Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb 9781844577781, 9781838713652, 9781844577804

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BFI Film Classics The BFI Film Classics is a series of books that introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the film’s ‘classic’ status, together with discussion of its production and reception history, its place within a genre or national cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance, and in many cases, the author’s personal response to the film. For a full list of titles available in the series, please visit our website:

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Editorial Advisory Board Geoff Andrew, British Film Institute Edward Buscombe William Germano, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art Lalitha Gopalan, University of Texas at Austin Lee Grieveson, University College London Nick James, Editor, Sight & Sound

Laura Mulvey, Birkbeck College, University of London Alastair Phillips, University of Warwick Dana Polan, New York University B. Ruby Rich, University of California, Santa Cruz Amy Villarejo, Cornell University

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Peter Krämer

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain by Palgrave in 2014 Reprinted by Bloomsbury in 2018 on behalf of the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk

The BFI is the lead organisation for film in the UK and the distributor of Lottery funds for film. Our mission is to ensure that film is central to our cultural life, in particular by supporting and nurturing the next generation of filmmakers and audiences. We serve a public role which covers the cultural, creative and economic aspects of film in the UK. Copyright © Peter Krämer, 2014 Peter Krämer has asserted his/her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. 6 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Marian Bantjes Series text design: ketchup/SE14 Images from Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1963), © Hawk Films; Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, 1960), © Universal Pictures Company/Bryna Productions; 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

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Series: BFI Film Classics

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Contents Acknowledgments

6

Introduction

7

1 Opening

17

2 Launch

29

3 Response

46

4 Success

66

5 Failure

80

Conclusion

98

Notes

107

Credits

113

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Acknowledgments I would like to thank staff at the Stanley Kubrick Archive in the Archive and Special Collections Centre at the University of the Arts London, especially Richard Daniels. In addition, I am grateful to friends and colleagues who have invited me over the last few years to deliver lectures and workshops on Dr. Strangelove at Liverpool Hope University, the University of London, the University of Television and Film Munich (Germany), Phillips University in Marburg (Germany), the University of Flensburg (Germany), the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam (Germany) and Masaryk University in Brno (Czech Republic). Special thanks go to Christine Cornea and Rhys Owain Thomas for asking me to contribute to their study day and edited collection Dramatising Disaster. Many thanks also to Lee Grieveson and Jenna Steventon for their careful reading of, and comments on, the manuscript and to Sophia Contento for her help with the pictures.

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Introduction How do we deal with the possibility that we may not have much of a future, that not only our individual lives but also the existence of our countries, even the continuity of human civilisation as a whole may be threatened? In the two decades after the Americans’ devastating use of atomic bombs against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, people asked this question with regards to nuclear war, which many saw as unavoidable and, once it happened, as utterly destructive. One of these people was the young Jewish-American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, who, born in New York in 1928, was the grandchild of immigrants from Galicia.1 Kubrick specialised in films about crime – Killer’s Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956) – as well as films about military organisations and combat. The scope of these military stories increased from film to film – starting with a few combatants in an unidentified war evoking World War II (Fear and Desire [1953]), moving on to large groups of soldiers at the FrancoGerman front in World War I (Paths of Glory [1957]) and ending with huge armies battling for control of the Roman Empire (Spartacus [1960]).2 By the time he was working on Spartacus, Kubrick was ready to confront the possibility – which he deemed to be almost a certainty – that all of humanity might perish in a nuclear war. He started research for a film about the Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union in the late 1950s. The film eventually took the shape of a comic thriller and was released under the title Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb in 1964. The years during which Kubrick worked on this project were characterised by deeply contradictory developments in the sphere of Cold War nuclear politics.3 In October 1957, the Soviets launched

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Sputnik into Earth’s orbit; if it was possible to send a satellite into space with a rocket, it was widely expected that soon it would also be possible to use rockets (rather than just planes) to deliver nuclear bombs anywhere on the planet. Over the next few years intercontinental ballistic missiles were indeed built, and despite American worries about a ‘missile gap’, the United States soon took the lead. The number of nuclear bombs that could be delivered to enemy territory with planes and missiles increased dramatically, from 20,000 in 1960 to 29,000 in 1963 on the American side, and from 1,600 to 4,200 on the Soviet side.4 As it was calculated that a few hundred bombs could destroy a country, numerical superiority was of limited value. The basic idea of nuclear strategy was deterrence, that is each side’s ability to guarantee massive retaliation to any attack, thus discouraging the other side from launching one (this eventually came to be known as Mutual Assured Destruction or MAD). At the same time, the relationship between the superpowers was characterised by numerous crises. At least two of these – the Berlin crisis of August 1961 (when the authorities in Communist East Germany built a wall around West Berlin) and the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 (when the Americans challenged the Soviets about their stationing of nuclear missiles on Cuba) – were widely perceived to have brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. However, the so-called ‘Doomsday Clock’ which the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists had introduced in 1947 to indicate how close, according to expert opinion, humanity was to a global nuclear disaster, moved from two minutes to midnight in the mid- to late 1950s, back to seven minutes to midnight (that is, away from disaster) in the early 1960s and then to twelve minutes to midnight for the years 1963 to 1968.5 An important contribution to this positive change was what Jeffrey D. Sachs has recently called ‘JFK’s quest for peace’.6 Despite much Cold War rhetoric, John F. Kennedy’s speeches during his campaign for the 1960 presidential election as well as during his short-lived presidency from January 1961 to his assassination in November 1963, and his increasingly intensive and

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productive negotiations with the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev paved the way not only for the peaceful resolution of the Cuba crisis but also for the first ever nuclear treaty between the two superpowers – the ‘Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space and Under Water’ signed in August 1963. The cultural historians Spencer Weart and Paul Boyer have found that, after 1963, the threat of nuclear war became a much less prominent topic in public debates in the United States, because it was felt that the resolution of the Cuba crisis and the signing of the testban treaty proved that, with regards to nuclear matters, the two superpowers were able to get along with each other.7 However, deepseated private fears did not go away. Surveys across the 1950s and 1960s revealed that between one and two thirds of respondents expressed strong concerns about the prospect of nuclear war.8 One survey from the mid-1960s asked children about ‘the world as it may be about ten years from now’ and found that 70 per cent ‘spontaneously mentioned the bomb – either by envisaging a gruesome existence underground, or in terms of possible wholesale destruction’.9 Stanley Kubrick shared these fears about the future and was concerned that both the media and the American people were turning their backs on an unresolved issue. After pointing out that ‘the inadvertent use of the bomb is, and will always be the greatest risk – a nuclear Sword of Damocles, which, in the words of President Kennedy, “can be cut at any moment by accident, miscalculation or madness”’, he told Cosmopolitan magazine in November 1963: ‘If the system was safe for 99.99 per cent of the days of the year, given average luck, it would fail in thirty years.’10 As a subscriber to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the turning back of the Doomsday Clock at the beginning of the 1960s was no comfort to him, because, as he highlighted in his production notes for Dr. Strangelove, many scientists, politicians and philosophers continued to predict humanity’s nuclear self-destruction ‘by 1970’.11 In a letter from March 1964, Kubrick remarked that, in retrospect, he considered ‘the lack of concern on the part of most

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people’ as ‘one of the most alarming features’ of the Cuba crisis.12 In his experience, many had seen the threats and counterthreats as nothing more than a ‘bluff’, or had responded to the situation with ‘denial-resignation’; if they were unable to ignore the reality of the threat of nuclear war, they accepted it as a kind of fate: ‘if it happens it happens’. Kubrick also wrote in his production notes for Dr. Strangelove: There is no defense against a nuclear attack. We may shoot down fiftypercent of attacking air-craft but the remainder can easily overkill 180 million Americans. There is no forseeable defense whatever against missiles. How do we take this? I’ve read that inmates of concentration camps gave up and became ‘walking dead’ when they believed that nothing they could do, no effort or cooperation on their part would have any effect on their fate. We are pacified … by full stomachs, TV and comfortable homes but we have become ‘walking dead’. We’ve given up as individuals. We deny the threat and subconsciously experience our anxieties elsewhere.13

This is an extraordinary statement, equating concentration camp inmates with contemporary Americans living in the shadow of nuclear war. It arises from Kubrick’s previous engagement with the persecution of Jews. There had been echoes of the Nazi genocide in Spartacus, especially in shots of large numbers of corpses – men, women and children – covering the ground, seemingly piling up here and there; these shots are reminiscent of pictures taken after the liberation of concentration camps. Around the same time, Kubrick had been working on a film set in Holland during World War II; it was meant to deal with the story of a young German woman living through the Nazi occupation of the country and observing the plight of Jews.14 Kubrick had probably come across the concept of the ‘walking dead’ in the 1960 book The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age by the Jewish-Austrian émigré psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, who had come to the United States after a year in German

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concentration camps in 1938–9, or perhaps in a review of the book.15 Mostly focusing on the world of Nazi concentration camps, Bettelheim’s book established links between this most destructive form of social organisation and general trends in modern mass societies. In this he was not alone; as Kirsten Fermaglich has shown, many Jewish writers and artists in 1950s and 1960s America used comparisons with Nazi Germany, in particular with concentration camps, to develop critiques of contemporary American society.16 While not the subject of one of her case studies, Dr. Strangelove is included in Fermaglich’s list of important works in which the Nazi regime was not the subject itself, nor was it a brief metaphor or rhetorical flourish; it was instead part of a substantial comparison that lasted Spartacus (1960)

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throughout the entirety of the work of art and that shed light on the brutality of ordinary American life.17

This, then, is one of the analytical perspectives in my discussion of Kubrick’s film. I show that Dr Strangelove equates the ideas and practices of American nuclear strategy, including visions of a postwar underground society, with Nazi ideology and crimes. Only nineteen years after the end of World War II and the collapse of the Nazi regime, this parallel greatly enhanced the terrifying plausibility of the scenario depicted in the film. Consideration of the walking dead of the concentration camps also helped Kubrick to make the psychological disposition of the film’s audience, and the ways his film might engage with, and perhaps even help to change, this disposition, a main concern of his work. Hence Dr. Strangelove was not intended to present political, military or technological solutions to the problem at hand, or to take sides in ongoing public debates. Indeed, Kubrick wrote: ‘I’m against every body. The Joint Chiefs and the nitwit liberals and the sitdowners.’18 In his view, the main barriers to a solution were mental: ‘By the process of psychological denial we increase our tension and hostility, and decrease our chance to see whatever opportunities may eventually appear.’19 He was convinced that only a, by necessity, rather ill-defined sociopsychological transformation (which he hoped his film could contribute to) would help: There is no technical solution. … Disarmament, even without cheating, but unaccompanied by a profound moral change of attitudes in men and nations, could easily lead to sudden rearmament and war – you can’t take away the knowledge. The only defense is the mind of man, and I don’t think he has even begun to face the problem.20

The first step towards a possible solution, therefore, was to confront people with the reality of the nuclear situation. In order to achieve this, Kubrick insisted, even after he had decided to turn his

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nuclear thriller into a comedy, that the film should convincingly evoke the reality of military organisations, procedures, settings, equipment and personnel. In the ‘general notes’ introducing a script from 31 August 1962, he wrote: The story will be played for realistic comedy – which means the essentially truthful moods and attitudes will be portrayed accurately, with an occasionally bizarre or super-realistic crescendo. … The sets and technical details will be done realistically and carefully. We will strive for the maximum atmosphere and sense of visual reality.21

Elsewhere he pointed out that ‘the comedy flavor of the film is precisely that – a flavor, and nothing more’.22 More so than laughter, ‘[t]he most direct emotional result of the film will be suspense, excitement, and fascination’.23 However, comedy was of particular importance for the second step towards a possible solution, which was to overcome the ‘reverence’ with which ‘The Bomb’ was usually treated. Kubrick wrote in 1962 that it was necessary ‘to kick a few sacred cows, and in passing to examine some of the more widely held attitudes about The Bomb’; this could best be done with ‘an irreverent, vicious, satirical comedy’.24 As is indicated by the film’s title which Kubrick came up with in August 1962, he did not intend to employ comedy as a distancing mechanism, allowing viewers to detach themselves from what they see, and feel superior to it. Quite on the contrary, he wanted them to relax (‘stop worrying’), get involved in the action and become complicit in its terrible outcome (‘lov[ing] the bomb’). My analysis of the film shows that Kubrick worked hard to ensure that the audience became deeply involved in the psychological and military processes which bring about a nuclear catastrophe. Paying particular attention to male fantasy, the film challenges members of the audience to become – or to resist becoming – the ‘I’ in the title and learn – or resist learning – to love the bomb. Dr. Strangelove takes the viewer on an emotional rollercoaster ride,

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moving from mystery and beauty to comedy and suspense and back again, always allowing for elements of hope, yet ending in almost complete despair. Before presenting my analysis, which combines a close and systematic examination of the film with discussions of key aspects of its development, it is useful to present an outline of its complicated production history so as to offer some orientation to the reader. As we will see, Kubrick and his collaborators explored many different ways to tell a story about the nuclear world, drawing on a wide range of sources (including his own previous films), reversing direction several times, dropping key themes and formal devices along the way and making important decisions only shortly before the film’s release.25 After several years of preliminary research, Kubrick decided in 1961 to adapt the nuclear thriller Two Hours to Doom (1958) which the former Royal Air Force officer Peter George had published under the pseudonym Peter Bryant in the United Kingdom (the American title was Red Alert). The novel tells the story of an American general launching an unauthorised nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, which, if it succeeds, could provoke the Soviets to activate a special explosive device that would poison the Earth’s atmosphere and eventually kill everyone. With co-operation between the Cold War enemies and with a lot of luck, this catastrophe can be prevented. Kubrick started work on adapting George’s novel, in collaboration with the author,

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in autumn 1961. After exploring many different variations of the novel’s narrative, from March to June 1962, George and Kubrick switched to a brand new story – no longer directly related to Two Hours to Doom/Red Alert and intended to be used as the basis for both a film script and a novel. The new story dealt with nuclear matters in a humorous fashion and centred on the rise in the American political establishment of a nuclear strategist who eventually acquired the name Dr. Otto Strangelove; the title The Rise of Dr. Strangelove was considered for the project by June. However, soon thereafter, Kubrick decided to go back to his original intention and wrote his own, quite faithful adaptation of Red Alert (dated 23 July 1962), then quickly changed his mind again and imported the comical tone of the ‘Dr. Strangelove’ project and also the figure of the nuclear strategist into his adaptation of Red Alert. While nuclear destruction had featured in earlier treatments and scripts, it is only in Kubrick’s first comical adaptation of George’s novel from 1 August 1962, that a ‘Doomsday machine’ (similar to the special explosive device in George’s novel) is actually triggered at the end, ensuring the destruction of life on Earth. Although the novel’s American title was still used for this version, by the end of that month Kubrick had settled on the long title he would then stick with. The project was initially developed by Harris-Kubrick Pictures, but Kubrick’s partnership with James B. Harris was amicably dissolved in 1962. Funding came from Seven Arts, which had also financed Kubrick’s previous film, Lolita. Whereas Seven Arts had arranged for Lolita to be released by MGM (in June 1962), it sold Kubrick’s nuclear project outright to Columbia in November 1962. Principal photography – from 28 January to 24 May 1963 – and post-production took place in the United Kingdom (as had also been the case with Lolita), and the film was released in the United States and the United Kingdom at the end of January 1964. My analysis of the story, themes and style of Dr. Strangelove tries to adopt the perspective of an American cinemagoer seeing the film for the first time in 1964. I take into account what that person

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might already know about its story (from publicity and advertising), but otherwise draw only on the information given in the film itself, and only in the order in which it is revealed. In doing so, my work is informed by reports on special screenings organised by the distributor, letters from individual cinemagoers and reviews as well as other American publications from 1964. I occasionally reference such sources but by no means all the material I have consulted. The following chapters go through Dr. Strangelove in a linear fashion, each dealing with a major section of the film. The first chapter, ‘Opening’, covers the first three minutes, containing a US Air Force disclaimer, a narrative prologue and the credits. Chapter 2 (‘Launch’) deals with the film’s next twenty minutes, during which a rogue American general launches an unauthorised nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Chapter 3 (‘Response’) traces developments across the film’s next twenty-eight and a half minutes, during which political and military leaders discuss the situation in the Pentagon and initiate countermeasures. Chapter 4 (‘Success’) deals with the following nineteen and a half minutes, depicting the apparent success of these measures, while Chapter 5 (‘Failure’) covers the film’s final nineteen and a half minutes, which show their ultimate failure.

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1 Opening (0:00–3.02)26 For almost all people seeing Dr. Strangelove in the United States in 1964, the film started with a disclaimer (0:00–0:25), slowly rolling up the screen: It is the stated position of the U.S. Air Force that their safeguards would prevent the occurrence of such events as are depicted in this film. Furthermore, it should be noted that none of the characters portrayed in this film are meant to represent any real persons living or dead.27

The text is laid out in such a way that the last line consists only of the two words ‘or dead’, placed in the centre; once ‘or dead’ has disappeared at the top of the frame, the screen stays black for three seconds. This disclaimer had belatedly been added, apparently under pressure from the Air Force, to all prints a few days after the film’s release on 30 January 1964.28 Despite its external origins and late addition, the opening text was perfectly in line with the film’s overall approach to the subject of nuclear war, insofar as it addressed the audience in a contradictory fashion. In the light of the expectations raised by the film’s title and promotional campaign, it would seem to have been wholly unnecessary to include a disclaimer at all, which meant that its very inclusion was suspicious; it was protesting too much. Ever since the first public announcement of Kubrick’s new project in the summer of 1962, Americans had been kept informed about its progress by the press.29 The number of publications about the film increased across 1963 and early 1964, complemented by print advertisements and also, eventually, by trailers in cinemas and on television. From the outset, Dr. Strangelove was promoted as the

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latest film by perhaps the most celebrated representative of a new generation of American directors – whose last two films had been the hugely successful Roman epic Spartacus and the tragicomic bestseller adaptation Lolita – and as a suspenseful, yet also comical treatment of arguably the most important issue of the day (‘the hot-line suspense comedy’, read the tagline). Press reports and interviews placed a lot of emphasis on the dominant role Kubrick played in all aspects of the film’s production, and also on his extensive research on nuclear matters. Unusually, the film-maker even made a brief appearance in Dr. Strangelove’s theatrical trailer. While continuing to mention Kubrick as well as the film’s serious subject matter and its emphasis on suspense, in the last few months before its release the promotional focus shifted more towards comedy and, connected with this, towards the film’s stars (one of whom, Peter Sellers, was best known as a comedian) as well as the film’s intriguing sexual dimension. Hence widely used designs for print ads featured the line ‘Why did Dr. Strangelove want ten women One of Kubrick’s very brief appearances in the trailer

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for each man?’ One of them included pictures of Peter Sellers, who was widely reported to play three different roles in the film, and featured a seductively posed ‘Miss “Foreign Affairs”’ (Tracy Reed). Wearing a bikini, the latter also made several appearances in the theatrical trailer, in which, furthermore, the last three words of the film’s title (‘love the bomb’) were spoken by a comically exaggerated, sexy female voice. Against the backdrop of this promotional campaign, the Air Force disclaimer opening the film served precisely to remind viewers that the film did deal with an important subject, and that its story was closely related to real military organisations and personnel. More specifically, the opening text confirmed that ‘safeguards’ were indeed needed in the present situation, with the obvious implication that such safeguards could fail. The sombre visual design (simple white letters against a black background) and the silence of the disclaimer sequence, together with the foregrounding in its layout of the words ‘or dead’ and the three seconds of black frames at the end, encouraged the audience to take a more serious approach to the story they were about to see than they might have taken otherwise. The sobering impact of the opening text carries over into subsequent shots, starting with the fade in to the Columbia logo (0:25–0:34), shown briefly and silently before fading back to black. Rather than following this with the film’s credits, Dr. Strangelove fades in to Scene 1 (0:34–1:12), starting with a shot taken from high above the clouds, which completely cover the ground, with only a few mountain peaks in the distance breaking through. The film’s first, somewhat threatening sound is the blowing of fierce winds, while the camera moves towards these mountains and a male voiceover announces: For more than a year, ominous rumours had been privately circulating among high level Western leaders that the Soviet Union had been at work on what was darkly hinted to be the ultimate weapon: a doomsday device.

