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Strangelove” Was True | The New Yorker

N s Desk

Almost Everything in “Dr.

Strangelove” Was True
By Eric Schlosser January 17, 2014

This month marks the ftieth anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy about
nuclear weapons, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love
the Bomb.” Released on January 29, 1964, the lm caused a good deal of controversy.
Its plot suggested that a mentally deranged American general could order a nuclear
attack on the Soviet Union, without consulting the President. One reviewer
described the lm as “dangerous … an evil thing about an evil thing.” Another
compared it to Soviet propaganda. Although “Strangelove” was clearly a farce, with
the comedian Peter Sellers playing three roles, it was criticized for being implausible.
An expert at the Institute for Strategic Studies called the events in the lm
“impossible on a dozen counts.” A former Deputy Secretary of Defense dismissed
the idea that someone could authorize the use of a nuclear weapon without the
President’s approval: “Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.” (See a
compendium of clips from the lm.) When “Fail-Safe”—a Hollywood thriller with
a similar plot, directed by Sidney Lumet—opened, later that year, it was criticized in
much the same way. “The incidents in ‘Fail-Safe’ are deliberate lies!” General Curtis
LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, said. “Nothing like that could happen.” The rst
casualty of every war is the truth—and the Cold War was no exception to that
dictum. Half a century after Kubrick’s mad general, Jack D. Ripper, launched a
nuclear strike on the Soviets to defend the purity of “our precious bodily uids” from
Communist subversion, we now know that American officers did indeed have the
ability to start a Third World War on their own. And despite the introduction of
rigorous safeguards in the years since then, the risk of an accidental or unauthorized
nuclear detonation hasn’t been completely eliminated.

The command and control of nuclear weapons has long been plagued by an
“always/never” dilemma. The administrative and technological systems that are
necessary to insure that nuclear weapons are always available for use in wartime may
be quite different from those necessary to guarantee that such weapons can never be
used, without proper authorization, in peacetime. During the nineteen- fties and
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sixties, the “always” in American war planning was given far greater precedence than
the “never.” Through two terms in office, beginning in 1953, President Dwight D.
Eisenhower struggled with this dilemma. He wanted to retain Presidential control
of nuclear weapons while defending America and its allies from attack. But, in a
crisis, those two goals might prove contradictory, raising all sorts of difficult
questions. What if Soviet bombers were en route to the United States but the
President somehow couldn’t be reached? What if Soviet tanks were rolling into West
Germany but a communications breakdown prevented officers from
contacting the White House? What if the President were killed during a surprise
attack on Washington, D.C., along with the rest of the nation’s civilian leadership?
Who would order a nuclear retaliation then?

With great reluctance, Eisenhower agreed to let American officers use their nuclear
weapons, in an emergency, if there were no time or no means to contact the
President. Air Force pilots were allowed to re their nuclear anti-aircraft rockets to
shoot down Soviet bombers heading toward the United States. And about half a
dozen high-level American commanders were allowed to use far more powerful
nuclear weapons, without contacting the White House rst, when their forces were
under attack and “the urgency of time and circumstances clearly does not permit a
speci c decision by the President, or other person empowered to act in his stead.”
Eisenhower worried that providing that sort of authorization in advance could make
it possible for someone to do “something foolish down the chain of command” and
start an all-out nuclear war. But the alternative—allowing an attack on the United
States to go unanswered or forces to be overrun—seemed a lot worse. Aware
that his decision might create public unease about who really controlled America’s
nuclear arsenal, Eisenhower insisted that his delegation of Presidential authority be
kept secret. At a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he confessed to being “very
fearful of having written papers on this matter.”

President John F. Kennedy was surprised to learn, just a few weeks after taking
office, about this secret delegation of power. “A subordinate commander faced with a
substantial military action,” Kennedy was told in a top-secret memo, “could start the
thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative if he could not reach you.” Kennedy
and his national-security advisers were shocked not only by the wide latitude given
to American officers but also by the loose custody of the roughly three thousand
American nuclear weapons stored in Europe. Few of the weapons had locks on
them. Anyone who got hold of them could detonate them. And there was little to

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prevent officers from Turkey, Holland, Italy, Great Britain, and Germany from
using them without the approval of the United States.

In December, 1960, fteen members of Congress serving on the Joint Committee

on Atomic Energy had toured bases to investigate how American nuclear
weapons were being deployed. They found that the weapons—some of them about a
hundred times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima—were
routinely guarded, transported, and handled by foreign military personnel. American
control of the weapons was practically nonexistent. Harold Agnew, a Los Alamos
physicist who accompanied the group, was especially concerned to see German
pilots sitting in German planes that were decorated with Iron Crosses—and
carrying American atomic bombs. Agnew, in his own words, “nearly wet his pants”
when he realized that a lone American sentry with a ri e was all that prevented
someone from taking off in one of those planes and bombing the Soviet Union.

