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uncovering the death wish in dr. strangelove 181 Where Fail-Safe focuses on technological malfunction, one of the most famous treatments of the U.S. nuclear defense system engages with human failings. Dr. Strangelove gives particularly bizarre expression to what had become known as the “mad man” scenario, where an individual pathological officer launches an attack on the Soviet Union.1 The United States had introduced psychological screening in order to make this case virtually impossible, but once again we encounter the problem of the military machine, specifically the problem of preventing the dreaded outcomes from a renegade officer’s actions. This subject had already appeared in fiction as early as 1955 in the journalist Flora Lewis’s One of Our H-Bombs Is Missing. Ingeniously cast in a whodunit framework, this narrative deals with events following a rumor that an H-bomb has gone missing from a U.S. base in Alaska. Because this base is so isolated, the chances of a Soviet assault are minimal, and so the guilty party must be a member of the American personnel. Accordingly, the investigation juggles with the two possible explanations: that someone suffered a nervous crisis or that an officer responded to the tensions of life on an Arctic base by taking his own action. Two factors make this narrative quite different from Dr. Strangelove, however. The action takes place during the premiership of Stalin, when Soviet aggression was more blatant; at one point, missiles are fired at the U.S. base. And the narrative predates the U.S. introduction of psychological screening for its officers. Indeed, most of the military personnel seem to be suffering from one kind of severe tension or another. It transpires that the culprit is an officer who is convinced that U.S. policy is one of supine appeasement. As he explains to his superior, the bomb “might mean saving the lives of a hundred million Americans. You know chaPter 11 Uncovering the Death Wish in Dr. Strangelove 182 under the shadow it means the future of your country. Yet you stand here and chicken. You give the world to the Commies. You want to wait for them to wipes us out!”2 Although the mystery paradigm is cleverly handled, it is premised on a paradox. The action treats the theft as an isolated event, whereas in practice this could never be the case, nor could the scenario that a single officer could steal a bomb and fly toward Russia with the intention of dropping it. Even though this officer experiences a change of heart and returns to the base with the bomb intact, his actions would have instantly become part of a larger system, just as a single detonation would have produced instant escalation. As one character reflects, “The H-bomb could not be thought about. It was like trying to imagine infinity. The immensity, the horror of even one H-bomb explosion shocked the mind into defensive rejection of the truth, fatalistic indifference, and final disbelief.”3 In this chapter we remain on the nuclear brink, which is approached by One of Our H-Bombs but then conveniently defused by the return of the renegade officer. The most famous treatment of this scenario remains the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, which raised the nuclear stakes by including a doomsday device within its narrative and which was made against a background of military change where ballistic missileswerereplacingnuclearbombers.4 ThefilmcarriedtriplecreditsofauthorshiptoStanleyKubrick ,TerrySouthern,andPeterGeorge,althoughthenovelwas publishedthatsameyearunderthelatter’snameonly.Theattributionofthemovie was the more accurate of the two because it appropriately reflected how methods ofblackhumorhadbeen superimposedontotherealistbaseof PeterGeorge’s1958 novel Red Alert. Kubrick’s adaptation of this novel involved a fundamental shift in narrative mode so that rather than dramatizing a crisis within the Cold War, he could direct a comic assault on an entire political stance. George’s novel, then, point for point supplied Kubrick with materials for parody or travesty. Red Alert carried a brief foreword explaining that it described events which could easily happen and, more importantly, that it presented a battle on two fronts: military combat and one “in the minds of men.” The events are triggered when the commander of a strategic air command base orders a “red alert,” a state of maximum readiness to respond to Russian attack, and dispatches his bombers in retaliation to a nonexistent offensive, thus overriding the “fail-safe” system.5 George explores the possibility of such action and examines the reasons behind it. Accordingly, it is crucial that General Quinten should not...

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