by P. D. Smith
As well as Dr No, the best-selling nuclear thriller Fail-Safe (1962), by two political science professors, Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, almost certainly provided Kubrick with the first seed of an idea that would eventually grow into Strangelove. Fail-Safe was strikingly similar to Peter George’s novel, so similar in fact that in February 1963, as Dr Strangelove went into production at Shepperton Studios, George sued for plagiarism in New York. Both parties eventually settled out of court, but it was a victory for Kubrick and George. The film rights to Fail-Safe, which had sold 280,000 copies in its first year, had been bought for $500,000 (Kubrick’s company had paid a paltry $3,500 for Red Alert). But the lawyers agreed that the distribution of the film of Fail-Safe would be delayed until after Dr Strangelove opened.
Like Roshwald’s Level 7, Burdick and Wheeler’s novel was about a nuclear war started by a technical fault. A malfunction occurs in the fail-safe system that allowed bombers to be scrambled on warning and then to receive a coded signal while in the air, telling them whether to proceed or return. As in Dr Strangelove, there are frantic hotline discussions between the Kremlin and the White House, as B-52 bombers head towards the Soviet Union after the signal to attack is given by mistake. When Moscow is destroyed, the President agrees to bomb New York to avert a global thermonuclear holocaust. Although originally included in Dr Strangelove, this like-for-like destruction of cities was eventually dropped from Kubrick’s film.
There were many similarities between the two novels, but whatever the rights and wrongs of the plagiarism case, it was Kubrick’s film that gained most from the other storyline. In Fail-Safe a mathematician called Professor Walter Groteschele (Walter Matthau in the 1964 film) advises the chiefs of staff on nuclear strategy. George’s Red Alert featured no mad scientist character. But in Kubrick’s film, Dr Strangelove – a key government adviser, like Groteschele – becomes the most memorable figure. This, coupled with Kubrick’s decision to address the subject through black comedy, paid off both critically and at the box office. Although it was successful as a thriller, Fail-Safe made little lasting impression on the culture of the cold war. Today it is not Professor Groteschele, but Dr Strangelove who is remembered.
Dr Strangelove plays no part in Kubrick’s film until near the end. Peter George’s novelization of the film introduces the character earlier on and is more revealing about his origins. In the first reference to Dr Strangelove, he is shown to be unmistakably modelled on the German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun, now working for the American military:
Though he was known personally to few people in this room, he had long exerted an influence on United States defense policy. He was a recluse and perhaps had been made so by the effects of the British bombing of Peenemünde, where he was working on the German V-2 rocket. His black-gloved right hand was a memento of this. He was not sure whether he disliked the British more than the Russians.13
A few pages later we are introduced to another important dimension of Dr Strangelove’s character: his role in the preparation for nuclear war. ‘He was of course familiar with the jargon of the nuclear strategists,’ says the narrator. ‘Indeed, he himself had created a great deal of it.’ Many of Dr Strangelove’s later words on the doomsday machine, as well as his final master plan ‘to preserve a nucleus of human specimens’ in mineshafts, are virtually identical to passages in Herman Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War.14 In a discussion of civil defence, Kahn had recommended spending $5 billion fitting out mines to provide people with fallout shelters.
Herman Kahn was not German, however, and although he may have been a neoconservative, he was certainly no ex-Nazi. Neither Kahn nor von Braun is an exact match for the elusive Dr Strangelove, any more than Professor Groteschele or Dr No is. Other possible candidates for the real-life Dr Strangelove are Edward Teller, John von Neumann and even Henry Kissinger, then a Harvard academic who wrote on nuclear strategy. Kubrick himself told Alexander Walker he thought ‘Strangelove’s accent was probably inspired by the physicist Edward Teller’, although he admitted that Sellers didn’t sound much like the Hungarian father of the H-bomb.15
Wernher von Braun, pictured in about 1947. The 1960 American biopic about him, I Aim at the Stars, contained no reference to concentration camps or the destruction caused by the V-2. The film was not popular in Britain. One review was titled ‘I Aim at the Stars, But Sometimes I Hit London.’