The Kennedy Administration soon decided to put locking devices inside ’s

nuclear weapons. The coded electromechanical switches, known as “permissive
action links” ( s), would be placed on the arming lines. The weapons would be
inoperable without the proper code—and that code would be shared with
allies only when the White House was prepared to ght the Soviets. The American
military didn’t like the idea of these coded switches, fearing that mechanical devices
installed to improve weapon safety would diminish weapon reliability. A top-secret
State Department memo summarized the view of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1961:
“all is well with the atomic stockpile program and there is no need for any changes.”

After a crash program to develop the new control technology, during the mid-
nineteen-sixties, permissive action links were nally placed inside most of the
nuclear weapons deployed by forces. But Kennedy’s directive applied only to
the arsenal. For years, the Air Force and the Navy blocked attempts to add
coded switches to the weapons solely in their custody. During a national emergency,
they argued, the consequences of not receiving the proper code from the White
House might be disastrous. And locked weapons might play into the hands of
Communist saboteurs. “The very existence of the lock capability,” a top Air Force
general claimed, “would create a fail-disable potential for knowledgeable agents to
‘dud’ the entire Minuteman [missile] force.” The Joint Chiefs thought that strict
military discipline was the best safeguard against an unauthorized nuclear strike. A
two-man rule was instituted to make it more difficult for someone to use a nuclear
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weapon without permission. And a new screening program, the Human Reliability
Program, was created to stop people with emotional, psychological, and substance-
abuse problems from gaining access to nuclear weapons.

Despite public assurances that everything was fully under control, in the winter of
1964, while “Dr. Strangelove” was playing in theatres and being condemned as
Soviet propaganda, there was nothing to prevent an American bomber crew or
missile launch crew from using their weapons against the Soviets. Kubrick had
researched the subject for years, consulted experts, and worked closely with a former
R.A.F. pilot, Peter George, on the screenplay of the lm. George’s novel about the
risk of accidental nuclear war, “Red Alert,” was the source for most of “Strangelove”
’s plot. Unbeknownst to both Kubrick and George, a top official at the Department
of Defense had already sent a copy of “Red Alert” to every member of the Pentagon’s
Scienti c Advisory Committee for Ballistic Missiles. At the Pentagon, the book was
taken seriously as a cautionary tale about what might go wrong. Even Secretary of
Defense Robert S. McNamara privately worried that an accident, a mistake, or a
rogue American officer could start a nuclear war.

Coded switches to prevent the unauthorized use of nuclear weapons were nally
added to the control systems of American missiles and bombers in the early
nineteen-seventies. The Air Force was not pleased, and considered the new security
measures to be an insult, a lack of con dence in its personnel. Although the Air
Force now denies this claim, according to more than one source I contacted, the
code necessary to launch a missile was set to be the same at every Minuteman site:
00000000.

The early permissive action links were rudimentary. Placed in weapons during
the nineteen-sixties and known as Category A s, the switches relied on a split
four-digit code, with ten thousand possible combinations. If the United States went
to war, two people would be necessary to unlock a nuclear weapon, each of them
provided with half the code. Category A s were useful mainly to delay
unauthorized use, to buy time after a weapon had been taken or to thwart an
individual psychotic hoping to cause a large explosion. A skilled technician could
open a stolen weapon and unlock it within a few hours. Today’s Category D s,
installed in the Air Force’s hydrogen bombs, are more sophisticated. They require a
six-digit code, with a million possible combinations, and have a limited-try feature
that disables a weapon when the wrong code is repeatedly entered.
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The Air Force’s land-based Minuteman III missiles and the Navy’s submarine-based
Trident II missiles now require an eight-digit code—which is no longer 00000000
—in order to be launched. The Minuteman crews receive the code via underground
cables or an aboveground radio antenna. Sending the launch code to submarines
deep underwater presents a greater challenge. Trident submarines contain two safes.
One holds the keys necessary to launch a missile; the other holds the combination
to the safe with the keys; and the combination to the safe holding the combination
must be transmitted to the sub by very-low-frequency or extremely-low-frequency
radio. In a pinch, if Washington, D.C., has been destroyed and the launch code
doesn’t arrive, the sub’s crew can open the safes with a blowtorch.