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The speaker’s tone of voice, his choice of words (‘ominous rumours’, ‘darkly hinted’, ‘doomsday device’) as well as the topic of this sentence (the construction of a superweapon by the Cold War enemy) confirm and intensify the sense of seriousness and foreboding created by the disclaimer. But there is also something oddly comforting about this statement, because the voiceover is located at a point in time from which it is possible to look back safely on the events about to be portrayed in the film. The narrator says ‘had been’ rather than ‘have been’, showing that he is not involved in the unfolding action but remembers it (the same could be said about the use of the past tense in the film’s title – ‘learned’ instead of ‘learn’). This suggests that, however threatening the Soviet Union’s ‘ultimate weapon’, and however apocalyptic its destructive power, might be (enough to bring about a ‘doomsday’, that is, a day of destruction affecting all of humanity), the story to be told will end in such a way that someone capable of presenting a calm voiceover will still be around. The following sentences continue to evoke the past (from the speaker’s perspective) while also hinting at future developments (from the perspective of the audience waiting for the story to begin):

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Intelligence sources traced the site of the top secret Russian project to the perpetually fog-shrouded wasteland below the Arctic peaks of the Zhokhov Islands. What they were building or why it should be located in such a remote and desolate place, no one could say.

These two statements do not only identify the location shown in the image they accompany, but also suggest a particular interpretation of that image. They evoke the ‘remote and desolate’, and also icy cold (‘Arctic’), ‘wasteland’ hidden beneath the clouds; indeed these clouds are like a ‘shroud’, something to cover the dead with. The point in time and space from which the voiceover is spoken may not be that far removed from total devastation after all. Perhaps all of the Earth’s surface will be a desolate wasteland by the end of the story. Once again quickly fading out and back in, the film next presents Scene 2 (1:12–3:02), starting with a brief, low-angle shot of a metallic vehicle with a thick round pole sticking out front. This is followed by a high-angle shot, looking down on a world covered in clouds (as it was in the prologue), and showing the tip of a metal rod being inserted into an opening on the top of a plane. The next few shots reveal that this high-angle shot was taken from the bottom of another plane (a tanker), which is transferring fuel to the bomber below. This is accompanied by the first music to be heard in the film, an instrumental version of the sentimental song ‘Try a Little Tenderness’. Even without being familiar with the song’s title, the viewer is likely to respond to the gentle melody and lush, stringheavy orchestration with vaguely romantic feelings, and even a little sadness when, just under two minutes later, the song comes to an end at the same time that the two planes disconnect and slowly drift apart (before yet another fade to black).30 Starting ten seconds into this scene, credits are superimposed on the image, the writing in them contrasting sharply with that in the disclaimer. The handwritten letters are thin, even spindly, and of very different sizes, yet the text is laid out in rectangular blocks, lending the credits a childish air.

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An audience primed by the promotional campaign, and the film’s title, to expect comedy and a little bit of sex (as well as a wellresearched and suspenseful exploration of a serious topic) could feel more at home in this credit sequence than it had with the material preceding it. It is not much of a stretch to discern an erection in the opening shot (‘that great phallus sticking it to all of us’, in the words

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of one of Kubrick’s correspondents)31 and gentle sexual intercourse across the rest of the scene. Kubrick was perfectly happy with such a response. He declared in a letter to a viewer: ‘The intention was to make an irrevent [sic] sexual joke at the start of the film in order to create the right mood.’32 Whether audiences understood the credit sequence in sexual terms or not, it certainly constitutes a shift away from the seriousness, indeed the menace, of the opening disclaimer and the narrative prologue towards the beauty (and eroticism) of flying and the warmth of tender feelings. By the end of its credit sequence, then, Dr. Strangelove has firmly established the possibility of radical shifts in mood in the way it proceeds, and also raised specific questions about the story which the remainder of the film can be expected to answer: is it true that the Soviet Union is building a ‘doomsday device’, and, if so, what exactly is it? Having been reminded of the film’s connection to non-filmic military realities by the disclaimer, one may also ask whether such a doomsday device already exists or is being planned for real.33 And going back to the film’s title, there is the question of who Dr. Strangelove is, and whether it is this character or someone else who has learned to love the bomb.

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How did Kubrick and his collaborators come up with this opening? The starting point for their work was Peter George’s novel, which opened with a foreword: ‘This is the story of a battle … fought with modern nuclear weapons.’34 It linked this tale directly, and threateningly, to the reality of the reader’s world: ‘it is a story which could happen. It may even be happening as you read these words.’ Finally, the foreword emphasised what was at stake. If the events of the novel were happening for real, they would spell ‘doom’: ‘Yours and mine and every other living creature’s.’ Among the many variations of the novel’s story Kubrick and George worked on, there is a long memo dated 25 October 1961, outlining, among other things, a possible introduction to the film’s narrative – in the form of ‘a TV debate between leading civilian and military strategists, a discussion within the Department of Defense, [or] a hearing before the appropriate Senate committee’ – which would explain ‘the dilemmas which face the statesmen and people of the world today’.35 Then there is a script entitled The Delicate Balance of Terror from 12 February 1962, which also makes a considerable effort to establish a direct link between the story to be told in it and the real world.36 Its very title reproduces the title of an influential article published by the nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter in the political journal Foreign Affairs in 1959.37 In addition the script for The Delicate Balance of Terror includes a prologue covering the following topics: 1. The effects of thermonuclear weapons. 2. What two 25-megaton bombs would do to N[ew]Y[ork]. 3. Stockpile of US-SU material.

While the script fails to explain exactly how these topics were to be presented, it does mention a ‘Documentary Sequence of Our Defense Forces’, showing planes, missiles, ships etc. At this point, then, Kubrick and George were thinking about opening the film with a powerful reminder of the reality, as well as the huge destructive

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potential, of nuclear weapons. The fictional story to follow this prologue was to be understood as a scenario that could lead to actual nuclear war. The creation of scenarios dealing with developments that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons was central to the work of civilian nuclear strategists, who worked at universities or think tanks, notably the RAND Corporation.38 Several of them wrote to George to express their appreciation of his novel. Thomas Schelling of the Centre for International Affairs at Harvard University told George in 1960 that ‘[o]n its merits as a kind of “war-game exercise” your book is as good as any serious analysis I have seen’, adding that ‘a large number of professionally responsible people in this country share that evaluation of it’.39 Schelling remarked that in many ways a novel such as George’s was superior to the war games of nuclear strategists: ‘The great advantage of fiction is that people can be enticed, for the sake of the story, to accept premises that they would otherwise reject as unreasonable, when they are really only unfamiliar.’ The admiration for George’s work went so far that Herman Kahn of the RAND Corporation, arguably the leading nuclear strategist of the time, referenced George’s novel in his widely known 1960 book On Thermonuclear War,40 and in 1961 invited George to join the new national security research institute he was setting up. George’s role there would be to develop ‘“scenarios” … about how crises might start and end, and how wars might start and be terminated’.41 In fact, George’s novel had first been recommended to Kubrick by a military strategist in the UK,42 and Kubrick, in addition to having read many of their publications, also knew Kahn, Schelling and other so-called ‘defense intellectuals’ personally.43 Since the US Air Force worked closely with these strategists, it is understandable that it would be concerned about the impact of a Hollywood adaptation (albeit a comical one) of George’s novel, and demand the inclusion of a disclaimer. One area of great concern must have been the film’s reference to a ‘doomsday device’, because the idea of a superbomb that could destroy all life on Earth had been introduced

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into public debate by the nuclear scientist and peace campaigner Leo Szilard in 1950,44 and it featured prominently in Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War. The film’s suggestion that the Soviets might actually build such a device and that, due to a series of unauthorised actions and unfortunate accidents, it could be triggered, was something the Air Force would want to refute by stating that its ‘safeguards would prevent the occurrence of such events as are depicted in this film’. But, as I have argued, this disclaimer served precisely to prime the audience for taking the film’s story more seriously than they would have done without it. Thus, the film’s disclaimer fulfilled very much the same function as the novel’s foreword and as the prologue of The Delicate Balance of Power. Kubrick also considered a radical alternative to such attempts to link the film’s story directly, and threateningly, to the audience’s reality. The first script carrying the film’s eventual title (from 31 August 1962) opens with a parody of the MGM logo: ‘Main title card – A weird hydra-headed, furry creature snarls at camera.’45 The film is said to be a ‘Macro-Galaxy-Meteor Picture’. After the initial credits the camera traverses the universe and then approaches the Earth, while a narrator intones: The bizarre and often amusing pages which make up this odd story [were discovered] in the Great Northern Desert by members of our Earth Probe. … Our story begins sometime during the latter half of the Earth’s so-called Twentieth Century.

At this time, ‘the full consequences of nuclear weapons seemed to escape all governments and their people’. This prologue positions the audience in the distant future and among alien explorers, thus removing them as far as possible from the story which is about to unfold, while also distancing that story from their own reality. Revised versions of this script from the beginning of 1963 were the basis for the novelisation of the film that George was writing, in consultation with Kubrick, from January 1963 onwards.46 Published

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later that year, under the film’s title, this novelisation opens with a ‘Publisher’s Note’: ‘The pages which make up this bizarre and ancient comedy were discovered at the bottom of a deep crevice in the Great Northern Desert of planet Earth.’47 This is followed by an ‘Introduction’ which, much like the voiceover in the 31 August 1962 script, explains the background of the story, and does so from the perspective of aliens in the distant future, looking back on Earth’s history. The main purpose of this Introduction (and of the opening narration in the script) was not to immerse the audience in the dangers of the military and political realities of the world around them, but to offer them a fresh, outside perspective on these realities. For example, the narrator points out that the two superpowers ‘were not on friendly terms, and we find this difficult to understand, because both were governed by power systems which seem to us basically similar’.48 Kubrick was shooting Dr. Strangelove at the same time that he worked with George on the novelisation, using a script which contained the futuristic framing story and parodistic credits.49 But later in 1963 he dropped these elements and went back to the framing strategy employed in George’s novel and the February 1962 script for The Delicate Balance of Terror. Kubrick decided that it would, after all, be more effective, for the kind of emotional responses he wanted to provoke, not to allow viewers to project themselves into a distant future but instead to remind them – with the help of the US Air Force disclaimer and an ominous prologue – of the terrifying implications of the story they were going to see for their own lives. The only trace of the futuristic frame left in the finished film is the use of the past tense in the opening voiceover and also perhaps the camera’s heavenly perspective in the prologue (and, as we will see, in the final scene). However, this futuristic frame did serve as a point of departure for Kubrick’s next project, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which moved the aliens’ visit to Earth from the distant future of the Dr. Strangelove framing story (when humanity has already

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destroyed itself) into the distant past (when proto-humans are on the verge of extinction and need to be saved).50 2001 also depicts another, transformative encounter between humans, now (as Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was written parallel to the making of the film, explains) on the verge of nuclear selfdestruction, and alien technology at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The alien storytellers of the Dr. Strangelove script and novelisation thus become the saviours of proto-humans and of humankind in 2001. But why does humankind need saving in the first place? How and why does it move towards nuclear self-destruction?

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2 Launch (3:02–23:14) In sharp contrast to the bright skies of the credit sequence, Dr. Strangelove next fades in to a night-time aerial shot looking down on what is soon identified as an Air Force base (Scene 3, 3:02–5:36).51 There are various buildings, a runway, a radar installation, an Air Force plane on the ground, another in the air. There is no music, but planes and other machinery can be heard, sounding not unlike the fierce winds of the prologue. After the frivolity of the credit sequence, the film appears to have returned to the seriousness of the prologue and the disclaimer. Yet, the interior shots that follow work to combine the two modes. When a buzzing sound starts in a brightly lit room filled with computers, an officer wearing a British uniform and sporting an unusually elongated moustache (Peter Sellers), emerges from behind the huge computer printout he is holding up, and walks to a desk where he is handed a phone: ‘General Ripper for you, sir.’ The officer introduces himself

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on the phone: ‘Group Captain Mandrake speaking.’ The film cuts back and forth between him and the caller, who is a cigar-chomping American general (Sterling Hayden), sitting in an unevenly lit office and speaking slowly with a deep, gruff voice, which contrasts with the upper-class English speech (higher-pitched and in places a bit slurry) of his interlocutor. As it (eventually) turns out, this conversation revolves around the outbreak of war, but it gets to this point only in a very roundabout fashion: RIPPER

Do you recognise my voice, Mandrake?

MANDRAKE

I do, sir. Why do you ask?

RIPPER

Why do you think I ask?

MANDRAKE

Well, I don’t know, sir. We spoke just a few moments ago on the phone, didn’t we?

RIPPER

You don’t think I’d ask if you recognise my voice unless it was pretty damned important, do you, Mandrake?

MANDRAKE

No, I don’t, sir, no.

RIPPER

Alright, let’s see if we can stay on the ball.

In the light of the importance of the information and the commands which are about to be communicated, this exchange takes as its starting point the need for anyone receiving orders to make sure that the person who delivers them is authorised to do so. It would be reasonable, then, for Mandrake, once he has received his orders, to ensure that he is in fact talking to Ripper. Yet, absurdly, it is Ripper who starts the conversation by asking Mandrake whether he recognises Ripper as Ripper. As this makes no obvious sense, Mandrake, sensibly, wants to know why Ripper is asking this question. Instead of giving an explanation, Ripper challenges Mandrake, as if it were Mandrake, rather than Ripper himself, who is asking stupid questions. The implication is that the general is entitled to ask whatever he likes, and Mandrake just has to assume that his superior officer has good reasons for doing so; questioning

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this comes close to insubordination, and definitely delays the important business at hand. This part of the conversation thus ends with a rebuke for Mandrake. What are we, as spectators, supposed to make of this? Does this dialogue constitute a satirical comment, made by the film-maker, on military rituals, or can we understand it in terms of the two characters engaged in it? Ripper’s behaviour could be understood as a sign of mental problems, or, quite the contrary, as a demonstration of his skills as a manipulative communicator. After all, Mandrake is so befuddled when Ripper finally tells him to ‘stay on the ball’ that he is unlikely to question anything the general will say from now on. In this way, Ripper ensures that his orders will be carried out without further discussion. And these orders are momentous. The base is to be put on ’condition red’, ‘Plan R’ is to be transmitted to its bomb wing (the bombers having already reached their ‘fail-safe points’), and all privately owned radios on the base are to be impounded to prevent instructions being sent to saboteurs. While the viewer is given no explanation of ‘condition red’ or ‘Plan R’, it sounds very serious indeed; in fact it is so serious that Mandrake assumes it to be an exercise rather than the real thing. In return, Ripper reveals that ‘we are in a shooting war’; he says that he does not know any details, but was called on the ‘red phone’ and told to issue Plan R. Mandrake’s response (‘Is it that bad, sir?’) suggests that Plan R involves an attack on the enemy, which, one has to assume (‘Are the Russians involved?’, asks Mandrake), is the Soviet Union. The Cold War has just turned hot, but it is not yet known what exactly the Soviets have done to make it so. After Ripper’s confusing opening gambit, the conversation would appear to be straightforward and deadly serious, yet there continue to be irritations. For example, Mandrake’s response to the announcement that war has broken out is a softly spoken ‘Oh, hell.’ This seems comically inadequate to the gravity of the situation, but, then again, what could one possibly say in the face of such news? There is also the prominent display, both in the computer room and

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in Ripper’s office, of a poster saying ‘Peace is our Profession’, which, in the context of what transpires, is deeply ironic. Then there is the name plate placed in the foreground of several shots of General Ripper sitting at his desk; it gives his full name as ‘Jack D. Ripper’. Whatever one may have thought about ‘Mandrake’ (man-drake?) and ‘Ripper’ as last names (they are certainly unusual), ‘Jack D. Ripper’ is obviously a joke. Surely, no parents would ever consider giving their son a name sounding like the moniker attributed to the most notorious serial sex murderer in history – Jack the Ripper. Hence we are invited to understand the name as the film-maker’s comment on the kind of person the general is. On the one hand, this (together with his phallic cigar) expands on the sexual elements so prominent in the credit sequence. On the other hand, it (together with Ripper’s contributions to the early part of the conversation) raises serious questions about anything he says or does. The scene thus operates on several levels. It combines the seriousness and menace of the film’s disclaimer and prologue with the sexual implications and humorousness of its credit sequence. The location shooting and detailed set design situate the action in what,

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for all we know, looks like a real Air Force base. Much of the dialogue, in particular the use of military jargon, sounds much as we might imagine a conversation in such a setting to sound. And the military story for which the prologue has whet our appetite gets off to a dramatic start with the announcement that war has broken out. All of this encourages us to take the first scene at face value, to take it seriously, yet, as mentioned before, there are aspects of this scene (certain lines of dialogue, performance elements, props and character names) which point in a different – satirical, humorous – direction, inviting us to laugh, or at least smile, at what we see and hear. This applies to much of the remainder of Dr. Strangelove, with most scenes offering viewers the opportunity both to immerse themselves in serious drama and to engage in a humorous response to it. However, there are also scenes which are not characterised by such dual address and instead revert back to the straightforward seriousness of the prologue. Scene 4 (5:36–6:17) is an example. Once again, the camera is placed high above the ground, with a voiceover providing important background information. Accompanying shots of various planes in the sky (a mixture of documentary footage, comparable to that used in the credit sequence, and what is fairly obviously trick photography, using models and back projection),52 the narrator explains that, in order to protect itself against a ‘surprise nuclear attack’, the United States maintains a large fleet of B-52 bombers ‘airborne twenty-four hours a day’ (which, retroactively, explains the need for the in-flight refuelling shown in the credit sequence). Their destructive power exceeds human imagination: ‘Each B-52 can deliver a nuclear bomb load of fifty megatons, equal to sixteen times the total explosive force of all the bombs and shells used by all the armies in World War II.’ This statement lends credence to the rumours, mentioned in the prologue, about a Soviet ‘doomsday device’ (especially for those viewers who were aware of the public debate about such a device mentioned in Chapter 1). If a single bomber (in a large fleet of such bombers on the American side, matched, no doubt, by a Soviet fleet

