorists such as Henry Kissinger and Herman Kahn.

  The physicist Herman Kahn had a Falstaffian girth and a vitality to match. He had worked with Hans Bethe, John von Neumann and Edward Teller on the H-bomb project in the early 1950s. Like Kubrick, he grew up in the Bronx (although he moved to Los Angeles at the age of 10 with his mother and sister). After studying nuclear physics at UCLA and CalTech, he worked for the RAND Corporation at Santa Monica, in southern California, from 1948.

  Although Kahn started out by using the new computers to solve the complex mathematics of nuclear reactions in H-bombs, he soon established himself as the most influential figure in military strategy and nuclear planning since World War II. His self-declared mission in life was to make people think the unthinkable. ‘In our times,’ he wrote, ‘thermonuclear war may seem unthinkable, immoral, insane, hideous, or highly unlikely, but it is not impossible. To act intelligently, we must learn as much as we can.’55 Kahn argued that, instead of hoping that nuclear war would never happen, the government and military should regard nuclear war not just as survivable, but as winnable. To this end he campaigned for an extensive programme of shelter building. He also encouraged military chiefs to think of war in terms of ‘rungs of escalation’, or stages of conflict, rather than just all-out war. In a lecture delivered to senior Strategic Air Command officers, Kahn derided their outdated strategies for total war, telling them, ‘Gentlemen, you don’t have a war plan, you have a war orgasm.’56

  By the early 1960s, Herman Kahn was fast becoming the favourite ‘prophet of the hard-hats’.57 Later he also became an influential futurologist, with the vision – if not the politics – of H. G. Wells. According to Thomas Bell, who was President of the Hudson Institute (which Kahn co-founded in 1961), he had given briefings to every president from Harry S Truman onwards.58 Speaking in May 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had glowing words for his friend, who died in July 1981: ‘I did value my relationship with Herman, a remarkable man with brilliant ideas on so many subjects – war, peace, trade, energy, transportation and, of course, the future.’59

  Kubrick read Kahn’s controversial study, On Thermonuclear War (1960). It contains such intentionally provocative statements as: ‘War is a terrible thing, but so is peace. The difference seems in some respects to be a quantitative one of degree and standards.’60 For many people, including Szilard’s friend James Newman, Kahn’s 668-page book deserved to be called ‘evil’ as it seemed to be trying to persuade military leaders that they could fight a nuclear war and win. Writing in Scientific American, Newman memorably described Kahn’s book as ‘a moral tract on mass murder: how to plan it, how to commit it, how to get away with it, how to justify it’.61

  Kubrick met the 39-year-old Kahn several times as the script for Dr Strangelove gradually took shape during 1962. Herman Kahn was a larger than life figure. With a cigar in his hand and a wisecrack never far from his lips, the rotund physicist could pass for the owner of a New York deli. A natural-born iconoclast with an IQ as impressive as his substantial girth, Kahn was allergic to fashionable thinking and liked nothing better than to attack the liberal consensus.

  Kahn was familiar with Peter George’s Red Alert before he met Kubrick. He had referred to it in On Thermonuclear War and praised ‘the clever way the general negates the elaborate system set up to prevent unauthorized behavior’.62 He had also used the novel at RAND in training courses for military commanders. In these courses, fictional scenarios (a word RAND reinvented for the cold war) were used in nuclear war games. As a New York Times reporter put it, novels like Red Alert helped ‘stimulate reason and imagination to cope with history before it happens’.63 At least, that was the theory. Clearly, fiction had lessons to teach the military, as well as the scientists.

  Analysts like Kahn wanted to be ‘future historians’, a category of creative thinker identical to that which H. G. Wells had created for himself at the start of the century.64 Since RAND was formed, American governments have paid millions of dollars to be advised by Kahn and his successors on the shape of things to come. Kubrick also had strong views about what the future had in store for us. Dr Strangelove – which won the Hugo Award for best science fiction film of the year – would be the first of a series of future visions, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. But unlike Kahn, Stanley Kubrick showed people a future which their leaders said couldn’t happen: a bleak land where science, rather than ushering in utopia, creates machines that turn on their masters.

  Herman Kahn had also been intrigued by Szilard’s idea of a doomsday bomb, as described in Red Alert. He included it in On Thermonuclear War, and the idea attracted much media interest. In an article for a popular magazine in 1961, he described the ‘doomsday machine’ as ‘without question the most menacing and the most characteristic of the era’. He told the magazine:

  I can build a device – I think I know how to do it today, I doubt that it would take me 10 years to do and I doubt that it would cost me 10 billion dollars – and this is a device which I could bury, say, 2,000 feet underground and, if detonated, it would destroy everybody in the world – at least all unprotected life. It can be done, I believe. In fact, I know it can be done.65

  On Thermonuclear War explains how such a device would be

  connected to a computer which is in turn connected, by a reliable communication system, to hundreds of sensory devices all over the United States. The computer would then be programmed so that if, say, five nuclear bombs exploded over the United States, the device would be triggered and the earth destroyed.66