Dr Strangelove’s wheelchair has been seen as an allusion to computer pioneer John von Neumann. As we have seen, the hawkish mathematician was a frequent visitor to the White House in his wheelchair before his death in 1957. Like the other Strangeloves, von Neumann was fiercely patriotic and jingoistic in his advice to President Eisenhower. But it is also possible that the wheelchair was introduced for more mundane reasons. In Dr Strangelove, Peter Sellers upstaged his own performance in Lolita by playing three characters – President Merkin Muffley, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, DSO, DFC, RAF, and Dr Strangelove himself. He had originally intended to play a fourth character, Major Kong, but surrendered the role when he injured his ankle clambering through the B-52’s fuselage.
Dr Strangelove is so memorable a character because Sellers succeeds wonderfully in fusing together the traits of the real-life, and indeed fictional, figures on which he is based. Through the alchemy of filmmaking, Kubrick and Sellers created cinematic gold in the figure of Dr Strangelove. Teller, von Braun and von Neumann were all key players in the sciences of destruction. The references to Peenemünde and the concentration camps in the film’s novelization make it abundantly clear that Wernher von Braun was Peter George’s main model for Dr Strangelove. However, his words are those of the man who had worked with and admired both Teller and von Neumann: Herman Kahn, the personification of the military intellectual – detached and coldly rational. Like the four riders of the apocalypse, these figures come together in the unforgettable character of Dr Strangelove, the ultimate Doomsday Man.
For Lewis Mumford, responding to the New York Times’ panning of the film, Kubrick’s masterstroke was to make Dr Strangelove ‘the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination’. For Mumford, the tragedy of the age they were living in was eloquently expressed by the manic figure of this fanatical rationalist: ‘This nightmare eventuality that we have concocted for our children is nothing but a crazy fantasy, by nature as horribly crippled and dehumanized as Dr Strangelove himself.’ He concluded by hailing Kubrick’s film as ‘the first break in the catatonic cold-war trance that has so long held our country in its rigid grip’.16
Mumford was right to describe Kubrick’s film as a crucial moment in the culture of the cold war. For people all over the world, Dr Strangelove soon came to personify the sinister alliance of science and power politics that made it possible to annihilate millions at the touch of a button. Dr Strangelove’s logic could transform acts of inhumanity into practical solutions, his rhetoric clothed barbarity in sweet words of reason, and his think tanks – such as the ‘Bland Corporation’ – used computers to transform lives into numbers. For numbers, as Herman Kahn had said, are something you can think the unthinkable about.
Peter Sellers taking the title role in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).
In the 1960s, a new generation began to reject a life reduced to numbers and to look for answers beyond science and rationality. This generation no longer felt comfortable with the easy post-war certainties that their parents had accepted without question. For those who grew up in an age haunted by the Strangelovean cobalt bomb, the old ways of looking at the world seemed to lead to a dead end – to doomsday.
The press screening of Dr Strangelove was due to take place on 22 November 1963, a day forever etched into the American psyche. When news broke of President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, the screening was cancelled and the release of the movie, scheduled for the end of 1963, delayed. In Peter George’s novelization of the script, which had already been publis
hed, General Ripper’s recall code for the B-52s is ‘JFK’. In the final cut of the film this became POE, for ‘Peace on Earth’, or alternatively Ripper’s more paranoid ‘Purity of Essence’.