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of considerable size) can unleash the explosive power of many world wars, it is entirely conceivable that an even more advanced explosive device may doom all of humanity. Yet, even without such a doomsday device, the bombers (together with the nuclear missiles in possession of the two superpowers) would seem to constitute a threat to all life in any country they are aimed at. What is more, the American B-52s are only ‘two hours from their targets inside Russia’, which means that, once they are ordered to attack (such an order, we can assume, being a central component of Plan R), there will not be much time to stop them. The stakes, then, are incredibly high. Scene 5 (6:17–11:11) for the first time brings the human costs of nuclear war into focus. It is set in the crowded interior of a bomber (named Leper Colony in the novelisation, although this name is never mentioned in the film), a largely hand-held camera observing the crew reading, eating, doing card tricks or taking a rest, before a message is received. A rapid series of medium shots and (extreme) close-ups shows, step by step, how the radio operator decodes the message as ‘Wing attack Plan R’, and – once this has been relayed to the unbelieving captain of the plane, Major Kong (Slim Pickens) –

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how Kong in turn checks that decoding. When he is questioned whether this might be a test, Kong declares that Plan R would not have been issued unless Washington, DC and other American cities had already been destroyed by a Soviet attack. Once everyone has settled down at their stations, he gives a speech, acknowledging the shock everyone feels about the news of a nuclear attack on the United States and their apprehension about ‘nuclear combat’ (which will entail the destruction of whatever target they have been assigned). He also reminds his listeners that people back home are now counting on them to do their job. As in Scene 3, the seriousness of the action (which is supported by the detailed sets and the close attention to military procedure)53 is complemented by a number of humorous elements: Kong’s name54 as well as his thick Texan accent and colourful language (‘this is it: nuclear combat, toe to toe with the Russkies’); the large amount of chewing gum ‘Goldie’, the radio operator (Paul Tamarin), is stuffing

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into his mouth; the cowboy hat that Kong puts on; the instrumental version of ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’, a song closely associated with the American Civil War, which somewhat ironically (after all they are about to march into battle, instead of returning from it) accompanies his speech;55 the, in the light of the outbreak of nuclear war, incongruous final part of Kong’s speech about ‘promotions’ and ‘personal citations’. There is also, once again, a sexual element, because the first two shots inside the plane show Kong studying a Playboy centrefold. This sexual element is central to Scene 6 (11:11–14:18), which starts with the view of a scantily clad woman (Tracy Reed) lying on a bed, in a pose similar to the one adopted by the Playboy playmate – indeed the novelisation points out that they are the same woman (‘Miss Foreign Affairs’).56 In sharp contrast to the rapid editing and hand-held camerawork of Scene 5, the action of this scene is captured in a single, three-minute shot, the camera being static with the exception of two slight reframings due to the movement of actors. Sexuality is foregrounded throughout. Two walls of what appears to be a hotel room are covered in mirrors (perhaps to allow the

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occupants to observe themselves while having sex). When the woman (who we find out is Miss Scott, the secretary of General Turgidson – ‘turgid son’, another sexual reference) stands up and answers the phone, she immediately drops her official voice for some vocal intimacy when she recognises her interlocutor Colonel Puntrich and calls him ‘Freddie’. It is difficult to imagine this conversation taking place in a country which has just been subjected to a Soviet nuclear attack, as the audience has been led to assume up to this point. Miss Scott now has to relay everything the colonel says to her boss – and apparent lover – who is occupied in the bathroom. This once again introduces a delay into the communication of extremely important information (similar to the delay in the phone conversation between Ripper and Mandrake): a message from Burpelson Air Force Base to its bomb wing was intercepted and decoded as Plan R; the base cannot be reached. When Turgidson (George C. Scott), wearing underpants and a Hawaiian shirt, finally comes to pick up the phone himself, he is surprised to find out that there is ‘nothing cooking on the threat board’, which confirms what the audience has already suspected, namely that there has been no

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Soviet strike. Why then has General Ripper launched the attack on the Soviet Union? The general does not outwardly appear to be too troubled by all this, but he declares ‘condition red’ and calls a meeting in the ‘war room’. The fact that he is able to do this suggests that he is placed near the top of the military hierarchy (perhaps as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff).57 That he knows the commander of Burpelson Air Force Base by name indicates that he belongs to the Air Force, which is responsible for almost all American nuclear forces, including both bombers and land-based missiles. This might help to explain his parting shot to Miss Scott who is disappointed that he is going to leave her and, teasingly, remarks that she is not ready to go to sleep yet. Turgidson says: ‘Tell you what you do: You just start your countdown and old Bucky will be back here before you can say “blastoff!” .’58 Turgidson’s wordplay, equating a rocket (or missile) launch with penetration and/or orgasm, suggests not only that military men like him relate to women in terms of the weapons technologies they deal with, but also that they can relate to these technologies in sexual terms. Perhaps it is men like Turgidson

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who, as the film’s title announces, ‘love the bomb’ – precisely because it delivers the biggest blast of all. The next two scenes show key elements of Plan R being carried out, and, in contrast to Scene 6, they (much like Scenes 3 and 5) contain very few comical or sexual elements. In Scene 7 (14:18–15:46), Ripper gives a speech, via loudspeakers, to his troops, who are shown listening attentively all around the base. He orders them to shoot at anyone approaching the base, even if they are wearing ‘the uniform of our own troops’: ‘if in doubt, shoot first and ask questions afterwards. … Today the nation is counting on us.’ Just like Major Kong, Ripper here justifies the use of extreme violence with reference to the national interest – and, as was the case on the Leper Colony, no one seems to question the rightfulness of the violent action they are told to engage in. During Ripper’s speech, a jeep is shown, packed with the radios he had previously ordered to be collected. Mandrake finds another radio in the computer room and gets excited when he switches it on and hears music, revealing to him what the audience already knows: there has been no Soviet attack. He rushes out.

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In Scene 8 (15:46–18:30), which features another rendition of ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’ (as do all the scenes in the Leper Colony throughout the film, whereas there is no non-diegetic music elsewhere in the film except for the credit sequence and the film’s last scene), a crew member on the bomber gets the printed ‘attack plan’ for Plan R out of the safe, revealing pictures of scantily clad women pinned to the inside of its door. Major Kong then reads out detailed instructions for his crew. These concern, first of all, the blocking of all radio communications unless they are preceded by the code prefix ‘OPE’; this is ‘to ensure that the enemy cannot … plant false transmissions’. Second, Kong identifies the targets they are to hit with their two bombs: the missile complexes at Laputa and near Borchov. Scenes 7 and 8 (like Scenes 3, 5 and 6) show military hierarchies in action, with commanding officers giving orders to be carried out by their subordinates. In both cases (and also in Scene 3), the orders are centrally concerned with cutting off connections between a military entity (the base, the bomber) and the outside world so that nothing can interfere with the attack on the Soviet Union. A challenge to the smooth functioning of military hierarchies is rebuffed in Scene 9 (18:30–23:14). It shows Mandrake hurrying to, and then entering, Ripper’s office. Unlike the preceding two scenes, which are made up of numerous shots taken from varied positions, this one is mostly made up of two camera set-ups. The first part of the conversation between the two officers is captured in a threeminute-long, static shot, taken from behind Ripper. This gives way to three brief shots showing how Ripper reveals a gun to Mandrake and the latter’s anxious response. The final (one-and-a-half-minute-long) part of the conversation is made up mostly of a tight close-up of Ripper, interrupted only by two brief close-ups of Mandrake. Across the scene, the focus shifts from Mandrake’s excited talk and actions (if Ripper refuses to respond to the fact that music is playing on the radio, Mandrake says that he will go and issue the recall code for the bombers himself) to Ripper’s revelations: he has issued Plan R

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without authorisation, is the only one who knows the recall code and will not reveal it to anyone. Ripper’s deep voice and measured speech, which puts emphasis on almost every word, contrasts once again with Mandrake’s highpitched, rapid delivery. Mandrake is clearly distressed but tries to maintain conversational niceties (‘After all, we don’t want to start a

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nuclear war unless we really have to’), whereas Ripper is calm and direct. He lays out his true intentions: While we are chatting so enjoyably here, a decision is being made by the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the war room at the Pentagon, and when they realise there is no possibility of recalling the wing, there will be only one course of action open – total commitment.

He also explains why, in his view, it was necessary for him to take such drastic action: ‘War is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training or the inclination for strategic thought.’ In other words, based on a well-informed and clear-headed assessment of the Soviet threat, military leaders such as himself have to force politicians to take certain actions. This may be illegal, undemocratic, even immoral, but it is not necessarily irrational. It is only when Ripper describes the Soviet threat that the doubts about his mental state raised in Scene 3 by his puzzling conversational style and his name are given some credence: ‘I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.’ The last ten words hint at some kind of sexual anxiety, which might connect with what his name implies about him (namely a tendency to act in shockingly violent ways as a consequence of conflicted feelings about sexually active women). Ripper is probably crazy. How did Kubrick and his collaborators arrive at this particular scenario of how nuclear war could get started? George and Kubrick had explored several ways in which this might happen. A story outline from October 1961 has a Soviet officer launching an unauthorised attack on the United States.59 In a treatment from January 1962, Soviet bombers approach the United States for unknown reasons and the launching of Soviet rockets (later explained as part of the Soviet space programme) is mistaken for a missile attack, which leads to an

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American counterattack.60 A similar scenario – sometimes without the Soviet bombers approaching the United States, so that it is only the rocket launch which causes all the problems – is used in many later treatments and scripts, for example, in George’s screenplay The Delicate Balance of Terror from February 1962, and in handwritten notes from July 1962.61 In the end, though, Kubrick decided to return to George’s novel and to follow it very closely. In Two Hours to Doom/Red Alert, General Quinten, the commanding officer of Sonora Air Force Base, issues Plan R to his bomb wing and puts the base on ‘Warning Red conditions’. The crew of the Alabama Angel receives and starts carrying out Plan R, and General Franklin, the head of the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command, is informed about Quinten’s order. By being given insights into Quinten’s thought process, the truth about his actions is soon revealed to the reader (and only later to his executive officer Major Howard).62 He is convinced that the Soviet Union is getting ready for an all-out attack on the United States, waiting only for the required number of intercontinental ballistic missiles to become operational, which will happen in ‘a matter of weeks’.63 He calculates that the Soviet attack will destroy almost all American nuclear forces, so that the American counterattack cannot be effective. In the light of this situation, Quinten concludes, the survival of the United States can only be assured, and millions of American lives can only be saved, by striking first. He believes that the top military leaders, although some of them are ‘entirely of his way of thinking’ and ‘would have considered his plan logical, inexpensive, and entirely necessary’, are held back by politicians, which is why he has to act himself, launching the attack and thus forcing the politicians to get behind him.64 When talking to Howard, Quinten reiterates the threat posed by the Soviet Union: ‘Remember what they did to Hungary in ’56? They won’t be able to do that again, not ever.’65 Later on in their conversation, he speaks about the spread of Communism ‘[t]o the Balkans, to Eastern Europe, to China’: ‘Since the war a dozen countries have gone Communist. Name me one that’s shaken off Communism.’66

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Howard, who is initially horrified, begins to agree with Quinten, but changes his mind again when the base is being attacked: A moment ago, Howard had found Quinten’s reasoning valid. He had almost spoken right out in favour of the general’s action. But this was something else. Out there Americans were killing Americans. That couldn’t be justified ever.67

The novel has put Howard in a position where, much like the reader, he is asked to judge the rightness or wrongness of Quinten’s actions. It would seem that the reader is expected to go along with Howard’s judgments. In the above quotation, Howard makes a categorical distinction between ‘Russians’ and Americans, which enables him to accept the death of many millions of the former but not of a few dozen of the latter. This echoes the way in which Quinten also makes his case by referring to the radical and essential otherness of ‘Russians’. Their ‘real purpose’ is ‘world domination’: ‘Nationally speaking, it’s nothing new. Czarist Russia was essentially expansionist. And the nature of a people doesn’t change overnight.’68 Later he introduces the idea that at heart Russians are an incomprehensibly alien, unimaginably violent Asiatic people. He tells Howard that, shortly after the end of World War II, he witnessed Russian troops … still moving forward. I watched the Mongolian troops enjoying themselves. By that I mean raping women. By women I mean any female they could lay their hands on between six and sixty. … they were animals.69

As we will see, such racist ideas about ‘Russians’ are also central to the thinking of the American president in the novel, but Kubrick’s film works to neutralise or expose them. It starts to do so by replacing Quinten’s rational argument for a first strike against the Soviet Union, which is underpinned by a belief in racial difference,

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with Ripper’s blunt declaration that he can no longer accept hostile Communist activities, especially where they concern the purity of ‘our precious bodily fluids’. This not only sounds delusional, but hints at a misguided ‘racial’ concern with blood and semen. It should be noted that, by the end of the ‘Attack’ section of the film, none of the questions raised in its opening sequence has been answered. But, as we will see, the film’s next section does finally reveal the truth about the Soviet Union’s doomsday device, and also explain who Dr. Strangelove is. In addition, it addresses the questions emerging from this section. To what extent is General Ripper mentally disturbed? Will the president and top military leaders support his attack? Could Ripper possibly be convinced to recall his bombers?

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3 Response (23:14–51:46) Like the ‘Launch’ section of the film, Scene 10 (23:14–34:03) begins with an aerial view of a military structure, in this case the Pentagon. This is followed by the introduction of a new interior location – the war room which was mentioned as the site of an important meeting by General Turgidson in Scene 6. Extreme high-angle long shots emphasise the vastness of the room and the smallness of the human figures seated around a huge roundtable. This is intensified by the large maps of North America and the Soviet Union covering the walls above these figures, and by the fact that much of the room remains in darkness.70 In purely visual terms (which are complemented by echoing sounds), the military and political leaders having to decide the fate of the world appear small, overwhelmed by their surroundings, sitting in a pool of light but lost in a larger darkness. Closer shots, occasionally interspersed with extreme long shots, follow the conversation between General Turgidson and President

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Muffley (Peter Sellers),71 in which Turgidson recaps the events so far. After being told that Ripper’s bomb wing will ‘begin penetrating Russian radar cover within twenty-five minutes’, the president asks: ‘I find this difficult to understand. I was under the impression that I was the only one in authority to order the use of nuclear weapons.’ When Turgidson admits that Ripper has ‘exceeded his authority’, the president wants to know how. Turgidson reminds him of the ‘provisions of Plan R’, which, although he approved them, the president clearly cannot remember. He is thus in the same position as the viewer who first heard about Plan R in Scene 3 but never received an explanation. Now Turgidson elucidates: Plan R is an emergency war plan in which a lower echelon commander may order nuclear retaliation after a sneak attack if the normal chain of command has been disrupted. … the idea was to discourage the Russkies from any hope that they could knock out Washington, and yourself, as part of a general sneak attack and escape retaliation because of lack of proper command and control.

In other words, Plan R tries to prevent a situation in which no one is authorised to launch a nuclear counterattack. Why is this so important? Because without such a plan, there is a concern, as Turgidson reminds the president with regard to the debates leading up to the development of Plan R, about ‘our deterrent lacking credibility’. For the president – and the viewer – this is a quick lesson in the basics of nuclear strategy, which goes something like this: the enemy will only be deterred from attacking by the knowledge that they will be destroyed in retaliation. If the United States cannot guarantee such retaliation (for example, by not assuring ‘proper command and control’ after a first strike by the Soviet Union), then this will tempt the Soviets to attack. If, however, the Soviets know about Plan R, then they are discouraged from such a surprise attack because there will always be someone left who can initiate a retaliatory attack.

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Unfortunately, once Plan R becomes part of the Air Force’s repertoire of ‘war plans’, there is nothing to stop a ‘lower echelon commander’ from pretending that he has been informed about a Soviet first strike and launching his bomb wing against the Soviet Union, which is what Ripper has done. What is more, once the ‘go’ code has been given it will be difficult to recall the planes because, as we have seen (and as is explained to the president in this scene), the bombers can only be contacted with a special recall code prefix known only to the base commander. The whole system of nuclear deterrence, then, rests on the total reliability of people like General Ripper, or the ‘human element’, in Turgidson’s words. When Turgidson reads out a phone message Ripper gave to the headquarters of the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command (telling them that they had ‘no other choice’ but to support his attack to avoid being ‘totally destroyed by red retaliation’, but also mentioning ‘the purity and essence of our natural fluids’), the president quickly concludes that Ripper is ‘a psychotic’ – which is what the audience has already come to suspect as well. The president now complains that a mentally disturbed person should have been prevented from getting into a position of such power: ‘General Turgidson, when you instituted the human reliability tests, you assured me there was no possibility of such a thing ever occurring.’ Perhaps inappropriately, but not in fact unreasonably, Turgidson responds: ‘I don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn the whole programme because of a single slip-up.’ This goes to the heart of the matter. With nuclear weapons being so powerful, nuclear strategy so complex (even the president cannot remember some of its key elements) and the ‘balance’ of nuclear threats and counterthreats between the two superpowers so ‘delicate’, it does not take an official act of war to bring about a catastrophe. In particular, the system is vulnerable to human failure, in this case a mental breakdown, but also, of course, to unauthorised but wholly rational action (as in George’s novel), misunderstandings between people and technical accidents. As mentioned in the

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Introduction, Kubrick was not alone in thinking that the system of deterrence was bound to break down sooner or later, because no system can have a perfect operational record – and we do not usually expect it to have such a record and are able to accept a certain amount of risk. The problem is that in the case of nuclear deterrence a ‘single slip-up’ may spell disaster for millions of people. This is the point at which the discussion in the war room enters a new phase, because the president now has to decide how to respond to the crisis. While his attention shifts from Turgidson to General Faceman from the army (Gordon Tanner) and Staines (Jack Creley), who appears to be his closest aide, Turgidson receives a phone call from Miss Scott. This is highly inappropriate (‘I told you never to call me here’), and the shift in register from the complex technicalities and high drama of military strategy to a man’s attempt to pacify his impatient lover provides welcome comic relief (after all, the conversation in the war room has already been going on for six long minutes). It turns out that Miss Scott is not concerned about the ‘blastoff’ Turgidson promised her but about the longer-term prospects of their relationship. The film only presents his side of the conversation, most of it in an uninterrupted

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medium shot: ‘Of course, it isn’t only physical. I deeply respect you as a human being. Some day I’m gonna make you Mrs. Buck Turgidson.’ In their own, under the circumstance of the nuclear crisis rather incongruous way, these lines address the issue that men like Turgidson are in a position to instrumentalise other people for their own gratification, and not relate to them as human beings. The fact that the film (and Turgidson himself) has already linked men’s sexual relations with women to their relationship with weaponry, has troubling implications for the decisions to be made in the war room. These lines also perhaps imply that men’s selfishness can be restrained through the institution of marriage, which once again is ominous because none of the principal characters involved in the crisis appears to be married (at least they never refer to their wives or families).72 After this interlude, Turgidson rejoins the roundtable discussion when the president orders an army division to enter Burpelson Air Force Base and get General Ripper on the phone to him. Turgidson argues that this is the wrong response to the crisis, not only because under ‘condition red’, the base will defend itself, but, more fundamentally, because there is no time for such actions. He systematically lays out the situation as he sees it (and here he closely follows Ripper’s reasoning): One: our hopes for recalling the 843rd bomb wing are quickly being reduced to a very low order of probability. Two: in less than fifteen minutes from now the Russkies will be making radar contact with the planes. Three: when they do they will go absolutely ape and strike back with everything they’ve got. Four: if, prior to this time, we have done nothing to suppress their retaliatory capabilities, we will suffer virtual annihilation. Now, five: if, on the other hand, we were to immediately launch an all-out and co-ordinated attack on all their airfields and missile bases, we’d stand a damn good chance of catching them with their pants down.