The security measures now used to control America’s nuclear weapons are a vast
improvement over those of 1964. But, like all human endeavors, they are inherently
awed. The Department of Defense’s Personnel Reliability Program is supposed to
keep people with serious emotional or psychological issues away from nuclear
weapons—and yet two of the nation’s top nuclear commanders were recently
removed from their posts. Neither appears to be the sort of calm, stable person you
want with a nger on the button. In fact, their misbehavior seems straight out of
“Strangelove.”

Vice Admiral Tim Giardina, the second-highest-ranking officer at the U.S. Strategic
Command—the organization responsible for all of America’s nuclear forces—-was
investigated last summer for allegedly using counterfeit gambling chips at the
Horseshoe Casino in Council Bluffs, Iowa. According to the Iowa Division of
Criminal Investigation, “a signi cant monetary amount” of counterfeit chips was
involved. Giardina was relieved of his command on October 3, 2013. A few days
later, Major General Michael Carey, the Air Force commander in charge of
America’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, was red for conduct “unbecoming an
officer and a gentleman.” According to a report by the Inspector General of the Air
Force, Carey had consumed too much alcohol during an official trip to Russia,
behaved rudely toward Russian officers, spent time with “suspect” young foreign
women in Moscow, loudly discussed sensitive information in a public hotel lounge
there, and drunkenly pleaded to get onstage and sing with a Beatles cover band at
La Cantina, a Mexican restaurant near Red Square. Despite his requests, the band
wouldn’t let Carey onstage to sing or to play the guitar.

While drinking beer in the executive lounge at Moscow’s Marriott Aurora during
that visit, General Carey made an admission with serious public-policy implications.
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He off-handedly told a delegation of U.S. national-security officials that his missile-

launch officers have the “worst morale in the Air Force.” Recent events suggest that
may be true. In the spring of 2013, nineteen launch officers at Minot Air Force base
in North Dakota were decerti ed for violating safety rules and poor discipline. In
August, 2013, the entire missile wing at Malmstrom Air Force base in Montana
failed its safety inspection. Last week, the Air Force revealed that thirty-four launch
officers at Malmstrom had been decerti ed for cheating on pro ciency exams—and
that at least three launch officers are being investigated for illegal drug use. The
ndings of a report by the RAND Corporation, leaked to the A.P., were equally
disturbing. The study found that the rates of spousal abuse and court martials
among Air Force personnel with nuclear responsibilities are much higher than those
among people with other jobs in the Air Force. “We don’t care if things go properly,”
a launch officer told RAND. “We just don’t want to get in trouble.”

The most unlikely and absurd plot element in “Strangelove” is the existence of a
Soviet “Doomsday Machine.” The device would trigger itself, automatically, if the
Soviet Union were attacked with nuclear weapons. It was meant to be the ultimate
deterrent, a threat to destroy the world in order to prevent an American nuclear
strike. But the failure of the Soviets to tell the United States about the contraption
defeats its purpose and, at the end of the lm, inadvertently causes a nuclear
Armageddon. “The whole point of the Doomsday Machine is lost,” Dr. Strangelove,
the President’s science adviser, explains to the Soviet Ambassador, “if you keep it a
secret!”

A decade after the release of “Strangelove,” the Soviet Union began work on the
Perimeter system—-a network of sensors and computers that could allow junior
military officials to launch missiles without oversight from the Soviet leadership.
Perhaps nobody at the Kremlin had seen the lm. Completed in 1985, the system
was known as the Dead Hand . Once it was activated, Perimeter would order the
launch of long-range missiles at the United States if it detected nuclear detonations
on Soviet soil and Soviet leaders couldn’t be reached. Like the Doomsday Machine
in “Strangelove,” Perimeter was kept secret from the United States; its existence was
not revealed until years after the Cold War ended.

In retrospect, Kubrick’s black comedy provided a far more accurate description of

the dangers inherent in nuclear command-and-control systems than the ones that
the American people got from the White House, the Pentagon, and the mainstream
media.
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“This is absolute madness, Ambassador,” President Merkin Muffley says in the lm,
after being told about the Soviets’ automated retaliatory system. “Why should you
build such a thing?” Fifty years later, that question remains unanswered, and
“Strangelove” seems all the more brilliant, bleak, and terrifyingly on the mark.

guide to
You can read Eric Schlosser’s guide to the
the long-secret
long-secret documents
documents that help explain the risks
America took with its nuclear arsenal, and watch and read his deconstruction of clips from
“Dr. Strangelove” and from a little-seen lm about permissive action links.

Eric Schlosser is the author of “Command and Control.”

Eric Schlosser is the author of “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus
Accident, and the Illusion of Safety,” from 2013, and a producer of the documentary
“Command and Control,” from 2016. Read more »

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