Although it was panned as a ‘shattering sick joke’ by the New York Times’ reviewer when it was finally released in January 1964, Kubrick and George’s film was well received.17 Sight and Sound said that it demonstrated how ‘power politics have become a Frankenstein monster which one little error can send out of control’. Their critic praised it as ‘the most hilariously funny and the most nightmarish film of the year’.18 For the New Statesman it was a ‘mesmeric’ film that set out ‘to create its own category or genre’.19 Despite Peregrine Worsthorne in the Sunday Telegraph likening Kubrick’s portrayal of Americans to Soviet propaganda, the film was hugely popular with moviegoers who ‘ringed the block’ at the Columbia cinema in London.20 The cinema even had to put on special late screenings at 11 p.m. each night. Ticket sales were 25 per cent higher than for any other film the Columbia had shown, and The Times reported that ‘all house records have been broken’.21
Stanley Kubrick took a keen interest in how his film was marketed. Columbia’s publicists focused on a topical aspect to sell the film. It was advertised as ‘the wild hot-line suspense comedy’, and each character was pictured speaking on the telephone. Both in the book and the film, the hotline between the Kremlin and the White House is a crucial narrative device, connecting the two leaders as they try to pull back from nuclear apocalypse. Originally, the film had been planned as a real-time thriller, reflecting the ‘two hours to doom’ of George’s novel, a device exploited most recently in 24, the cult TV series about terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction.
Peter George’s description of the hotline and its role in averting disaster (in his 1958 novel, at least) made an important contribution to superpower relations. After reading Red Alert, Harvard academic Thomas Schelling suggested the idea of a hotline to the Eisenhower administration. Leo Szilard also discussed it with Khrushchev in a personal meeting in New York in 1960. The response was positive. In fact, Khrushchev was so impressed by his meeting with Szilard (who had left his hospital bed, where he was recovering from cancer, to meet the Russian leader) that he sent the scientist a hamper of Russian delicacies, including caviar and smoked fish.
If the idea of the hotline had been accepted in time by both sides, the Cuban Missile Crisis might have been defused far sooner. As it was, the first hotline was not introduced until a year later, on 31 August 1963. But even then it was not the telephone link depicted in book and film, but a pair of teletype machines. Although these were introduced to clear up misunderstandings, communication difficulties still dogged superpower relations. Replying to Washington’s first message, Moscow asked, ‘Please explain what is meant by a quick brown fox jumping over a lazy dog?’22
After the release of Dr Strangelove, Peter George continued to be preoccupied by the horrifying prospect of nuclear conflict. It was a fascination that would prove fatal. The aftermath of a devastating war formed the subject of his next two books. The first, Commander One, he dedicated to Kubrick, but the second, Nuclear Survivors, was never completed. The 41-year-old writer was found dead from a self-inflicted shotgun wound at his home in St Leonards, near Hastings, Sussex, on 1 June 1966.
His friend, the science fiction writer Brian Aldiss, has told how George suffered ‘fear and pain about the threat of nuclear war’. He was also an alcoholic. According to Aldiss, he ‘would start with a sip of whisky and wake up a fortnight later in a Glaswegian gutter, poor guy’. After Dr Strangelove appeared, George began to feel uncomfortable with Kubrick’s transformation of his realistic thriller into a black comedy. Aldiss agrees that he was ‘sorry’ about the way the film turned out.23 George even wrote to Thomas Schelling, who had been an advisor on the screenplay, apologizing for its tone.24 Ironically, it is Kubrick’s film rather than George’s novel that has stood the test of time. Only George’s novelization of the script is available today in bookshops. Sadly, his other books have long since gone out of print, including Red Alert.
In the month that Dr Strangelove was released, Leo Szilard and his wife Trude moved to the town of La Jolla, on the sunny Californian coast. For the last three years since his recovery from cancer, he had been a one-man peace movement in Washington, looking in vain for a market for his unique brand of wisdom. Now he told a friend that he wanted to move to La Jolla because it offered ‘a foretaste of paradise’.25
At the age of 66, Szilard had accepted his first research position in over a decade. The discoverer of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk, had offered him a fellowship at his new Institute for Biological Studies in the West Coast town. The Institute was itself a product of Szilard’s extraordinarily fertile mind. He had first suggested the idea in 1957, as a place where the biological and social sciences could come together under the same roof. The area he intended to work on was typically at the cutting-edge of science: the chemical and biological basis of memory.