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The system of nuclear deterrence is based on the firm conviction of both sides that any nuclear attack will lead to devastating retaliation. Since it seems unlikely that the bomb wing can be stopped, Turgidson is correct in assuming that, as soon as the Soviets become aware of the attack (‘in less than fifteen minutes’), the logic of nuclear strategy requires them to launch a counterattack. The only way to reduce the impact of this attack is to destroy their ability to carry it out, through the launch of missiles which will quickly hit Soviet missile bases as well as Soviet bombers on the ground. Turgidson proudly states: ‘an unofficial study which we undertook of this eventuality indicated that we would destroy 90% of their nuclear capabilities. We would therefore prevail and suffer only modest and acceptable casualties from their remaining force.’ The last few words are spoken with a big, triumphant smile on his face. He obviously enjoys the prospect of this victory, and does not appear to have any consideration for the humanity of those who will fall into the category of ‘acceptable casualties’. But there is more to Turgidson’s argument than his selfish wish for a grand victory. After all, he genuinely believes that there are only two alternatives – the ‘virtual annihilation’ of the United States or ‘modest and acceptable casualties’:

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It is necessary now to make a choice – to choose between two admittedly regrettable but nevertheless distinguishable postwar environments. One where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you have 150 million people killed.

Put in these terms, it is much more difficult to disagree with Turgidson’s demand for an all-out attack on the Soviet Union. However, the president does not accept the general’s premise that these are the only two choices: ‘there are still alternatives open to us’. This allows him to consider matters of political and moral principle: ‘it is the avowed policy of our country never to strike first with nuclear weapons’ (General Ripper’s attack does not count in this context because it was not ‘an act of national policy’); the all-out attack proposed by Turgidson would be ‘mass murder, not war’. In order to express the magnitude of this crime, the president compares it to what he perceives to be its closest historical precedent: ‘I will not go down in history as the greatest mass murderer since Adolf Hitler.’ In other words, he compares Turgidson’s advice to Hitler’s policies (a key component of which, not coincidentally, was an all-out attack on the Soviet Union, leading to many millions of casualties). Interestingly, during the latter part of this conversation, the spatial logic of the film’s editing breaks down. Instead of directing his comments in the direction of the place where Turgidson is meant to sit, the president looks directly at the camera, the shot being composed in such a way that the shoulders of two people sitting at the roundtable loom large at the edges of the frame. It is as if the camera/viewer sat in the second row around the table, and as if the president were addressing us. Ignoring the substance of the president’s concerns, Turgidson accuses him of selfishness: ‘Perhaps it might be better if you were more concerned with the American people than with your image in the history books.’ At this point, the president moves on to one of the alternative courses of action he mentioned earlier. On his order the Soviet ambassador has been brought to the Pentagon and will soon

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join the discussions in the war room. Turgidson complains about the ‘serious breach of security’ this constitutes: ‘He’ll see everything. He’ll see the big board.’ The president responds that ‘this is precisely the idea’, and then tells Staines to ‘get Premier Kissoff on the hot line.’ It would seem that the president’s strategy is full disclosure to the Soviets. In addition to the imposing setting, the content of the conversation, the military jargon used by Turgidson and the serious demeanour and occasional anger of Muffley all convey a sense of deadly serious drama across this long scene (at almost eleven minutes by far the longest in the whole film). This is, however, given a humorous dimension by the phone call from Miss Scott, Turgidson’s occasionally inappropriate choice of words, his vigorous gum chewing and his exaggerated intonation and facial expressions which become ever more pronounced as the scene progresses. Similarly, the seriousness of Scene 11 (34:03–34:58) has a comical undercurrent which gets stronger as it develops. The scene serves as a brief reminder that the bomber attack launched by General Ripper is proceeding. Major Kong is once again relaying instructions for Plan R, this time concerning the items in the survival

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kit. These items become ever more unlikely (starting with a gun, ammunition and emergency rations, and ending with ‘prophylactics’, ‘lipsticks’ and ‘nylon stockings’); they seem to be selected to ensure that the survivors can have a good time, more particularly that they will have sex. As Kong says: ‘Shoot, a fellow could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.’ The scene is shot very much like the previous action in the Leper Colony (claustrophobic setting, rapid cuts, varied angles, attention to detail), except for the camera being held more steadily. Stylistically, then, the audience is anchored in a threatening reality – of a crew about to enter enemy territory, examining the items they will need should their plane get shot down. Yet, this is undercut by the suggestion that the ultimate purpose of their mission is sexual adventure. Scene 12 (34:58–36:46) finally introduces a representative of the Cold War enemy in the person of the Soviet ambassador de Sadesky (Peter Bull), who, incongruously, is first seen ordering food at a buffet in the war room, then is verbally abused by Turgidson and finally gets into a physical fight with him (because Turgidson saw his secret camera) which ends with the ambassador sitting in the general’s lap, and the president scolding them, much like a parent would do with

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misbehaving children. For the first time, the film leaves serious drama and the depiction of realistic behaviour behind altogether. Instead it imagines the face-to-face confrontation between enemies as a childish slapstick routine. At the same time, the scene moves the story forward because, after the Americans have been unable to reach the Soviet premier, the ambassador provides them with the phone number of his girlfriend where he now answers the phone. Contrasting sharply with the physical and verbal humour of the previous scene, Scene 13 (36:46–38:22) is wholly serious. It shows how one of the countermeasures ordered by the president in Scene 10 is being carried out. The attack on Burpelson Air Force Base is depicted in a series of exterior shots (except for the final shots in Ripper’s office) and evokes some of the formal characteristics of combat documentary footage by including shaky, hand-held camerawork, unbalanced shot compositions, and objects blocking the camera’s view of the action (see p. 56). This positions the audience as participants in the lethal action (on the side of the defending forces, that is, those standing in the way of a possible resolution of the crisis), rather than as mere observers. Scene 14 (38:22–43:42) focuses on a phone conversation between President Muffley and Premier Kissoff (with only the former being seen and heard), which evolves very differently from the rapid disintegration of communication into fighting in Scene 12. Due to the fact that, as the ambassador informs the president, the premier is drunk, Muffley once again has to adopt a parental role, but this time he is not scolding. Instead he takes the (alcohol-related) diminished mental capacity and increased emotionality of his interlocutor into account, makes him feel comfortable, always responds carefully to his interjections (even if they sidetrack the conversation), talks about feelings as much as facts, reminds and constantly reassures the premier of their close relationship, informs him of the crisis in a non-threatening manner and offers a solution to the problem. After first asking the premier to turn the music down, the president spends some time simply confirming ‘you’re fine and I’m

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fine’. He then introduces the serious topic at hand: ‘Now then, Dimitri, you know how we’ve always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the bomb.’ He explains that ‘one of our base commanders … he went a little funny in the head … and he went and did a silly thing. … He ordered his planes to attack your country.’ This is not followed, as one might expect, by angry threats

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and counterthreats, but by an exchange of statements about how each of them feels, confirming that they like talking to each other and consider each other friends. Only after these reassurances does Muffley tell the premier that the planes ‘will not reach their targets for at least another hour’ and reveal that he plans to help the Soviets to shoot them down (by providing them with information on ‘the targets, the flight plans and the defensive systems of the planes’). Given the seriousness and urgency of the crisis, the roundabout way in which the president gets to the point and the tone and language he uses to do so are comically inappropriate. Yet given the fact that the premier is drunk and that, if he felt he could not trust the president, he would have to respond to the news by immediately launching a counterstrike, the president’s cautious approach is not only understandable and indeed very successful, but also rather touching. The conversation ends with the two telling each other how sorry they are about what is happening. Instead of scoring political points or emphasising their military might, they argue about who feels sorrier and decide to call it a draw. In a terrifying crisis, then, their personal relationship allows the Cold War leaders to collaborate on a resolution. However, at the end of this scene, the story takes a new (in the light of the prologue not completely unexpected) turn when the ambassador is told by Kissoff that the Soviets have built a ‘doomsday machine’, ‘a device which will destroy all human and animal life on Earth’. A one-minute-long, static medium long shot of Mandrake and Ripper talking to each other on a couch opens Scene 15 (43:42–47:10). It continues the exploration of Ripper’s thinking from Scene 9 and confirms (if such confirmation is still needed) that he is mentally disturbed. Ripper explains that ‘Commies’ never drink water, only vodka, and he himself only drinks distilled or rain water and ‘pure grain alcohol’, because all tap water is poisoned through ‘fluoridation’, which is ‘the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face’. Ripper then jumps up in response to shots being fired into the room, pulling out a

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machine gun from among his golf clubs and getting ready to return fire, asking Mandrake to join him. He thus exposes himself to further enemy fire whereas Mandrake sensibly stays away from the windows on the couch claiming a ‘gammy’ leg. Ripper’s mad courage suggests that it will not be easy to get him to reveal the recall code. With most of the key questions raised in the early sections of the film (about the president’s response to the crisis, the existence of the doomsday device and Ripper’s mental state) now answered, it is left to Scene 16 (47:10–51:46) to give more information about the doomsday machine and finally to introduce the film’s title figure. The scene begins with a low-angle extreme long shot showing an excited ambassador walking away from the roundtable (soon to be followed by Turgidson and the president). The kind of crisis management represented by people sitting and talking around a table is made obsolete by the ambassador’s news. He explains that the doomsday machine consists of many hydrogen bombs put together and jacketed with ‘Cobalt Thorium G’, which will be transformed into a highly radioactive substance by the bombs’ explosion; hence, ‘when they are exploded they will produce a doomsday shroud, a lethal cloud of

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radioactivity which will encircle the Earth for 93 years’. This echoes the film’s ominous prologue, with its cloud cover serving as a ‘shroud’. The ambassador admits that exploding the device is not something ‘a sane man would do’, but reveals that the device ‘is designed to trigger itself automatically’ and cannot be switched off. In answer to the president’s question why anyone would want to build ‘such a thing’, the ambassador does not talk about nuclear strategy but the financial implications of superpower rivalry: ‘We could not keep up with the expense involved in the arms race, the space race and the peace race.’ The Soviet leaders felt that they had to reduce military expenses because ‘our people grumbled for more nylons and washing machines’: ‘Our doomsday scheme cost us a small fraction of what we had been spending on defence in a single year.’ Oddly enough, then, the consumerist desires of Soviet citizens, and the Soviet leaders’ willingness to give the people what they want, give rise to their decision to risk the destruction of all life on Earth. The ambassador also points out that, according to the New York Times, the Americans had been ‘working along similar lines’. The president has no knowledge of this and asks Dr. Strangelove

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(Peter Sellers), who introduces himself as ‘Director of Weapons Research and Development’, about it. Sitting in a wheelchair, wearing darkened glasses and a black leather glove on his right hand, Dr. Strangelove mentions ‘a study of this project by the Bland Corporation’, from which he concluded that the doomsday machine was not ‘practical’. He elaborates on the ambassador’s explanation about how it is supposed to function as a deterrent: ‘Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the fear to attack.’ Such fear can best be produced if ‘human meddling’ is removed from the process (because humans cannot be relied upon to take revenge after an attack; they may just give up). Hence nothing could be more ‘terrifying’ for a potential aggressor than ‘the automated and irrevocable decision-making process’ of the doomsday machine; its threat of retaliation is ‘completely credible’. The ‘Response’ section of the film thus ends just like it began – with an expert for military strategy, now the civilian Dr. Strangelove rather than General Turgidson, explaining the intricacies of the nuclear situation. The similarities do not end there. Concerns about the credibility of the nuclear deterrent were, as Turgidson explained

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in Scene 10, precisely what gave rise to Plan R. Like the doomsday machine, this plan increases credibility by taking decision-making power away from top political and military leaders (in this case by giving them to ‘lower echelon commanders’), and by initiating a preprogrammed sequence of events which cannot be influenced (crews are meant to follow the instructions of Plan R and are cut off from the outside world). In other words, Plan R and the doomsday machine are different consequences of the same underlying logic. Both Turgidson and Dr. Strangelove are heavily invested in the strategic issues they discuss. Turgidson argues for an all-out attack on the Soviet Union, already relishing the victory to come. Dr. Strangelove does not necessarily love the doomsday device, but certainly enjoys explaining it and, although he does not regard it as ‘practical’, he clearly admires its ‘terrifying’ power and its effectiveness as a deterrent. These feelings do not seem to be shared by anyone else in the war room – except for Turgidson who announces: ‘I wish we had one of them doomsday machines.’ Turgidson is also the only one interested in Dr. Strangelove as a person, specifically in his German origins, which are signalled by his accent. Staines tells him that Strangelove adopted his English last name ‘when he became a citizen’. For Turgidson it does not change the fact of Strangelove’s essential Germanness: ‘a Kraut by any other name’ (is still a Kraut). This does not make him suspicious of Strangelove; quite on the contrary, in Turgidson’s eyes, Strangelove’s Germanness appears to ensure his scientific rigour and coldly rational analysis. Such analysis leads Dr. Strangelove to a final question. Since the doomsday machine can only function as a deterrent if everyone knows about its existence, ‘why didn’t you tell the world?’ The ambassador responds: ‘It was to be announced at the party congress on Monday. As you know, the premier loves surprises.’ Hence it is Kissoff’s desire to make a big announcement in front of his assembled party which holds back crucial information that could have prevented disaster (assuming that Ripper is not so crazy that not even knowledge of the doomsday device could have stopped him).

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In conclusion, then, the twenty-eight-and-a-half-minute-long ‘Response’ section consists largely of a sequence set in the Pentagon’s war room, which comprises four scenes of conversations about the crisis, adding up to twenty-two and a half minutes. Across this sequence, three different levels of conflict come into view: politicians versus the military in the United States (represented by President Muffley and General Turgidson), the United States versus the Soviet Union (represented by President Muffley and Premier Kissoff), humanity versus the doomsday machine. Just like the ‘Launch’ section, the action in this section of Dr. Strangelove consists mostly of talk. However, whereas the previous section revolved around the issuing, and carrying out, of orders, as well as morale-boosting speeches, such top-down communication, characteristic of the military, is now largely replaced by the give and take of civilian conversations in the war room. Even the brief conversation between soldiers before the start of the attack on the Burpelson base and Ripper’s exchange with Mandrake are about sharing rather than commanding or leading. The first two levels of conflict mentioned earlier (military vs political leaders, United States vs Soviet Union) can be resolved through conversations between the opponents. However, the third level (humanity vs machine) cannot be addressed in this way. Here, conversation only serves to inform everybody that the decision-making power has been taken out of human hands and given to the computer programme running the doomsday device. Thus, the influence of talking on the overall outcome of the crisis is limited by the ultimate top-down process: a machine which cannot be switched off, following a programme which cannot be changed, making decisions which cannot be influenced, translating into actions which are predetermined. By emphasising the parallels between the doomsday machine and Plan R, the film suggests that this is the inevitable outcome of the logic of deterrence. How did Kubrick and his collaborators come up with this scenario? Most of the action and dialogue in this section of the film is taken from Two Hours to Doom/Red Alert. However, there are at

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least five crucial differences between the novel and Dr. Strangelove. First, the novel’s president has known about the existence of the Soviets’ special explosive device (the film’s ‘doomsday machine’) all along.73 Second, this device is not automated.74 Third, the president is convinced that the Soviets will activate it once they realise they are under attack.75 Fourth, this is the main (perhaps the only) reason why the president rejects the military’s proposal to support the rogue general’s attack on the Soviet Union.76 Fifth, like General Quinten, the president bases his predictions of future Soviet actions on a racialised view of the ‘Russian’ people. With regards to this last point, the novel presents the president as a lifelong student of Russian history and literature, and of the basic character of ‘Slavs’: He did not believe the character of a people can change over night… . He thought of the Russian peasant: stubborn, obstinate, accustomed to suffering and perhaps even welcoming it. Latent in all Slavs, he thought, is the urge for self-destruction.77

The president combines this negative conception of Russians/Slavs with an apocalyptic view of dictatorial regimes: It is my belief, based on a lifetime’s study of the Russian character in particular, and also the behaviour of dictators facing defeat in general, that if they see they are beaten they will not hesitate to fire those [doomsday] devices. Have you any doubt Hitler would indeed have brought the world down in flaming ruins if he had had the power to do so when Berlin was under siege? … In every dictatorship which is tottering, there is an urge towards destruction. Of self, if that only is possible. Of the world, if that is.78

In the light of this ‘understanding’ of the Cold War enemy, which appears to be shared by all the major American players in the novel, it is not surprising that, in principle, everyone is willing to go along with Quinten’s plan for what they would all consider to be a ‘pre-emptive’

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strike against the Soviet Union. If, due to their racial ‘character’ or due to the fact that at any time the Soviet regime may be ‘tottering’, the Soviets are bound to attack the United States eventually, then it may indeed be best to destroy their country first. There are yet more anti-Soviet and pro-American twists in George’s novel because it assigns ultimate responsibility for Quinten’s ‘breakdown’ to Soviet policies, and it celebrates the rogue general as a peacemaker. In a conversation with the Soviet premier, the president accuses his counterpart of ‘world-wide aggression’: Not only our economy has been strained, but our minds and our nerves. Now one of our commanders has reached breaking point. Would the Marshal deny that his own acts of aggression have contributed to the commander’s breakdown?79

When the crisis is finally resolved (because the bomb dropped by the one plane getting through misses its target and also misfires), the American president and the Soviet ambassador are both convinced that the crisis has taught everyone an important lesson: ‘No-one, on either side, could live through a time like that and ever again seek war.’80 This does, of course, ignore the earlier conviction of the Americans that ‘Slavs’ and dictatorial regimes will inevitably bring on total destruction. When the president reminds the ambassador that ‘the general who actually launched the attack did so because he was convinced it was the only way to secure peace on earth’, the latter replies: ‘his attack failed. But I’m not sure it hasn’t resulted in securing peace on earth just the same.’81 How can this peace be secured? On the one hand, through more communication between the Cold War enemies; on the other hand – and more importantly – through technological innovation. From the point of view of 1958 (when there was a debate about intercontinental nuclear missiles, but such missiles did not yet exist), the novel envisions a world of the near future in which missiles are kept on hair-trigger alert, serving as a perfect deterrent. In the

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words of the ambassador: ‘Once both sides have missiles which will automatically retaliate, war becomes profitless.’82 What, after trying out many variations of the story, Kubrick and his collaborators eventually did, then, was to remove the novel’s racist anti-Soviet dimensions and even to downplay the differences between the two political systems (democracy vs ‘dictatorship’); to liken the American military’s outlook, rather than that of the Soviet leadership, to Hitler’s crimes; to remove any responsibility assigned to the Soviet Union for the rogue general’s breakdown; and to have the president refute the arguments for an all-out attack presented by the military and make a genuine choice for peace (because he decides on co-operation with the Soviets before he knows about the doomsday machine). What is more, the film takes what is offered as a solution for the nuclear confrontation in the novel – namely the introduction of an automated weapons system acting as the ultimate deterrent – and turns it into the biggest problem of them all. Similarly, the film redirects the racial discourse of the novel (which is ultimately based on sexual concerns, insofar as it assumes that psychological and social characteristics are determined and reproduced biologically) away from its use as a justification for aggressive actions against the Soviet Union and towards an exploration of anxieties about sexuality as one of the roots of male aggression. Finally, the film introduces the figure of Dr. Strangelove, a German-born civilian nuclear strategist who has no equivalent in the novel. Since the film is named after him, the audience can expect him to become more central to its story. Yet, it is not easy to see how he might be involved in the action which from now on will have to revolve around the success or failure of the two countermeasures initiated by the president: the American attempt to get the recall code for the bomb wing through an attack on Burpelson Air Force Base, and the Soviet attempt to shoot down the attacking planes. The existence of the doomsday machine means that the planes have to be prevented from dropping a single bomb.