  In this vision of a complex computer network which has the power of life and death over its human makers, it is easy to see the prototype of Hal, the computer in Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s film 2001. Kubrick had a profound distrust of machines, eventually shunning planes and becoming reluctant to travel by car (drivers were told to restrict their speed to below 35 mph). According to one of his biographers, ‘his films, always preoccupied with systems that fail and plans that don’t succeed, increasingly dealt with the same problems but on a global or cosmic scale, as if even the universal order could no longer be relied on’.67

  Kahn describes the doomsday machine as the ultimate deterrent – invulnerable, automatic and frighteningly persuasive: ‘Even an idiot should be able to understand their capabilities.’ He makes it clear that he thinks it unlikely that either Russia or America intend to construct such a machine in the near future. But he does raise the possibility that less ‘cautious’ nations, which are becoming technologically advanced and ‘yet desperate or ambitious enough to gamble all’ might create the ultimate destructive device. He notes that Hitler ‘probably would have been delighted to procure a Doomsday Machine’.68

  Although the US military rejected the doomsday machine (‘it just does not look professional’), Kubrick would no doubt have been struck by Kahn’s claim that ‘more than a few scientists and engineers do seem attracted to the idea’. In his conclusion, Kahn states that ‘a central problem of arms control – perhaps the central problem – is to delay the day w
hen Doomsday Machines or near equivalents become practical’.69

  Herman Kahn’s influence on Dr Strangelove is clear. The phrase ‘doomsday machine’, which is used in the film, is from Kahn. In Red Alert, Peter George had talked of ‘world-killing devices’, and the Soviet cobalt bombs are not triggered automatically, but set off by the country’s leader.70 It is also significant that in the film, Dr Strangelove has commissioned a feasibility study of the doomsday machine from the ‘Bland Corporation’, a transparent allusion to Kahn’s former employer.

  Some have seen Kahn’s irreverent wit and iconoclastic style as the source of the film’s unique doomsday humour, prompting one reviewer to describe it as ‘the most shattering sick joke I’ve ever come across’.71 But of course, Kubrick had already explored this darkly comic approach in Lolita. More importantly, Herman Kahn – the man who thought the unthinkable and rationalized the risks of nuclear war – has been identified as one of the models for the film’s most memorable character, Dr Strangelove.

  20

  Strangeloves

  Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the War Room!

  Dr Strangelove (1964)

  On 2 December 1962, the University of Chicago celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the first controlled release of atomic energy. By now, the imposing Gothic battlements of Stagg Field stadium had been pulled down. In its place, a bronze plaque marked the spot where Chicago Pile Number One had been built. Enrico Fermi, the ‘Italian navigator’ who had led the journey into the nuclear future, had died in 1955, but his name lived on. Across the street now stood the Enrico Fermi Institute for Nuclear Studies, and the following day President Kennedy would present the Enrico Fermi Award to Edward Teller. Apart from four physicists who had died since 1942 and Albert Wattenberg, who led a simultaneous event at Rome University, nearly all the original scientists attended the anniversary at Chicago. Leo Szilard was notable for his absence.

  Later that month, a somewhat sheepish Szilard flew back from Geneva. On arrival, he faced criticism from some of his closest colleagues for his flight from America. Many people had placed their trust in Szilard in the search for peace, and now they felt that he had deserted them in their hour of need. Szilard didn’t see it that way at all. For him it had been the only rational plan of action. ‘If I were to stay in Washington until the bombs begin to fall and were to perish in the disorders that would ensue,’ he said, ‘I would consider myself on my deathbed, not a hero but a fool.’1

  The Chicago-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists marked the ‘birth of the atomic age’ with a special issue to which even the President contributed.2 It began with Harrison Brown’s dramatic editorial, penned in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis as the Doomsday Clock was about to strike midnight. The Bulletin’s editor, Eugene Rabinowitch, looking back at those tense days in October, said ‘in 1962, mankind came as close as never before to the abyss of nuclear war’.3

  But other contributors to the Bulletin, among them the discoverer of plutonium and now AECChairman, Glenn Seaborg, remained doggedly upbeat about the achievements of the atomic age. Thanks to the Chicago experiment, wrote Seaborg, ‘we have witnessed… the real beginning of a society based on science’.4 In an interview with William Laurence, he even predicted that within twenty years nuclear rockets would be taking astronauts to Venus and Mars, and the energy of the atom would allow the earth’s polar regions to be colonized.5 Seaborg preferred to direct the public’s gaze towards a rosy future rather than linger over the mistakes of the past. Eugene Wigner, with whom Szilard had shared the $75,000 Atoms for Peace Award in 1959 for their contribution to the development of atomic reactors, was less sanguine.