In the spring of 1964, he could not have missed the advertisements for Kubrick’s film in almost every newspaper and magazine. Prominent in these advertisements was the question, ‘What did President Muffley do about the Doomsday Machine?’ As usual, scarcely a month passed without these same journals mentioning one of Szilard’s proposals for peace. In February, Holiday magazine published a profile of Szilard in which historian Alice K. Smith was quoted as saying that alongside Lincoln, Gandhi, Churchill and Hitler, Szilard was one of the five men who had done most to ‘change our times’. Discussing his return to scientific research, Szilard explained why he had switched fields: ‘The mysteries of biology are no less deep than the mysteries of physics were one or two generations ago, and the tools are available to solve them provided only that we believe they can be solved.’26
Szilard also noted that ‘the creative scientist has much in common with the artist and the poet’. As well as ‘logical thinking and an analytical ability’, the ‘subconscious’ plays a vital role in truly creative science.27 A review of his 1961 collection of stories, The Voice of the Dolphins, had described Szilard as a ‘scientist who also happens to be an artist’. These political satires, which provide an extraordinary insight into the cold war as well as keeping alive the voice of one of its unsung heroes, are most notable for what the reviewer called a ‘quality that is half farce and half nightmare’.28 As Stanley Kubrick later realized, a dark sense of humour was essential for those who had to live with the Bomb.
Unfortunately, Leo Szilard’s Indian summer of scientific research was all too brief. He died in his sleep of a heart attack at his La Jolla apartment on 30 May 1964. Never again would his fellow scientists be astonished or infuriated by his unconventional insights. The obituary writers made much of his role in the opening of the atomic Pandora’s box which had created the precarious balance of terror in the cold war. But the papers were most impressed by his tireless dedication during the past twenty years ‘to the task of closing that box, of seeing to it that no human community ever again suffers the fate that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki’.29
If Szilard had been a character in one of his own stories or in a Wellsian scientific romance, science would have allowed him to cheat death, perhaps living on, like Wells’s ‘sleeper’, until progress had caught up with the frailties of the body and allowed him to be cured. If this had happened he would have been pleased to read the New York Times the day after he died. The newspaper’s editorial stated that Leo Szilard would be most remembered for ‘the example he personally set of the responsible scientist deeply concerned that the fruits of research be used to benefit, not harm, mankind’.30
Writing about his friend later that year, Edward Teller compared Szilard to a famous sixteenth-century alchemist: ‘I cannot but think of that legendary, restless figure, Dr Faust, who in Goethe’s tragedy dies at the very moment when at last he declares he is content.’31 For both the designer of the H-bomb and the man who contributed
so much to the development of the atomic bomb, Faust’s pact with the devil remains a powerful symbol of the temptations of absolute knowledge and power. For Leo Szilard, who had been impressed at an early age by a Hungarian poem inspired by Goethe’s Faust, it was an appropriate comparison; although, unlike Faust – and, one might argue, Teller – Szilard never lost sight of the true humanistic purpose of science which was, as he put it, to save the world.
In the year that Leo Szilard died and the doomsday machine hit the big screen in Dr Strangelove, the war of words between the superpowers continued unabated. In March 1964 the United States conducted an investigation into shipments of cobalt from Morocco to China as fears were raised about the construction of a cobalt bomb by the nascent nuclear power in the Far East. Later, the US Government itself had to deny that it used cobalt in nuclear weapons, after it was reported that General MacArthur had wanted to seal the border between Korea and China with a radioactive no man’s land of cobalt.
Also that year, another American general, the commander of the Air Force, Curtis LeMay, who later threatened to bomb North Vietnam ‘back to the Stone Age’,32 called for the United States to develop a 100-megaton bomb like the Soviet one. The suggestion was politely but firmly rejected by government defence advisors. As Einstein had pointed out after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, advances in science and technology were still not being matched by progress in thinking.
Then, in September, a Japanese delegation visiting Moscow brought back an ominous story from behind the Iron Curtain. Khrushchev had spoken of a new and terrible weapon developed by the Soviet Union. He reportedly told them that ‘It is a means of the destruction and extermination of humanity – the most powerful and strongest of existing weapons. It is power without limit.’33