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4 Success (51:46–71:22) The battle for control of the Air Force base continues in Scene 16 (51:46–58:51), the camera this time viewing the exterior action from among the attacking forces. However, the focus soon shifts to Ripper’s office, where the general takes a break from firing his machine gun to elaborate his ideas about the great Communist fluoridation conspiracy: ‘A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie works.’ When Mandrake asks him ‘when did you first … develop this theory?’, Ripper replies hesitantly (with the film cutting from a medium two-shot to a close-up on ‘luckily’): I first became aware of it … during the physical act of love. … A profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily, I was able to interpret these feelings correctly – loss of essence. I can assure you it has not recurred. … Women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women … but I deny them my essence.

In this conversation, Ripper links his concern about Soviet attempts to undermine the purity of his blood and semen to the way he felt ‘during the physical act of love’, which could refer to his inability properly to perform this act (that is, his impotence) or, if he is able to perform it, to a kind of post-coital depression. Whatever the problem is, Ripper asserts his sexual appeal to the opposite sex (‘women sense my power’) and his heterosexuality (‘I do not avoid women’), before declaring that he denies them his ‘essence’, presumably by not ejaculating. In addition to the (not unfamiliar) idea that semen is a limited resource which is closely tied to a man’s vitality and therefore should not be ‘spent’ too freely – or, in this

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extreme case, not at all – Ripper sees women as exploitative aggressors. They sense the vitality behind his ‘power’ and approach him to take his ‘life essence’ away through sexual intercourse. Like a vampire sucking a person’s blood, here women are understood as predators extracting semen through sex. This does not in fact explain how Ripper came up with his fluoridation theory. If there was a causal link (even if it was just imagined) between fluoridation and Ripper’s sexual problems, then the latter should long have disappeared because he has kept his bodily fluids pure by not drinking fluoridated water. This suggests that, as far as Ripper is concerned, predatory women are the real problem, not Soviet conspiracies. However, rather than acknowledging his anxieties about women, he projects them onto the Cold War enmity with the Soviet Union. In doing so, he simply inverts some of the key terms of the relationship: where women want to extract essential, vital fluids from his body, the Soviets want to inject foreign substances into his body to poison these fluids. Ripper is thus articulating his sexual anxieties through (a racialised version of) the Cold War discourse underpinning his profession.

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Indeed, it may be possible to understand other aspects of his life and behaviour in similar terms. Since he refuses to give his semen to women, he will not be able to have biological children, but his position as a commanding officer in the Air Force provides him with a paternal role. When Ripper realises that in the battle for the base ‘my boys must have surrendered’, he states: ‘Those boys were like my children.’ The military has thus allowed him to become a father without the loss of bodily fluids. It has also provided him with the means to experience vicariously a technological substitute for the orgasm he denies himself. Across the film, military technology and sexuality have been intertwined. It has been made clear that, ideally, the weapons systems being shown should never be used. In other words: the (explosive) power that is their essence should never be given away – much like Ripper refuses to give his ‘life essence’ to women. This equivalency also means that, while denying himself orgasms, Ripper can – and does – order the orgasmic release of nuclear power, initially that of the bombs to be delivered into enemy territory by the planes under his command but also, he hopes, that of all the nuclear forces at the disposal of the United States. Whereas the ‘physical act of love’ allows women to deplete Ripper’s power, this vicarious, technological orgasm would destroy the recipient of the vital power being released, namely the Soviet Union, standing in for all the women who ‘seek’ Ripper’s ‘life essence’, women, who, like the Communist conspirators threatening the United States, deserve to be punished in his view (and thus the general is indeed living up to his name). In addition to the systemic logic of nuclear deterrence explored in the ‘Response’ section, then, this conversation reveals a man’s inability to deal with his anxieties about sexuality and women as the root cause of the catastrophic scenario that is unfolding in the film. Whereas Scene 16 outlined how the competition between the two superpowers could result in the construction of an all-destroying automated weapons system beyond human control, the first half of Scene 17 explains the

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human behaviour which initiated the particular sequence of events that is now threatening to trigger the doomsday machine in terms of dysfunctional male sexuality. As we have already seen in Chapter 1 with regard to the credit sequence, Kubrick was not at all averse to sexual interpretations of his film. Indeed, in response to a letter from an art historian praising the sexual dimension of Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick wrote about the overall structure of the film: ‘You are the first one who seems to have noticed the sexual framework from intramission to the last spasm.’83 However, elsewhere he made it clear that the psychosexual dimension of the story should not be privileged over other perspectives. One of the film’s admirers asked Kubrick: ‘Was I correct in interpreting the catalytic agent of the whole nightmare as Jack Ripper’s fear of impotency which put his [sic] in an active psychotic state?’84 Kubrick replied: ‘Your assumption is correct, but obviously the film is a bit more involved than just a psychological tragedy induced by Ripper’s psychotic state.’85 Kubrick was interested just as much in superpower rivalry, military strategy and technological systems, as well as the role of racial ideologies (all of which may, of course, in turn be related to questions of sexuality). Nevertheless, the film’s intense focus on sexuality is remarkable, and it is not derived from George’s novel. Here the equivalent of Ripper, General Quinten, is threatened by a real illness (the nature of which is not explained) and has only six to twelve months to live.86 While he thinks that ‘his crews were his children’, he also has biological children.87 As we saw in Chapter 2, he has good reasons for launching his attack on the Soviet Union (reasons the novel appears to support), rather than doing it because he is mentally disturbed as a result of unresolved sexual anxieties. So where does the sexual dimension of the film come from? In the film’s long production history, a strong sexual component first appeared after Kubrick and George decided, in spring 1962, to abandon (only temporarily, as it turned out) their attempts to develop a serious nuclear thriller based more or less closely on Two Hours to

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Doom/Red Alert.88 The new story about a nuclear scientist, which they developed instead, closely linked his involvement in nuclear matters with sex. Initially called Prof. A. B. C. Ice (the initials being familiar from the widely used abbreviation for atomic, biological and chemical weapons) and then Dr. Strangelove (the first name initially was Roger, then Otto), this scientist is best known for the authoritative and indeed spell-binding way in which he deals with ‘megadeaths’ in writing, in speeches and in conversations.89 This is described, in various notes about the new project, as a kind of aphrodisiac for women who are aroused when encountering him and try to seduce him; in one fully scripted scene the seduction attempt goes in the direction of a sadomasochistic scenario with the nuclear scientist cast in the role of ‘slave’.90 Here, then, is the model for the predatory women in Ripper’s delusional imagination. In a treatment George wrote (in consultation with Kubrick) in late spring 1962, Dr. Strangelove, who hates the military but is well known as the author of an important book about nuclear strategy,91 is visited at his university by Ilse, a young woman sent by a top general to induce him to become a consultant for the ‘Defence Advisory Committee’.92 Strangelove agrees because he is ‘completely under the spell’ Ilse has cast over him. It is then revealed that Strangelove is seeing a psychiatrist (who in turn reports back to the general) about his ‘completely barren … sex life’. This is soon rectified when he has sex with Ilse. As a consultant, he promotes the interests of the military-industrial complex by arguing that ‘possession of great numbers of nuclear weapons was our greatest attribute in seeking peace’. This version of Dr. Strangelove’s story also provides an important model for Ripper’s story in the film, insofar as the militaristic outlook he develops is linked to a manipulative woman and to his dysfunctional sexuality (which makes it easy for the general and Ilse to steer him). When Kubrick returned to his original plan of adapting George’s novel, he quickly decided to make it funny (while sticking very closely to its story) and also incorporated references to two

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nuclear strategists. One of them, with the aristocratic Germanic last name ‘Von Klutz’, joins in discussions with the president, while the other, ‘Doctor Otto Strangelove’, is only mentioned in these discussions as a scientist working on a ‘Doomsday machine’.93 Unlike Kubrick’s serious script, dated 23 July 1962,94 the comical version version dated 1 August is full of sex (e.g. the film opens with a scene featuring a Playboy-reading pilot, the president is first seen in bed with a young woman who is ‘about nineteen’, and the Soviet premier is known to visit ‘a certain young actress in the afternoon’), but none of it has anything to do with the rogue general’s psychology and behaviour. It took Kubrick and his collaborators (including the American novelist Terry Southern in November and December 1962)95 several more months to make that connection. By the time principal photography started on 28 January 1963, the script’s General Ripper was very much like he is in the film.96 Sex, then, initially entered into the development process through the figure of a civilian nuclear strategist but it eventually became central to the film’s overall approach. In the process, dysfunctional sexuality came to characterise the rogue general rather than the civilian strategist, and the actual appearance of sexually manipulative women in the story gave way to the exploration of a man’s anxieties about such women. It is possible that Peter George originally came up, all on his own, with the idea of injecting sexual material into the new story about a nuclear strategist Kubrick had asked him to develop in the spring of 1962, but this is unlikely because the film-maker’s previous work had consistently explored the role of sexuality in human affairs, in particular the connection between male violence and men’s sexual relations with women (and the associated desires and anxieties).97 This exploration had culminated in Lolita. The film has a violent framing story, in which the protagonist Humbert Humbert (James Mason) kills Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers). Humbert is driven to this act by his desire, and love, for Lolita (Sue Lyon), who, he feels, was taken away from him by Quilty. Humbert first meets Lolita when she is a teenager (rather than the pre-teen she is in the novel),

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trying to stay close to her by lodging with, and then marrying, her mother Charlotte (Shelley Winters). He has violent fantasies about murdering Charlotte who dies in a car accident right after she has discovered his secret. As in Kubrick’s earlier films, violence here arises from men’s sexual desires and the object of their desires is an active subject: Lolita is not only being manipulated by Humbert but she also manipulates him in return (with and without Quilty’s assistance); right from the start she seems to be aware of, and willing to use, her sex appeal. In addition, Lolita is full of sexualised names and its dialogue full of double entendre. If we also take into account the fact that Quilty, who in the course of the story impersonates various, quite different people, is played by Peter Sellers, we can see that Lolita provided Kubrick with a model not only for the casting of Peter Sellers in several roles in Dr. Strangelove, but also for the highly sexualised approach to telling his nuclear story which he adopted in the spring of 1962 (when he and MGM were preparing the release of Lolita). In developing this story, he could draw on the destructive role male sexuality had played in all of his previous films. However, rather than showing women to be as manipulative as men like Ripper imagine them to be (and as, to an extent, they are shown to be in Kubrick’s previous films and indeed in various treatments for his nuclear project), he eventually decided to remove female characters from the film altogether (with the exception of Miss Scott). Dr. Strangelove is focused on the male mind and the behaviours and systems arising from it, on male sexual desires and anxieties with regard to women – without the actual presence of, or references to, women (apart from Miss Scott and Ripper’s delusions about female predators) who we, as an audience, could assign part of the blame to as we are invited to do in Kubrick’s previous films and in earlier versions of his nuclear story. In Dr. Strangelove, men are solely responsible for the destruction that ensues. This is not to say that all men are equally disturbed and destructive in Dr. Strangelove. Both Muffley and Mandrake do their

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best to prevent the catastrophe, and they do so, among other things, by being able to listen to other people, to see the world from their perspective, to establish trust and provide support. In Scene 17, Mandrake’s question to Ripper about the origins of his fluoridation theory leads to the latter’s revelations about his sexual anxieties. Mandrake is energised by this, because he thinks he can now easily convince Ripper that he is wrong: ‘Do I look all rancid and clotted? … And I drink a lot of water. … I can swear to you there is nothing wrong with my bodily fluids.’ Unfortunately, Ripper is not listening to him, because he is preoccupied with the torture he expects to be subjected to soon by those who want to extract the recall code from him, doubtful about his ability to withstand this torture and at the same time utterly convinced about the righteousness of his actions: ‘I happen to believe in a life after this one. And I know I’ll have to answer for what I’ve done. And I think I can.’ Mandrake is too absorbed in his own schemes for convincing Ripper to give up the code voluntarily to realise that the general is announcing his willingness to die rather than reveal it. While Mandrake continues to chat excitedly, Ripper quietly goes to the bathroom and shoots himself. The first of the president’s countermeasures appears to have failed miserably,

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and by focusing on Mandrake’s response to the shot emanating from the bathroom, the film invites the audience to share his sense of defeat. Scene 18 (58:51–62:46) examines the impact of the second countermeasure, yet it does so by putting us, as viewers, firmly in the place of the crew of the Leper Colony, that is, on the side of the attacked rather than the attackers, on the side of those standing in the way of a successful resolution of the crisis. Not only do we, once again, join the crew in the crowded interiors of the plane and follow every step of their work procedures, but we are also invited to share their sense of being threatened by a missile. We take the point of view of the crew member who studies, and reports on, the blip visible on his radar screen, moving ever closer to its centre (the plane), while the pilot takes evasive action. The blip representing the missile is slowly being diverted, although it continues to come ever closer. We cannot help but ask ourselves whether the missile’s diversion will be sufficient. When it explodes one mile from the plane, the impact is devastating.

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This is conveyed not only by fire and smoke in the cabin, but also by blinding light, quick, disorienting cuts and an extremely shaky camera, all of this accompanied by a cacophony of sounds. The missile’s explosion thus is an aural and visual assault on the viewer, who slowly recovers from it while the crew deals with the damage and appears to stabilise the plane’s flight. It is difficult to imagine that, under these conditions, as an audience we could genuinely wish for the plane to be destroyed – although that is precisely what the overall resolution of the crisis would require. Back in Ripper’s office in Scene 19 (62:46–65:00), we find ourselves once again on the side of those who want to prevent the catastrophe. The first shot (of notepaper with Ripper’s writing on it) immediately suggests a way out of the crisis. While the camera slowly zooms out, Mandrake can be heard reading out the two phrases written down repeatedly – ‘peace on earth’ and ‘purity of essence’ – and then focusing on the three letters standing out on the page: ‘P’, ‘O’ and ‘E’. The shot thus adopts Mandrake’s point of view, allowing us to follow his thought process which appears to be leading him to the conclusion that the three-letter recall code prefix is made

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up of the letters P, O and E (viewers might remember from Scene 8 that ‘OPE’ is indeed the prefix). Mandrake’s thinking is interrupted by shots being fired to force open the door to Ripper’s office. The officer entering the room (Keenan Wynn) is highly suspicious of Mandrake, because he does not wear an American uniform and stands over Ripper’s desk while the general lies dead in the bathroom. Mandrake tells him that he thinks he has the recall code, but Colonel ‘Bat’ Guano (which translates as ‘bat shit’, leading Mandrake to comment: ‘if that really is your name’) knows nothing about the bomb wing attacking the Soviet Union. Ignoring the rifle pointed at him, Mandrake picks up the ‘red telephone’ to call the Strategic Air Command, but it does not work, nor does the regular phone. The film is thus presenting a possible and potentially very quick resolution of the crisis, yet also creates what, for the moment, appear to be insurmountable obstacles for Mandrake: broken-down technology as well as an uninformed and hostile American officer. Calm and order have returned to the Leper Colony in Scene 20 (65:00–66:41), which is good news as far as the audience’s alignment with the crew is concerned, but bad news in terms of the overall story. Goldie reveals that ‘all the radio gear is out, including the CRM 114’, which adds to the obstacles set up in the previous scene because, even if Mandrake somehow manages to inform the Strategic Air Command or the Pentagon about the recall code, it is now clear that the Leper Colony will be unable to receive the recall message. Given the circumstances, Goldie’s next comment, again referring to the radio, is even more ominous (because it is a reminder of what will happen if only a single nuclear bomb ‘hits’ the Soviet Union): ‘I think the auto-destruct mechanism got hit and blew itself up.’ The navigator then calculates that, despite losing fuel, the plane will be able to reach its targets and from there a weather ship which can pick up the crew. Using very colourful language again, Major Kong summarises the situation. The plane is severely damaged and therefore has to fly

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extremely low, ‘but’ (and here the film cuts from a profile shot of Kong to an over-the-shoulder shot, looking past him through the cockpit window into the landscape which the plane is fast traversing) ‘we got one little budge on them Russkies: at this height, they might harpoon us but they damn sure ain’t gonna spot us on no radar screen’. Kong relishes the fact that his low flying will help them avoid detection. The final shot is taken from behind the (model) plane, both plane and viewer seemingly rushing forward into Soviet territory for eleven seconds. As an audience, we are invited to feel with Kong and also enjoy the continuation of the attack at a visceral level – although we may also be aware that the chances of the doomsday machine being triggered have increased considerably. Back at Burpelson Air Force Base in Scene 21 (66:41–70:16), the situation further deteriorates. Having been escorted out of Ripper’s office, Mandrake challenges Guano: ‘I must know what you think has been going on here.’ The answer is puzzling: ‘I think you are some kind of deviated prevert [sic]. General Ripper found out about your preversion and that you were organising some kind of mutiny of preverts.’ Guano appears to have taken Mandrake’s British uniform (his ‘suit’) and his English accent as indicators of homosexuality, and from this has deduced a homosexual conspiracy. This is not far removed from Ripper’s confusion of sexual and political anxieties. Having failed to talk Ripper out of his delusions, now Mandrake is simply speechless. However, Guano goes on to mention that he was told to get General Ripper on the phone to the president, which enables Mandrake to convince him that, as Ripper’s executive officer, he is the next best thing and should therefore be allowed to use a public phone box in the corridor to call the president. It now appears that an important step towards the resolution of the crisis is imminent, but there are new obstacles (which are played out for around two minutes). Mandrake does not have enough change, Guano has none at all. When asked to shoot at a Coca-Cola machine to get change, Guano initially refuses because it

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is ‘private property’. However, eventually he gives in, and is promptly rewarded with Coke splashing into his face. Scene 21 thus brings together many key elements of the film: its comical foregrounding of the human body and bodily functions, characters being motivated by sexual anxieties, the mixing of serious drama and in places quite outrageous humour, an emphasis on the shortcomings of technological systems and also on the problems and possibilities of human communication, sudden shifts from hope to despair and back. The scene ends with a quick dissolve (indicating the passing of time) to the war room (Scene 22, 70:16–71:22), where the successful recall of thirty bombers is confirmed with the remaining four having been shot down by the Soviets. All planes are accounted for and there are jubilations, yet as an audience, we know that something is wrong, because the Leper Colony was flying on in Scene 20, unable to receive any radio messages. Of course, time has passed since then and in the meantime the plane could have crashed, either due to a delayed effect of the missile attack we experienced, or because there has been another attack which has not been shown to us. If that turned out to be the case we would, I think, feel cheated for

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two reasons: first, the film withholds a crucial event from us, and second, a prominent group of characters with a clearly defined mission that we have become invested in has been removed. So perhaps the announcement about the planes is wrong; in fact, we might wish it to be, so as to avoid feeling cheated by the film. At the same time, though, we are invited to join the celebrations in the war room. Then Turgidson demands attention and silence for a prayer. During his prayer, there is an ominous shot of Dr. Strangelove sitting in the shadow in a corner of the room, which serves to remind us of other unresolved issues (apart from the fate of the Leper Colony). Dr. Strangelove has not yet done enough in the film to deserve the honour of giving it its main title. So what might he do to earn it? And will these actions reveal his love of the bomb, or are there others about to reveal such love? Turgidson’s prayer is interrupted by Staines who says that he has Premier Kissoff on the phone, and he is ‘hopping mad’. With a mixture of dread and satisfaction, we may now think that there is indeed more to the story of the Leper Colony than its unexplained removal from the story, and more to Dr. Strangelove than his brief appearance in Scene 16.