  Writing in the New York Times, Wigner admitted that the scientists’ biggest ‘failure of insight’ was not in physics but in understanding politics and human nature. Like fictional saviour scientists, they had naively expected ‘atomic weaponry to do away with international conflict’. Wigner and his fellow scientists were naturally ‘eager to enshrine reason’, but they made the mistake of assuming that nations would behave rationally if ‘the survival of humanity’ was at stake. Many scientists were convinced that the terrible reality of atomic superweapons would force nations to resolve their disputes and work for world peace. As Wigner put it, ‘any other outcome seemed utterly irrational.’ Today, such faith in humanity’s rationality seems naive. An older and wiser Wigner acknowledged that ‘the role of reason is real enough, but it does not determine our goals; it merely teaches us how to attain these, and at what cost’.6

  It was a hard lesson to learn, especially for Wigner and others who had such high hopes for atomic energy. By contrast, Szilard remained an optimist, convinced that the same rational mind that had split the atom would also solve all problems of the human spirit and bring about a utopia of peace and plenty. His old friend Albert Einstein had smiled ruefully at such wishful thinking and gently criticized him for over-estimating the role of rationality in human life. In Leo Szilard, the spirit of the saviour scientist lived on. But its days were numbered.

  In a personal message to readers of the Bulletin that December, President Kennedy said that the power of the atom, first unleashed in that cold, grey squash court, ‘has come to connote not only the unprecedented application of science to man’s use; but also the problem mankind faces in whether these uses contribute to welfare or to conflict’. A new scientific era had begun, but the old problem of the proper uses of knowledge had returned to haunt humankind.7

  As Leo Szilard stepped off the plane and set foot in a country he had thought would by now be a radioactive wasteland, Stanley Kubrick was announcing the title of his next film to the press: Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. In the same interview, Kubrick also disclosed that the film would star Peter Sellers and that it would be a satire about a ‘nuclear Wise Man’, co-written by Peter George.8 Later, Kubrick would bring in Terry Southern to work on the film. Southern, author of the erotic satire Candy, brought his uniquely anarchic and subversive humour to the storyline. One version even had the movie climaxing in a riotous custard pie fight in the War Room. The scene was filmed using crates of custard pies ordered from Fortnum & Mason – suppliers to the upper crust of English society – but was wisely cut from the final version.9

  Initially, Kubrick had been ‘fascinated’ by Red Alert as a ‘serious suspense novel about what happens when one of the great powers pushes the wrong button’.10 But the more he worked on the script, the more he was ‘intrigued by the comic aspects – the facade of conventional reality being pierced.’ Peter George recalled that they were in a taxi one day, en route to the Bronx, when Kubrick ‘suddenly slapped my leg and said, “You’re going to hate me for this, but can’t you see this thing as a comedy?’ ”11

  Although the plot and the characters in Dr Strangelove are the same as in Peter George’s novel, one character is entirely original to the film – Strangelove himself. The sinister scientist transformed what was a convincing and chilling thriller into a work of symbolic power. Brilliantly portrayed by Peter Sellers, who had played Dr Zempf and Clare Quilty in Lolita, Dr Strangelove is an ex-Nazi scientist who has become the director of US weapons research and development. Thanks to the power of this character, Kubrick’s film coined a new adjective: Strangelovean, describing a person who has a potentially fatal fascination with the idea of nuclear war. Dr Strangelove came to embody the anxieties of a generation about scientists creating ever more lethal technologies of mass destruction. If the cobalt bomb symbolized the doomsday generation’s fears of man-made apocalypse, Dr Strangelove personified the Doomsday Man himself.

  Dr Strangelove is a surprisingly complex figure, and the evolution of his character is a fascinating story in itself. He made his first appearance in a draft of the script dated August 1962, called simply at that time ‘von Klutz’. From the start he was essentially a comic character. The Bond film Dr No was released in autumn 1962, atthe same time as the Cuban Missile Crisis. D
r No is a nuclear physicist in league with the criminal underworld and the subversive spying organization SPECTRE. ‘My work has given me a unique knowledge of radioactivity,’ says Dr No, showing James Bond his black artificial hands, ‘but not without its costs, as you can see.’12

  Like all subsequent Bond baddies, the half-Chinese, half-German Dr No is obsessed with dreams of world domination. He is a classic mad scientist, whose genealogy can be traced from Drs Moreau and Griffin, to Thorkel in Dr Cyclops. The secret nuclear reactor Dr No has constructed on Jamaica is used to power a radio jamming system that threatens both US space rockets and ICBMs. He eventually suffers a horrible death at Bond’s hands – drowned in the radioactive pond of his own overheating reactor. James Bond’s actions cause the reactor to explode. Today, in the post-Chernobyl era, it seems remarkable that the usually well-informed 007 was unconcerned about the consequences of a reactor meltdown, a disaster which would have spread fallout across the Caribbean and America.

  Although Stanley Kubrick never admitted that the Bond villain was a prime source for his character, the similarities are clear. With his German origins and artificial hands, Dr No bears a striking resemblance to Dr Strangelove, who is also German (his name was Merkwürdigliebe, literally ‘strange-love’) and has a black prosthetic hand. However, Dr Strangelove’s hand has a life of its own, constantly struggling to rise up in the Hitler salute when he talks to the President. This black-gloved hand can also be traced back to Fritz Lang’s sorcerer-scientist, Rotwang, in Metropolis (1926). As a scientific archetype, Dr Strangelove has an impressive pedigree stretching back through twentieth-century cultural history.