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5 Failure (71:22–90:50) The Leper Colony is indeed continuing its flight in Scene 23 (71:22–72:00). However, its rate of fuel loss is increasing, which makes it doubtful whether the plane will be able to reach its targets. The phone conversation between Muffley and Kissoff in Scene 24 (72:00–74:37) finds the president catching up with some of what the audience already knows. The Soviet military now claims to have shot down only three, rather than four, American bombers, which (together with a piece of information presented in Scene 20, namely the destruction of the Leper Colony’s radio) explains why one plane is proceeding with the attack. The president confirms with the Soviet premier that any bomb dropped by the remaining plane will trigger the doomsday machine. He is hardly able to pose the question, and just for once Turgidson shares his terror. Not in control of his own voice, Muffley asks the premier not to get ‘hysterical’. Unlike the previous, competitive exchanges about who feels worse or sorrier about the situation, now the president simply wants to offer emotional support and to give advice, which is that the Soviets concentrate all their efforts on the two sectors surrounding the bomber’s primary and secondary targets. Scene 25 (74:37–76:10) teases the audience with possible ways out of the crisis by revealing that, due to the increased fuel loss, the Leper Colony will not be able to reach either one of its targets, and can barely make it to the previously mentioned weather ship. This gives the captain the perfect opportunity to acknowledge the failure of the mission: the plane is severely damaged and cannot do the job assigned to it; it is time for captain and crew at least to save themselves. But the captain has so much invested in the mission that he cannot even consider this possibility: ‘We ain’t come this far to dump this thing in the drink. What’s the nearest target of

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opportunity?’ There is no longer any reference here to the people at home counting on them, no sense that their mission is crucial for the war effort. It is merely a question of unleashing the destructive force of a nuclear bomb; any target will do. Kong’s question is followed by an eight-second shot of the plane flying across a wintry landscape – a pause in the conversation which, once again, raises the possibility of a way out: if no relevant target can be found nearby, Kong may yet decide to abort the mission. But it turns out that a missile complex (at Kotlass) is close enough so that the Leper Colony can drop a bomb and perhaps still reach the weather ship. Not only does the crisis continue, but it worsens dramatically. If the Soviet premier follows the president’s advice and concentrates all efforts on the Leper Colony’s two known targets, then the plane’s approach to Kotlass may not be noticed. As an audience, we are made aware of the increased chances of the plane eventually triggering the doomsday machine and bringing about the end of life on Earth, but we (like Major Kong) are also invested in the Leper Colony’s mission, having spent a considerable amount of time with the crew and lived through the plane’s near destruction with them. Would it be acceptable for us to see the Leper Colony abort the mission? At the very least, it would be anti-climactic. The logic of the story that we have become involved in demands, and our familiarity with countless similar stories about last-minute rescues predicts, that the attack will continue, only to be stopped at the very last moment. This contradictory attitude towards the Leper Colony’s mission is played out by General Turgidson in Scene 26 (76:10–77.19). The president ends his conversation with Premier Kissoff by saying: ‘We are all in this together. We’re right behind you, Dimitri. We’re with you all the way.’ However, when he asks Turgidson about the bomber’s chances to get through, the general, after pointing out the limited competence of the Soviet military, gets enthusiastic about the ability of Air Force pilots to fly extremely low (so that they evade radar). His enthusiasm makes him impersonate the plane with outstretched arms. Turgidson thus puts himself into the position

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of the bomber and its crew; he is with them (not the Soviets), all the way. His appreciation of piloting skills, his familiarity with low-flying planes and his wish to see a job well done lead him to predict success: ‘Has he got a chance? Hell ye-.’ His triumphant shout is cut short by his becoming aware of the implications of what he is saying. He remembers that the bomber getting through and delivering its

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payload will trigger the doomsday device, and quietly looks around, as if searching for someone who could take this terrible knowledge away from him or prevent this outcome. Then he stands still with a hand covering his mouth. Scene 27 (77:19–84:02) opens with a shot taken from behind the (model) aircraft, thus creating the illusion of the camera rushing towards the target just like the plane does. Viewers are thus invited again to identify with the bomber’s flight, just like Turgidson did. There is no Soviet opposition in sight and this is not likely to change because no one expects the Leper Colony to approach Kotlass, and it is flying below Soviet radar. All that needs to be done by the crew now is to follow the instructions for the ‘final bomb run check’ that the captain reads out from the Plan R document. Each step to get the plane ready for the dropping of a bomb is shown in minute detail. As an audience, we are as likely to be caught up in this (almost hypnotic) procedure as the crew is shown to be. Everything works until a problem with the bomb door circuits arises. Various attempts to open the bomb doors remotely fail. If, as an audience, we were detached from the action, this would be another moment of hope, because it means that the bomb cannot

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be dropped and hence the doomsday machine will not be activated. But such detachment is unlikely, because our investment in the attack has been steadily increasing; we are likely to be committed to seeing the procedure that has been initiated through to its designated end (or at least to a last-second twist). So, of course, is Kong, who decides to go to the bomb bay to fix the problem by hand. When he arrives there and finds an electrical fault right above one of the bombs, a crew member starts a countdown by announcing the distance from the target, starting with eight miles, then going down by one mile about every fifteen seconds. This is another strategy to involve the audience, as we cannot help but estimate whether the work Kong is doing can be completed before the countdown comes to an end; yet again, the completion of the task feels more important than the consequences of completing it. The film’s cutting rate increases: Kong climbs onto the bomb and tries to fix the electrical problem; other crew members sit at their stations and prepare for the dropping of the bomb; there are several shots from the cockpit looking out at the landscape that the plane traverses as well as exterior shots, mostly from behind the plane, rushing forward. Then the target is in sight, Kong succeeds with his rewiring, the bomb doors open, Kong looks down and starts screaming. This could be a moment like the one in Scene 26 when Turgidson realises the implications of what he is saying and is struck dumb by horror. But it is not. Instead of being terrified upon realising that he is going to fall to his death with the bomb he is sitting on, Kong utters cries of joy and triumph. He has worked so hard to complete the mission, and now he can be sure that it will indeed be completed. But there is, of course, more to this. The film has consistently foregrounded the connections between military technology and male sexuality as well as men’s anxieties about their relationships with women. There is a subtle reminder of the latter when Kong first enters the bomb bay and we see that the two nuclear bombs have writing on them: ‘Hi there’ and ‘Dear John’.98 ‘Hi there’ is a remark that may initiate a first meeting which leads to a romantic

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relationship, whereas the second phrase calls to mind the proverbial ‘Dear John’ letter, with which a woman ends a relationship. Less subtle is the phallic shape of the bomb, and the way Kong (whose name, it is useful to remember, refers to a giant ape with, it has to be assumed, an equally giant penis) takes the bomb between his legs when he climbs onto it. This is the position he is in when the bomb doors open and he realises that not only is he in for a wild ride down to the ground, but that at the end of it the most powerful weapon in human history will explode from in between his legs – indeed the ultimate ‘blastoff’. After a brief cutaway to a crew member asking about Kong’s whereabouts, the film moves on to a medium shot of the captain, the camera looking down on him from above, while he is waving his hat like a rodeo rider (Kong has mentioned rodeos before). When he falls away from the camera, the long body of the bomb comes into view. Kong’s behaviour and the sequence of events it is part of are comprehensible, but the overall realism of the film has (temporarily) given way to painted backdrops and dream logic. Kong rapidly falls to the ground and the idea that the bomb is sticking out from between his legs is transformed into the impression that the bomb is pinning him, eventually nailing him into the ground. The screen goes white – but does not stay so for long. There are two shots of mushroom clouds forming, while the noise of an explosion can be heard; both shots are taken from a long distance away, the second from very high above the Earth, which visually diminishes the power of the bomb, while emphasising the beauty of its cloud. This heavenly perspective is followed (in Scene 28, 84:02–89:10) by a low-angle shot of Dr. Strangelove turning away from the big board to the camera and announcing: ‘Mr. President, I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens … at the bottom of some of our deeper mineshafts.’ The president is sitting in front of the buffet, next to Staines and Turgidson, while all the others gather behind Strangelove. Everyone is focused on what Strangelove has to say. Through his choice of

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words, he elevates himself above other human beings (they are to him what laboratory specimens are to a scientist), yet his wording is evocative of the human body, in particular its sexuality, right from the start; he talks about ‘bottom’, ‘shafts’ and the fact that radioactivity could not ‘penetrate’ a deep mine. At the same time, his own body makes its presence known when his right arm begins to develop a life of its own (which it had not done during his previous appearances; in Scene 16 the fingers of his right hand had just seemed a bit stiff). While he tries to control this arm, he absent-mindedly responds to the president’s question whether people could stay in mineshafts for a hundred years until radioactivity on the surface has subsided: ‘It would not be difficult, mein Führer.’ Belatedly realising what he has said, he apologises. This slip establishes a link between his right arm and his past in Nazi Germany, where he appears to have had (or wishes to have had) a working relationship with Hitler comparable to the one he now enjoys with the American president. This revelation is immediately given a very sinister dimension when he states, with great relish and special emphasis on the last word, that in the mineshafts ‘animals could be bred and slaughtered’. In response to the president’s comment that he would not want to make the decision about who can go into the mineshafts and who will have to die, Dr. Strangelove replies that this could be done by a computer, programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence and a cross-section of necessary skills. Of course, it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition.

At this point, he tries to subdue his arm by hitting it, yet it shoots up into a Hitler salute. After pulling it down, he goes on to say that the people in the mineshafts would ‘breed prodigiously’, employing a ‘proper breeding technique’. The language and the gesture connect

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the proposed scheme to Nazi eugenicist policies which aimed at controlling human reproduction in such a way that those considered biologically valuable (including German political and military elites) would ‘breed’ and others would be prevented from doing so (many millions of them by being killed).99 At the heart of these policies was a concern for the racial purity of so-called Aryans, a concern which is echoed in Ripper’s obsession with the purity of ‘bodily fluids’. This does not mean that Ripper was directly influenced by Nazi ideology (because eugenicist ideas had much wider currency), but Dr. Strangelove’s right arm and his words do reveal that, at some level, he is an unreconstructed Nazi, who finally sees an opportunity to base a whole society on National Socialist principles with a new leader, he hopes, taking on Hitler’s mantle. Strangelove will help to design this utopia. Billions will have to die as a consequence of the explosion of the doomsday machine but, in his view, perhaps it is all worth it; if it is, then that’s how he just learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. For his breeding programme, Dr. Strangelove considers ‘a ratio of … ten females to each male’ ideal:

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I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics, which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.

He says this in response to Turgidson’s question about the abandonment of monogamy ‘as far as men were concerned’. It is obvious from Turgidson’s expression that rather than regarding this as a ‘sacrifice’ (Dr. Strangelove’s word), he relishes the prospect of having sex with ten Miss Scotts without anyone pestering him about marriage like she did. The Soviet ambassador also appears to be intrigued: ‘I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, doctor.’ Across the differences, and beyond the conflict, between the two superpowers, men are united in their approval of this sexual fantasy. And since it has been made possible, even – according to Dr. Strangelove – necessary, by the explosion of a nuclear weapon, we might say that this is why they all love the bomb now. Yet is this wish-fulfilment fantasy not also a version of Ripper’s delusional nightmare? What is to stop these numerically far superior women from taking control of the mineshaft society, and treating men like sexual service providers, even sex slaves, who they will drive

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to exhaustion with their demands? Thus, as with Kong’s phallic ride on the bomb and the orgasmic release of its explosive energy, and Ripper’s attempt to overcome his sexual anxieties with his bomb wing after withholding his ‘life essence’ from women, male sexual fantasy could once again ultimately result in a form of selfdestruction. But there is more to come because, despite their agreement about Strangelove’s scheme, the Soviet ambassador and General Turgidson have by no means forgotten about superpower rivalry – and this time the president does not provide a counterweight to militaristic thinking as he had done so effectively before. Turgidson declares: It’d be extremely naïve of us … to imagine that these new developments are gonna cause any change in Soviet expansionist policy … we must be increasingly on the alert to prevent them from taking over our mineshaft space in order to breed more prodigiously than we do, thus knocking us out through superior numbers when we emerge.

Indirectly, Turgidson here expresses anxieties about men’s relationship with women, because it is, of course, women who will have ‘superior numbers’ in the post-apocalyptic world that has just been discussed. And once again, these anxieties are projected onto the political and military rivalry with the Soviet Union. The film suggests that such projection is also at work from the other side, because, while Turgidson talks, the Soviet ambassador is wandering away from the other men in the war room and taking pictures of the big board. The superpower rivalry will indeed continue, but from now on its focus will be on population growth – on biology rather than technology, on sexual rather than political ideology. The duality of serious drama and (sexual, physical, verbal and satirical) comedy characterising much of the film is here taken to such extremes that it becomes difficult to experience this scene as a coherent entity. Sellers’s performance takes his character’s battle with

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his own arm well beyond the point where it is a humorous incident or a meaningful expression of Dr. Strangelove’s old Nazi self fighting against his new American identity. Instead it becomes a spectacle in its own right, completely divorced from the fictional world in which it is situated.100 None of the other people in the room comments on, or even pays attention to, his antics – it is as if they did not see them, as if they took place in another movie altogether. This sense of two films overlapping is enhanced by the last shot of the scene. A high-angle extreme long shot shows Turgidson jumping up with the words ‘Mr. President, we must avoid a mineshaft gap!’ Paying no attention to this, Dr. Strangelove rises as well, saying ‘Sir, I have a plan.’ While this sentence is addressed to the president, his next one is not. Strangelove just realises that he has been able to stand up and take a step. The condition that forced him to use a wheelchair is miraculously overcome and, as if participating in a faith-healing, he shouts thanks to the entity he holds responsible for this miracle: ‘Mein Führer, I can walk!’ If Sellers/Strangelove is indeed in a different film here, it is one about a godlike Hitler working miracles on the faithful and waiting to take control of a post-apocalyptic society based on eugenic thinking. This is a

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terrifying vision, yet the other scenario playing out in this shot is no more comforting: without any resistance from the president, Turgidson takes charge with a battle cry. This double vision of the future is followed by the film’s final scene (Scene 29, 89:10–90:40), which consists of shots of nuclear bombs exploding in what appear to be a range of locations (on solid ground and on water), documentary footage being used here to stand in for the detonation of the many bombs that make up the doomsday machine in the Arctic. This refers us back to the prologue, but instead of fierce winds and a male voiceover, we now hear an orchestra and soon several, mostly male voices start to sing ‘We’ll Meet Again’, sounding like a group of people spontaneously erupting into song rather than a professional choir. The lead vocalist is the British singer Vera Lynn, who made this 1939 song famous in the United Kingdom during World War II. While her classic recording of the song was a staple of wartime and postwar British culture, it must also have been familiar to millions of American soldiers stationed in the United Kingdom; other Americans were quite likely to have heard the song on American radio, either Lynn’s rendition or the version recorded by Benny Goodman with singer Peggy Lee in 1942.101 The people singing together assure each other that, although they must go separate ways and do not know where and when their paths will cross, they will meet again ‘some sunny day’. After this chorus, the female voice goes on alone telling her audience, especially perhaps those she sang the chorus with: ‘Keep smiling through/Just like you always do.’ In the song’s original wartime context, she might be addressing soldiers leaving home and going into battle. She acknowledges that they will encounter ‘dark clouds’, but promises them the return of ‘blue skies’. The singer then switches sides, imagining that she is the one who is leaving, telling those left behind to ‘say hello to the folks that I know’; they will be comforted by the fact that upon her departure ‘I was singing this song’, that is, a song about the certainty of being reunited with them. The female voice is then absorbed into the many voices of the chorus; the group

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singing once again exemplifies the very state of affairs that the lyrics promise for the future: togetherness. The images accompanying, and being cut to the rhythm of, the song, change from shots of explosions taken from the ground to those taken from high up in the air. This heavenly perspective is reminiscent of the prologue, and the clouds that can be seen in many shots here can be expected to form the comprehensive cloud cover seen earlier, which is the ‘doomsday shroud’ mentioned by the Soviet ambassador in Scene 16. Most of these shots look beautiful, yet there is a sense of threat, not only because of what they represent but also because the image at times goes very dark and at other times almost bleaches out to white. The final shot shows an explosion looking like a rising sun as well as ragged cloud formations resembling a hostile, rocky landscape, which fades to black while the song ends with ‘some sunny day’. Obviously, there are many contrasts between the song and the images as well as the story that it concludes. The explosions represent the unleashing of radioactive particles which will erase life on the surface of the Earth, killing billions of people. As this will take a while, people will certainly have time to say goodbye to each other,

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but they will never ‘meet again’. However, a select few can survive in mineshafts, albeit in a society which is likely to be highly militarised, perhaps even fascistic, and for some of them it may be possible to ‘keep smiling through’ – at least that is what many of the men in the war room seem to expect, while fantasising about the women they will have sex with. Eventually (in about one hundred years, according to Dr. Strangelove), the ‘dark clouds’ of radioactive particles will dissipate and the underground survivors will be able to see ‘blue skies’ again. The old enemies will ‘meet again’ – but not for a happy reunion. In the light of Turgidson’s battle cry and the ambassador’s spying at the end of Scene 28, we can expect them to resume superpower competition above ground which may well culminate in another global catastrophe. Still, there is an element of hope. The very last shot of the film is a title card (90:40–90:50), which combines the sober design of the disclaimer at the beginning of the film with the different-sized lettering and rectangular layout of its credits. Echoing the last line of the disclaimer (‘or dead’), the first two lines of this card read ‘The End’. But this is not the actual end of the film, because below these two words we read: ‘Made at Shepperton Studios, England by Hawk Films Ltd.’ This can be understood as another kind of (not, strictly speaking, necessary) disclaimer, insofar as it is a reminder that, of course, the world the film has shown is an artificial (and artistic) construct, pure make-believe, which we, as an audience, should certainly take seriously (this is, as I suggested, the ironic implication of the initial Air Force disclaimer), but perhaps more as a warning than as a prediction. Clearly, the film does not show a way out of the nuclear stalemate, insisting instead that the inherent logic of deterrence is likely to lead to the construction of a doomsday machine or a close equivalent thereof; that a racialised conception (not that far removed from Nazi ideology) of the differences between the two competing superpowers underpins American nuclear strategy; that a combination of human failure (including mental breakdowns) and

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technical accidents will sooner or later lead to the triggering of allencompassing nuclear war; and that it is a specifically male obsession with sexual potency and the control of women which is expressed through superpower rivalry and nuclear weapons, and which may one day provide the trigger for war. But the film does offer an alternative vision, at least of the postapocalyptic future, from within the destructive sexual fantasies of men. What if the numerically superior women do indeed take control of the mineshaft society: might they not abandon competition with the Soviets and instead come up with a more co-operative approach? This possibility returns us to Vera Lynn’s rendition of ‘We’ll Meet Again’. There is so much hope for, and indeed confidence about, a livable future in this song, and while, in its original World War II context, it concerned the relationship between those staying at home and those going off to fight the fascists, with reference to the film’s post-apocalyptic scenario it can take on other positive meanings. The singer’s ability to switch sides – adopting the place of those left behind and those going away – could be projected onto the two superpowers. The togetherness of voices in the chorus – under female leadership – would then stand in for the kind of superpower relationship envisioned by the president during the preceding crisis: ‘We are all in this together. … We’re with you all the way.’ Of course, by the end of Scene 28, the president’s viewpoint has been marginalised and his voice muted. Afterwards the only one able to articulate a hopeful vision of a co-operative future is Vera Lynn, whose voice enters the film’s post-apocalyptic scenario from a glorious past which did indeed see co-operation between the United States and the Soviet Union in a successful effort to defeat fascism. However we understand and respond to the film’s ending, its emphasis on a woman is entirely in keeping with Kubrick’s previous work. With the exception of Fear and Desire, the endings of all his earlier films included a hopeful note associated with female characters. It is not so surprising, then, that, based on an interview with the filmmaker, in February 1964 McCall’s had this to say about his plans:

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One likely subject he would like to tackle … [is] woman’s place … and her displacement in the modern world. … To Kubrick, the ‘gap’ between the sexes now ranks with the bomb, population explosion, and racial problems as a major world crisis.102

What I have tried to show in my analysis of Dr. Strangelove is that, in this film, Kubrick was tackling ‘the bomb’ as well as ‘racial problems’ precisely in relation to the ‘gap’ between the sexes, by removing all female characters except for one, and by suggesting that male (wishfulfilment as well as nightmare) fantasies about sexual potency, about unfettered sexual access to, and control of, women, and also about the (to them) terrifying sexual power of women is foundational for nuclear and racist thinking. The ‘I’ of the title who has learned to ‘love the bomb’ is probably male and definitely bound to self-destruct, eagerly and indeed joyfully (like Major Kong and the men approving of Dr. Strangelove’s mineshaft scheme in the war room). The film is constructed in such a way that viewers are encouraged both to resist (together with Captain Mandrake and President Muffley) this strange love and to go along with it. It may well be easier for women than for men to refuse this invitation to love the bomb. The film also presents a glimmer of hope that men may learn to listen to a woman’s voice (like that of Vera Lynn, or even that of Miss Scott) and turn away from ultimate self-destruction towards a co-operative future. Once again, women may find it easier than men to acknowledge and relish this possibility. After all it was the female head of Women for Peace who told Kubrick: ‘I hope millions of moviegoers will be inspired by this film to do something now to make peace a reality and the world of Dr. Strangelove a “real nightmare”!’103

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Conclusion In February 1964, an American ‘fan’ of Dr. Strangelove wrote: ‘I left the theatre terrified, amused, unhappy and delighted.’104 Another correspondent declared: ‘It’s a great picture – at once shocking, amusing, terrifying and above all completely absorbing from beginning to end.’105 These and other statements by contemporary viewers suggest that, at least with regards to American audiences, Kubrick’s ambition to engage viewers in complex, unexpected and contradictory ways was met with success. The filmic strategies I have outlined in my analysis of Dr. Strangelove really did take viewers on an emotional rollercoaster ride, which reached its extreme highs and lows towards the end of the film. What is more, the film was widely considered to be an important contribution to public debates about nuclear weapons, although there was no agreement about what exactly this contribution might be and whether it was constructive or not. Several press commentators attacked Dr. Strangelove for misrepresenting military procedure and defaming the American leadership, and thus potentially weakening America’s position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.106 At the same time, peace organisations produced flyers and booklets linked to the film, and held rallies outside cinemas where it was playing.107 Kubrick carefully avoided making any public statements or appearances which would associate him and his film with a particular position in the debates about the nuclear situation. He turned down invitations from the Peace Hostages Exchange Foundation,108 the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and SANE (the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy): Though I obviously share most of their views and objectives (the film speaks for that) I have avoided any identification with Peace Groups because I believe

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this film and my future films will have more impact coming from an uncommitted source, not easily labeled as a Peace Group effort.109

Kubrick’s non-committal stance probably helped the film’s commercial success and cultural impact. Dr. Strangelove was a considerable hit at the American box office (it was among the fifteen highest grossing films of the year) and an enormous success with critics, many of them declaring it to be one of the best American films of recent years.110 Both in reviews and in reports and letters sent to Kubrick, there were remarkably few negative comments on, or questions about, the film’s highly unusual title. This indicates that viewers did indeed experience the film along the lines suggested by its subtitle: from initial worries about the nuclear situation they moved – along with most of the male characters in the film, as I have shown – into a position where they could personally feel the appeal of the bomb. On some level, then, viewers seem to have accepted the film’s invitation to become the ‘I’ in its subtitle. There were also hardly any queries about the fact that the film’s main title was derived from a character whose appearances lasted only a few minutes. This suggests that viewers saw much of the film’s story, themes and style encapsulated in the figure of Dr. Strangelove. Such a response makes sense with regard to the film’s emphasis on scientific and strategic thinking, male fantasy, sexuality and mental instability, as well as its layering of deadly seriousness and outrageous comedy. What about the fact, though, that Dr. Strangelove has come to the United States from Germany, and that his American identity is at war with, and eventually defeated by, his old Nazi self? Quite astonishingly, both in 1964 and later (when historians of Cold War America and biographers of key nuclear scientists and strategists began to use the figure of Dr. Strangelove as an important reference point,111 and film scholars started analysing the film),112 Dr. Strangelove’s association with National Socialism has largely been ignored or left unexplored. American reviews and articles in

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1964 tended to mention Dr. Strangelove’s German background and his association with the Nazis briefly, but, with very few exceptions,113 failed to investigate what this implied for the film named after him. There is no doubt that for Kubrick, Dr. Strangelove’s association with Nazi ideology and policies was essential. This is most obvious in his decision to remove an extended slapstick routine he had filmed to conclude Dr. Strangelove. Building on the earlier comic fighting between Turgidson and the Soviet ambassador in Scene 12, this routine begins after the Americans’ discovery that the ambassador has been taking pictures of the big board. According to the script, ‘as is the case with the great pie-throwing scenes, misunderstanding piles upon misunderstanding, until everyone in the room is hectically engaged in splattering pies into each other’s face’.114 This was to be followed by the camera pulling back from the Earth and a final voiceover from the future aliens who have been telling this story about ‘the little-known dead planet Earth … in our series The Dead Worlds of Antiquity’. By October 1963, Kubrick had dropped the futuristic framing story and replaced it with documentary footage of nuclear explosions accompanied by ‘We’ll Meet Again’.115 He had also developed serious doubts about the inclusion of the pie-fight scene; instead he was proposing to end the war room scene with Strangelove’s ‘Mein Führer, I can walk!’ The detailed reports on the pros and cons of the two alternative endings which Kubrick solicited were in agreement.

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One report noted that the ‘Mein Führer’ ending placed too much emphasis on the figure of Dr. Strangelove and on his Nazi identity, which undermined the larger points the film was making about ‘collective absurdity’: ‘It’s about people being irrational not about strategists being Nazis.’116 The report also noted that the audience would only pay attention to Sellers’s ‘pyrotechnics’, not to what he was saying, and hence simply would not understand ‘the subtle and sophisticated theory of Nazi genocide equalling the strategic outlook’. Yet, for Kubrick, this ‘theory’ was so important that he decided to remove the pie-fight after all. On 1 November 1963, a telegram announced: ‘Pie sequence out.’117 Kubrick’s transformation of Dr. Strangelove into a Nazi had already run into opposition earlier that year. In April 1963, Max Lerner of the New York Post visited the set of Dr. Strangelove, talked to Kubrick and read the script. He had strong concerns about the figure of Dr. Strangelove, not least because his characterisation was ‘ignoring … the historic fact that almost all the great American nuclear scientists have been refugees from Nazism’.118 Lerner could have gone further: most of the nuclear scientists (both foreign-born and American-born) and many of the most prominent nuclear strategists such as Herman Kahn were Jewish. How, then, had this Jewish-American film-maker come up with the idea to represent the largely Jewish group of nuclear scientists and strategists through the figure of a Nazi? Initially, in his Prof. A. B. C. Ice incarnation in spring 1962, the nuclear strategist was neither a Nazi, nor even Germanic. If there was a real-life model for the charismatic nuclear strategist with a bestselling book about nuclear war that Peter George and Kubrick were developing at that time, it was Herman Kahn, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. Indeed, Kahn’s biographer Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi has traced many personal and intellectual connections between Kubrick, George and Kahn, and demonstrated that, when the film came out, quite a few commentators connected Dr. Strangelove to Kahn.119 She points out that Kubrick’s film and

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George’s novelisation were full of direct quotations or paraphrases of passages from Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War, and also argues that the very idea of telling a comical story about nuclear war may have emerged from George and Kubrick’s familiarity with Kahn’s witty, humorous, even outrageous performances (in person, in writing and in the media).120 There are archival traces of the different ways in which the initially Kahn-based figure of the nuclear strategist came to be associated with the Nazis. On the pages of a treatment loosely based on Two Hours to Doom/Red Alert from 22 March 1962, Kubrick jotted down a few questions through which he tried to put himself in the place of top nuclear decision-makers: Would you drop it? … Why don’t we hit them first? How would you feel if you killed 500,000 people? [next to this he wrote ‘abstraction’, PK] How would you feel if you had to kick a baby to death? [next to this he wrote ‘Reality’, PK].121

Kubrick was trying to imagine the worst possible human actions here, and it is not surprising that his thoughts turned to the Nazis. Later on, when he and George were working on the story about the rise of Dr. Strangelove, they had the nuclear strategist thinking about ‘[w]ar crimes trials for the losers’, which evokes the Nuremberg trials of leading Nazis after World War II.122 When exploring how a nuclear crisis could get started, he and George frequently turned to Berlin as a flashpoint of superpower rivalry; among other things, they considered an assassination attempt on Khrushchev by a ‘Nazi S.S. Sergeant’.123 Wherever he looked, Kubrick had to confront the legacy of World War II, of Nazi war crimes and crimes against humanity, and especially, I would argue, of the destruction of European Jewry. The phrase that was most frequently used in mainstream American media of the 1950s and 1960s to describe the effects of nuclear war – ‘nuclear (or atomic) holocaust’ – included the very word that within

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Israeli and Jewish-American circles was already most closely associated with the Nazi genocide of Jews.124 For a Jewish-American film-maker of the early 1960s it would have been difficult to think about nuclear war without also thinking of the specifically Jewish ‘holocaust’. Hence any attempt to deal with those responsible for bringing about a nuclear holocaust evoked the Nazi past. This connection was strengthened by the presence of numerous German rocket scientists in the United States and their involvement in the development of missiles able to deliver nuclear bombs to the Soviet Union, as well as, more famously, in the space race. The most high-profile of these scientists was Wernher von Braun, who had become a media celebrity and indeed an American hero by the early 1960s, although his Nazi past (especially his work on the missiles used to bombard various cities during World War II, most notably London) was the subject of some public criticism.125 All of this helps to explain why, by the beginning of 1963, Kubrick had decided to link the figure of the nuclear strategist to National Socialism. In the script materials from this time, there are still two such strategists. Dr. Strangelove is said to talk with ‘German precision’ when explaining the doomsday machine, whereas Von Klutz talks about mineshafts at the end, including, in response to the question whether people could live underground for a long time, the following lines which were omitted from the film (but not from its novelisation): man is an amazingly adaptable creature. After all, conditions [in the mineshafts] would be far superior to those, say, of the so-called Nazi concentration camps, where there is ample evidence most of the wretched creatures clung desperately to life.126

On a separate sheet containing character sketches, Von Klutz is said to be ‘[r]ather sinister in the manner of a Nazi nobleman’.127 While George was working on the novelisation he clearly had von Braun in mind when explaining that Dr. Strangelove’s

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‘black-gloved right hand was a memento’ of the ‘British bombing of Peenemünde, where he was working on the German V-2 rocket’.128 George and Kubrick may even have been aware of the fact that the Nazi rocket programme headed by von Braun used underground facilities filled with slave labourers from concentration camps (although the full horrors of this did not become widely known until much later).129 In some script drafts, Von Klutz responds to a general’s question about ‘deformed mutation births’: ‘some policy will have to be formulated to ascertain the social desirability of maintaining the harmfully deformed’.130 In other words, it will have to be decided whether they can be allowed to live (the Nazis’ systematic killing programme started with physically or mentally disabled people in 1939).131 Thus, Kubrick and George’s visions of a post-apocalyptic future invariably returned them to the Nazi past. As we saw in the Introduction, for Kubrick, thinking about the horrors of the Nazi regime was a way to gain some understanding of what it meant to be a (potential) victim of an all-encompassing campaign of murder and destruction, leading him to declare, with reference to the phrase used to describe the most miserable of concentration camp inmates: ‘we have become “walking dead”’. In his discussion of the conditions that turned people into ‘walking dead’, Kubrick pointed out that it happened only ‘when they believed that nothing they could do … would have any effect on their fate’. Kubrick implied here (and said more explicitly elsewhere) that there was a way out. The first step was to stop ‘deny[ing] the threat’ (by turning away from it through a consumerist lifestyle) and to acknowledge one’s fears about nuclear war explicitly and directly (rather than displacing and expressing them ‘elsewhere’). This would enable people to perceive the present situation in a new light (for example, as an obscene outgrowth of male sexual fantasies) and ‘to see whatever opportunities may eventually appear’. Kubrick suggested that these opportunities would arise not only (or even primarily) in the realms of politics, strategy and technology, but with

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regard to the ‘the mind of man’, facilitating a ‘profound moral change of attitudes in men and nations’.132 (Although Kubrick probably intended ‘man’ to refer to humanity as a whole here, my analysis of Dr. Strangelove suggests that he was specifically concerned about the male mind.) But where were the opportunities for the transformation of the (male) mind supposed to come from? Soon after the release of Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick started concentrating his energies on what was to become 2001: A Space Odyssey.133 When in 1966, the physicist and science writer Jeremy Bernstein published a profile of Kubrick in the New Yorker, he quoted him extensively on the dangers of nuclear war, and then noted: Such limited optimism as Kubrick has about the long-range prospects of the human race is based in large measure on his hope that the development of space exploration will change our views of ourselves and our world.134

Bernstein went on to point out that nothing would be more transformative than the event at the heart of Kubrick’s current project – ‘the first human contact with extraterrestrial life.’135 In other words, Kubrick’s only hope now was that such contact would take place before the otherwise inevitable outbreak of nuclear war. In my BFI Film Classic on 2001, I argue that hope is at the very centre of Kubrick’s intentions for the film, and also the foundation of the film’s largely enthusiastic reception by American audiences in the late 1960s. Many cinemagoers experienced 2001 not only as a story about great transformations in the history of life on, and beyond, this planet (from pre-human ape-like hominid to human being, from human being to Star-Child), brought about by extraterrestrial technology in the shape of black monoliths, but also as a transformative experience in its own right. According to many people who wrote letters to Kubrick in the late 1960s about their experiences with 2001, this mysterious, monolithic film had the power – comparable to that of the alien artefacts in the film – to help

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bring about fundamental change in individual lives, in the wider culture and perhaps even in humanity at large.136 Although nuclear weapons did not feature much in the reception of 2001 (partly because all explicit references to such weapons, which are very prominent in Clarke’s novel, had been removed),137 here perhaps was an example of the ‘profound moral change of attitudes in men and nations’, of the transformation of the ‘mind of man’ which Kubrick felt was the only ‘defense’ against nuclear war. It is important to note that 2001 starts out by showing, in an extension of the argument Kubrick put forward in Dr. Strangelove, that human beings are the result of pre-human male hominids learning to use phallic bones as murderous weapons. Yet it ends by depicting the re-birth of ‘man’ in the form of an unsexed ‘Star-Child’, who is visually aligned with Mother Earth at the end of the film, which could be understood as a solution to the problem of male sexuality and violence identified in Dr. Strangelove (and Kubrick’s earlier films). Thus, with the benefit of hindsight, we can say that Kubrick’s nuclear comedy helped to pinpoint the male mind as a crucial problem for which a solution was urgently needed, and to break down widespread denial of the nuclear situation so as to prepare the ground for a fundamental transformation of the (male) mind in 2001 and also perhaps elsewhere in the culture of the mid- to late 1960s.

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Notes 1 For biographical information about Kubrick, see Vincent LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick (London: Faber and Faber, 1998). The importance of Kubrick’s Jewish background for our understanding of his films has been explored in the ground-breaking work of Geoffrey Cocks and, more recently, Nathan Abrams; see especially Geoffrey Cocks, The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); and Nathan Abrams, ‘An Alternative New York Jewish Intellectual: Stanley Kubrick’s Cultural Critique’, in Tatjana Ljujic ´, Peter Krämer and Richard Daniels (eds), Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives (London: Black Dog, forthcoming). 2 On Kubrick’s early career, see Peter Krämer, ‘The Limits of Autonomy: Stanley Kubrick, Hollywood and Independent Filmmaking, 1950–53’, in Geoff King, Claire Molloy and Yannis Tzioumakis (eds), American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 153–64; and Peter Krämer, ‘“Complete Total Final Annihilating Artistic Control”: Stanley Kubrick and Postwar Hollywood’, in Ljujic ´ et al., Stanley Kubrick. 3 See, for example, Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armaggedon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983). 4 Jeffrey D. Sachs, To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace (London: Bodley Head, 2013), p. 13. 5 Ibid., p. 138. 6 Ibid., passim. 7 Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988),

pp. 258–69; Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), pp. 355–8. 8 Weart, Nuclear Fear, pp. 264–5. 9 Sibylle K. Escalona, ‘Growing Up with the Threat of Nuclear War: Some Indirect Effects on Personality Development’, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry vol. 52 no. 4, October 1982, p. 602. 10 Lyn Tornabene, ‘The Bomb and Stanley Kubrick’, Cosmopolitan, November 1963, pp. 15–16. 11 Stanley Kubrick, undated notes, most probably from 1962, in folder SK/11/1/7, Stanley Kubrick Archive (SKA), University of the Arts London. 12 Stanley Kubrick to Irvin Doress, 31 March 1964, SK/12/8/1/65, SKA. 13 Kubrick, undated notes, SK/11/1/7, SKA. 14 Chapters 2–8 of a novelistic treatment for this project are included in the as yet uncatalogued boxes on Kubrick’s unproduced projects in the Stanley Kubrick Archive. 15 Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age (New York: Free Press, 1960), esp. the section ‘Muselmänner: The Walking Corpses’, pp. 151–3. 16 Kirsten Fermaglich, American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares: Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957–1965 (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2006). 17 Ibid., p. 4. 18 Kubrick, undated notes, SK/11/1/7, SKA.

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19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Stanley Kubrick, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, screenplay, 31 August 1962, Vertical Files, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), Beverly Hills, CA (emphasis in the original); also in SK/11/1/1i, SKA. 22 Stanley Kubrick to Jonas Rosenfield Jr, Columbia Pictures, 4 January 1963, SK/11/9/19, SKA (emphasis in the original). 23 Ibid. 24 Kubrick, undated notes, SK/11/1/7, SKA. 25 On the film’s production history, marketing and success, see Peter Krämer, ‘“The Greatest Mass Murderer since Adolf Hitler”: Nuclear War and the Nazi Past in Dr. Strangelove’, in Christine Cornea and Rhys Owain Thomas (eds), Dramatising Disaster: Character, Event, Representation (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), pp. 124–9; and Peter Krämer, ‘“To Prevent the Present Heat from Dissipating”: Stanley Kubrick and the Marketing of Dr. Strangelove (1964)’, InMedia no. 3, April 2013, http://inmedia.revues.org/634. 26 The timing of sections and scenes relates to the two-disc special edition released by Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment in the UK in 2005. As this version runs at twenty-five frames per second, it is one 25th shorter than the theatrical release version of the film. I should also note that this DVD version reproduces the widescreen format used during the film’s original

theatrical release (1.66:1). There are, however, other versions of the film – for example, the one included in Warner Bros.’ ‘Stanley Kubrick Collection’ (2001) – that present Dr. Strangelove in the format used during the shooting of the film (the so-called ‘Academy’ ratio of 1.33:1). For the theatrical release, the 1.33:1 picture was cropped at top and bottom to create the widescreen format. 27 Many DVD and broadcast versions of Dr. Strangelove do not include this disclaimer, but the 2005 DVD version I am using does. 28 Al Schwartz, Columbia, to ‘branch managers’, 29 January 1964, SK/11/4/3, SKA. 29 The material in this paragraph and the next one is taken from Krämer, ‘“To Prevent the Present Heat from Dissipating”’. 30 Cp. Kate McQuiston, We’ll Meet Again: Musical Design in the Films of Stanley Kubrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 24–5; and Christine Lee Gengaro, Listening to Stanley Kubrick: The Music in His Films (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), p. 58. 31 Nat Asch of WNEW Radio to Stanley Kubrick, 9 January 1964, SK/11/7/17, 1/3, SKA. 32 Stanley Kubrick to Daniel Miller, no date, SK/11/9/28, 1/1, SKA. 33 As we will see below, there had in fact been an ongoing public debate about the possibility of a real ‘doomsday machine’. 34 Peter Bryant, Two Hours to Doom (no place: Startlux, 2005, originally published in 1958), p. iv. This reprint is

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included in the 2005 two-disc DVD edition I am using. 35 ‘Intended Screen Play Revisions for the Novel Red Alert’, Harris-Kubrick Pictures Corporation memo, 25 October 1961, SK/11/1/13, SKA. 36 Peter George, The Delicate Balance of Terror, first draft screenplay, 12 February 1962, SK/11/1/4, SKA. 37 Albert Wohlstetter, ‘The Delicate Balance of Terror’, Foreign Affairs, January 1959. Cp. Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, pp. 171–3, 249. 38 Cp. Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon. 39 Thomas Schelling to Peter George, 15 December 1960, SK/11/8/1, SKA. 40 Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007, originally published in 1960), p. 228. 41 Herman Kahn to Peter George, 8 August 1961, SK/11/8/1, SKA. George did not take up this offer. 42 Stanley Kubrick, ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cinema’, Films and Filming, June 1963, p. 12. 43 Robert Levine to Stanley Kubrick, 23 April 1964, SK/11/7/17, 3/3, SKA; Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 275–7, 362–3. 44 P. D. Smith, Doomsday Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon (London: Penguin, 2008), pp. xvii–xviii, ch. 2. 45 Kubrick, Dr. Strangelove, screenplay, 31 August 1962. 46 See the correspondence between Kubrick and George in SK/11/9/61, 2/2, SKA. My own collection includes a script

dated 11 February 1963 which carries the title Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and, in terms of both story and dialogue, is close to the novelisation. Dates on individual pages indicate that this script had in fact been written by 27 January 1963. Cp. the very similar scripts (dated between January and March 1963) contained in SK/11/1/17 and SK/11/1/22, SKA. 47 Peter George, Dr. Strangelove Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, originally published in 1963); the publisher’s note is unpaginated. 48 Ibid., p. 1. 49 Dr. Strangelove, screenplay, 11 February 1963. 50 Peter Krämer, 2001: A Space Odyssey (London: BFI, 2010), pp. 18–20. 51 According to Scene 4, it is called Burpelson Air Force Base. 52 Cp. Christopher Frayling, Ken Adam: The Art of Production Design (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), p. 114. 53 On research carried out for the bomber interior sets, see letter from Stanley Kubrick to F. C. Durant, 24 July 1964, SK/11/9/31, SKA. Cp. Frayling, Ken Adam, p. 113; and David Sylvester, Moonraker, Strangelove and Other Celluloid Dreams: The Visionary Art of Ken Adam (London: Serpentine Gallery, 1999), pp. 69–70. 54 The novelisation, but not the film, informs us that his nickname is ‘King’; George, Dr. Strangelove, p. 6. 55 Gengaro, Listening to Stanley Kubrick, pp. 58–9; McQuiston, We’ll Meet Again, pp. 25–6. 56 George, Dr. Strangelove, p. 23.

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57 According to the novelisation, he chairs the Joint Chiefs; ibid., pp. 22–3. 58 The novelisation has ‘re-entry’ here; ibid., p. 24. 59 ‘Intended Screen Play Revisions for the Novel Red Alert’. 60 Peter George, no title, treatment, 15 January 1962, SK/11/1/3, SKA. 61 George, The Delicate Balance of Terror, screenplay, 12 February 1962; and notes from 8 July 1962, SK/11/1/11, SKA. 62 Bryant, Two Hours to Doom, pp. 1–31, 47–54. 63 Ibid., p. 27. 64 Ibid., p. 30. 65 Ibid., p. 53. 66 Ibid., pp. 71, 73. 67 Ibid., p. 76; see also p. 118. 68 Ibid., p. 73. 69 Ibid., p. 74. 70 Cp. Frayling, Ken Adam, pp. 108–11. 71 The president’s name is mentioned only once in the film (by Captain Mandrake in Scene 21). 72 This was decided fairly late in the production process. The script of 11 February 1963 has references to wives and families on pp. 19 and 23. 73 Bryant, Two Hours to Doom, pp. 61–2. 74 Ibid., pp. 62–3. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., pp. 35–9, 57–63. 77 Ibid., p. 58; see also p. 139. 78 Ibid., pp. 62–3. 79 Ibid., pp. 110–11. 80 Ibid., p. 156. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 Stanley Kubrick to LeGrace G. Benson of Cornell University, 20 March 1964, SK/11/7/17, 3/3, SKA.

84 Postcard from John Pagel to Stanley Kubrick, 20 January 1964, SK/11/7/17, 1/3, SKA. 85 Kubrick to Pagel, 31 January 1964, SK/11/7/17, 1/3, SKA. 86 Bryant, Two Hours to Doom, pp. 8, 105. 87 Ibid., p. 8. 88 Cp. Krämer, ‘“The Greatest Mass Murderer since Adolf Hitler”’, p. 126. 89 This is very much in line with how people perceived Herman Kahn; see Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn, ch. 1. 90 Various undated loose sheets, probably from spring 1962, in SK/11/1/7, SKA. 91 Once again Herman Kahn seems to be the model here because On Thermonuclear War sold surprisingly well, and was widely read and debated within military and political circles and beyond. See Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn, pp. 17–22. 92 Treatment, probably written by Peter George in May or June 1962, SK/11/1/16, SKA. 93 Stanley Kubrick, Red Alert, screenplay, 1 August 1963, SK/11/1/20, SKA. 94 Stanley Kubrick, Red Alert, screenplay, 23 July 1962, SK/11/1/2, SKA. 95 Both at the time of the film’s release and later, there has been considerable debate about the extent of Southern’s contributions to the film, which I am not able to go into here. 96 Dr. Strangelove, screenplay, 11 February 1963 (actually 27 January 1963). 97 Cp. Peter Krämer, ‘“What’s It Going to Be, Eh?” Stanley Kubrick’s Adaptation of

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Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange’, in Ljujic ´, et al., Stanley Kubrick. 98 In the novelisation, one of the bombs is called ‘Lolita’. Hence we get sentences like the following: ‘[he] climbed onto Lolita. … He was sitting astride Lolita. … Lolita began to fall and King fell with her’; George, Dr. Strangelove, pp. 136–7. 99 Cp. Richard Weikart, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009). 100 Cp. this comment from a Temple University student: ‘I didn’t understand what the Dr. Strangelove thing with the gloved hand was all about. Otherwise, I liked [the film] very much’; quoted in a report by Joella Cohen sent to Roger Caras, 30 January 1964, SK/11/9/19, 2/4, SKA. Paul Rotha told Kubrick in a letter dated 5 February 1964: ‘Peter [Sellers] was so bad as Strangelove, hopelessly overacting to the point of farce. In fact, I would be so bold as to say that you didn’t need Strangelove in the film at all!’; SK/11/7/17, 3/3, SKA. 101 Cp. McQuiston, We’ll Meet Again, p. 25; and Gengaro, Listening to Stanley Kubrick, pp. 58–60. 102 ‘Hollywood’s Man Stanley’, McCall’s, February 1964, unpaginated clipping, SK/11/6/22, SKA (emphasis in the original). 103 Joan Robbins to Stanley Kubrick, 24 February 1964, SK/11/7/17, 3/3, SKA. 104 Phyllis Bellows of the Artists Agency Corporation to Stanley Kubrick, 28 February 1964, SK/11/7/17, 2/3, SKA. 105 Robert F. Blumofe of United Artists to Kubrick, 6 February 1964, SK/11/7/17, 1/3, SKA.

106 See Krämer, ‘“The Greatest Mass Murderer since Adolf Hitler”’, pp. 121–2. 107 Cincinatti Peace Center, ‘Hooray for Dr. Strangelove!’, undated flyer, probably from 1964, SK/11/9/21, SKA; World Law Fund (an educational foundation), 3 Films and World Peace, booklet, 1967, contained in Fred Zinneman Papers, AMPAS. 108 See the correspondence in SK/11/9/90, SKA. 109 Kubrick’s handwritten notes on letter from Donald Keys of SANE, 9 July 1964, SK/11/9/97, 2/3, SKA. 110 Krämer, ‘“The Greatest Mass Murderer since Adolf Hitler”’, p. 122. 111 Ibid., pp. 122–3. 112 The list of publications on Dr. Strangelove is far too long to be summarised here. Many of these publications are referenced in Grant B. Stillman, ‘Two of the MADdest Scientists: Where Strangelove Meets Dr. No; or, Unexpected Roots for Kubrick’s Cold War Classic’, Film History vol. 20 no. 4, 2008, pp. 487–500. 113 See Krämer, ‘“The Greatest Mass Murderer since Adolf Hitler”’, pp. 120–1. 114 Dr. Strangelove, screenplay, 11 February 1963, p. 121. In this version the Turgidson character is called ‘O’Connor’. 115 Syd Chassler of Redbook magazine to Stanley Kubrick, 13 October 1963; SK/11/9/68, 1/2, SKA. 116 ‘Comparison of the Two Endings’, no author, most probably from October 1963; SK/11/9/68, 1/2, SKA. 117 Lee Minoff to Robin Dean of Films and Filming, 1 November 1963, SK/11/9/18, 3/4, SKA.

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118 Max Lerner, ‘Folly on Film’, New York Post, 16 April 1963, p. 23. 119 Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn, esp. pp. 41, 61, 275–7, 304, 362–3. 120 Ibid., pp. 275–7, 363. 121 Incomplete and untitled treatment, 22 March 1962, SK/11/8/1, SKA. 122 Handwritten notes, probably from June 1962, SK/11/1/11, SKA. 123 Undated notes, SK/11/1/7, SKA. 124 Jon Petrie, ‘The Secular Word Holocaust: Scholarly Myths, History, and 20th Century Meanings’, Journal of Genocide Research vol. 2 no. 1, 2000, pp. 31–63. Cp. Krämer, ‘“The Greatest Mass Murderer since Adolf Hitler”’, pp. 131–2. 125 Michael J. Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (New York: Vintage, 2007), pp. 346–53, 404–7. 126 Dr. Strangelove, screenplay, 11 February 1963, pp. 80, 115; cp. Bryant, Two Hours to Doom, p. 141. 127 ‘Characters’ Rough Delineation’, no date, SK/11/1/9, SKA. 128 George, Dr. Strangelove, p. 35.

129 Neufeld, Von Braun, pp. 157–63. 130 Various scene drafts, probably from late 1962, SK/11/1/21, SKA. 131 See Weikart, Hitler’s Ethic, pp. 179–87. 132 All quotations in this paragraph are taken from various sets of undated notes in SK/11/1/7, SKA. 133 Cp. Krämer, 2001, pp. 18–23. 134 Jeremy Bernstein, ‘Profile: Stanley Kubrick’, New Yorker, 12 November 1966, reprinted in Gene D. Phillips (ed.), Stanley Kubrick: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), p. 29. 135 Ibid., p. 30. 136 Cp. Krämer, 2001, pp. 86–8; and Peter Krämer, ‘“Dear Mr. Kubrick”: Audience Responses to 2001: A Space Odyssey in the Late 1960s’, Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies vol. 6 no. 2, November 2009, http://www.participations.org/ Volume%206/Issue%202/special/ kramer.htm. 137 Cp. Krämer, 2001, pp. 13–17.

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Credits Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb UK/USA 1963 Directed by Stanley Kubrick Produced by Stanley Kubrick Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick Terry Southern & Peter George based on the book ‘Red Alert’ by Peter George [as ‘Peter Bryant’] Director of Photography Gilbert Taylor, B.S.C. Film Editor Anthony Harvey Production Designer Ken Adam Music Laurie Johnson © Hawk Films Ltd. Production Companies Columbia Pictures Corporation presents a Stanley Kubrick production Made … by Hawk Films Ltd. Associate Producer Victor Lyndon Production Manager Clifton Brandon

Assistant Director Eric Rattray Continuity Pamela Carlton Camera Operator Kelvin Pike Camera Assistant Bernard Ford Special Effects Wally Veevers Travelling Matte Vic Margutti Assistant Editor Ray Lovejoy Assembly Editor Geoffrey Fry Art Director Peter Murton Wardrobe Bridget Sellers Make-up Stewart [Stuart] Freeborn Hairdresser Barbara Ritchie Main Title by Pablo Ferro Ferro, Mohammed & Schwartz, Inc. Sound Supervisor John Cox [Sound] Recordist Richard Bird Dubbing Mixer John Aldred Sound Editor Leslie Hodgson Aviation Adviser Captain John Crewdson The Producers gratefully

acknowledge the assistance of Solartron Electronics; Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph; Telephone Manufacturing; British Oxygen uncredited Production Company Trooper Films, Ltd. Special Effects Alan Bryce Brian Gamby Garth Inns Mike Shaw Special Effects Adviser Arthur ‘Weegee’ Fellig Matte Painter Bob Cuff Visual Effects Camera Operator Jim Body Still Photographer Bob Penn Soundtrack ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ music by Harry M. Woods, Reginald Connelly, Jimmy Campbell; arranged by Laurie Johnson; performed by Studio Orchestra; ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’ music by Louis Lambert; ‘We’ll Meet Again’ music and lyrics by Ross Parker, Hugh Charles; performed by Vera Lynn

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Unit Publicist Lee Minoff CAST Peter Sellers Group Captain Lionel Mandrake President Merkin Muffley Dr. Strangelove George C. Scott General ‘Buck’ Turgidson Sterling Hayden General Jack D. Ripper Keenan Wynn Colonel ‘Bat’ Guano Slim Pickens Major T. J. ‘King’ Kong Peter Bull Ambassador de Sadesky James Earl Jones Lt Lothar Zogg, bombardier Tracy Reed Miss Scott Jack Creley Staines Frank Berry Lt H. R. Dietrich, D.S.O. Robert O’Neil Admiral Randolph Glen Beck Lt W. D. Kivel, navigator Roy Stephens Frank Shane Rimmer Captain G. A. ‘Ace’ Owens, co-pilot Hal Galili Burpelson base defender

Paul Tamarin Lt B. Goldberg, radio operator Laurence Herder Burpelson base defender Gordon Tanner General Faceman John McCarthy Burpelson base defender uncredited Burnell Tucker Mandrake’s aide Production Details Filmed from 28 January to 24 May 1963 at Shepperton Studios (Shepperton, Surrey, England) and on location in England (including London, Heathrow Airport and International Business Machines). Background aerial photography over Canada (including Banff National Park in Alberta; Québec and Northwest Territories); Rocky Mountains (Colorado, USA); the Arctic; Greenland and Iceland. Budget: $1,800,000. 35mm, 1.66:1; in black & white; sound (mono – Westrex Recording System). MPAA: 20469.

Release Details UK theatrical release by Columbia Pictures Corporation on 29 January 1964. BBFC certificate: A (no cuts). Running time: 94 minutes 19 seconds / 8,489 feet. US theatrical release by Columbia Pictures on 29 January 1964. Running time: 95 minutes Credits compiled by Julian Grainger