Dr. Strangelove Concepts

Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece

by Michael Benson · 2 Apr 2018 · 614pp · 174,633 words

Arthur C. Clarke; Clarke-Wilson Associates,” cable address: “Undersea, Colombo”—into his typewriter carriage. After some prefatory sentences covering Roger Caras, his interest in seeing Dr. Strangelove, and his having already seen Lolita, he continued with information about his arrival in only ten days in New York, and suggested that his work

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doing exceedingly well, both commercially and critically. On February 5 Variety’s front-page headline had been an all-caps affair: “Flash! Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove Breaks Every Opening-Week Record in History of Victoria Theatre (New York), Baronet Theatre (New York), Columbia Theatre (London).” Riding that wave, he was

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original ways of being sexually explicit on-screen. Shadow on the Sun could potentially allow that, while simultaneously exploring a science fiction theme. In fact, Dr. Strangelove’s script had contained a sci-fi framing device until shortly before shooting commenced in 1963. The film’s opening credits were supposed to start

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a lot of money down—and Clarke himself was evidently off in the tropics somewhere, doing God knows what. Distracted by the final stages of Dr. Strangelove’s publicity campaign, the director put the matter out of his mind—though he continued plowing diligently through science fiction novels in the evenings.

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concepts, or perhaps ideas they might develop in collaboration. Three years later, Clarke described their conversation in a draft piece for Life titled “Son of Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Stanley Kubrick”: “Somewhat to my chagrin, I found that Stanley had already acquired an interest

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Meredith’s nearly twenty years of experience—not to mention his having already roped together Peter George and his novel Red Alert, the basis for Dr. Strangelove, with Kubrick via Blau—the agent found himself outmatched and outmaneuvered. It was in Kubrick’s interest to keep Clarke effectively subject to his

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best to give Clarke, who was trying to finish the novel before Christmas, his undivided attention, he was distracted by his Academy Award campaign for Dr. Strangelove, and their discussion kept on being interrupted by phone calls. After providing Hector with a cup of tea, Christiane announced that she was going

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repeatedly overshot its release dates. This pushback reportedly came in part from some of the more conservative members of MGM’s board, who’d found Dr. Strangelove manifestly unpatriotic and offensive. Kubrick had chosen his studio boss wisely, however. In the years to follow, O’Brien never wavered in his support.

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a film of approximately this size and budget with Spartacus, and had just shown himself capable of achieving significant critical acclaim and commercial success with Dr. Strangelove. For Kubrick and Clarke, the MGM press release hailing Journey Beyond the Stars crystallized continuing doubts about the film’s short-lived series of titles

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whom to entrust with the film’s all-important production design preoccupied the director, who’d been playing footsie with Ken Adam—the mastermind of Dr. Strangelove’s sets, including its stunning war room—since the previous summer. Still shell-shocked from Kubrick’s relentless perfectionism, Adam was ambivalent about working

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d signed on to do the fourth James Bond film, Thunderball. He politely declined. This left an important position unfilled, and, at the recommendation of Dr. Strangelove’s associate producer, Victor Lyndon, Kubrick asked production designer Tony Masters to fly in from England for an interview. A tall, lanky type with bushy

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everyone worked on everything together, with lots of cross-pollination during meetings and discussions. Special effects pioneer Wally Veevers, who’d done the miniatures in Dr. Strangelove, would supervise the actual model production and filming, among other things. “The strange thing was that we all worked together for so long that we

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of the director backing down. • • • Kubrick had watched innumerable actors’ show reels throughout the summer and fall of 1965, and word had gotten around that Dr. Strangelove’s inscrutable mastermind was doing something Hollywood could understand: casting his next film. Rumor had it that Warren Beatty’s agent had been lobbying on

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Tyzack, whose prior London theater roles had included Lady Macbeth. Although Kubrick’s UK company, Hawk Films, which he’d formed in 1963 for Dr. Strangelove, would announce most of these decisions in early January 1966, the director got steamed when MGM presumed to issue a press release in September announcing

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the chess-dominance tactic Kubrick had engaged in with unwary actors on set—most famously George C. Scott, whom he’d repeatedly checkmated while shooting Dr. Strangelove—Lockwood never failed to thrash him at the game. When Kubrick noticed that the actor was fully ambidextrous, using his left and right hands

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pay close attention to the studio’s window screens so as to keep bugs out of his working environment. Like General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, he insisted on drinking only bottled water—something one assistant earned quiet backstage laughs circumventing by amassing empties of Malvern Water, surreptitiously filling them at

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show, because it would bite into the flesh.” The final result was flat, “almost invisible” crotch merkins—a term familiar to dedicated Kubrickologists because of Dr. Strangelove’s President Merkin Muffley, named in dubious tribute to these pubic wigs, originally used by prostitutes, that had been eagerly adopted by actors intent on

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aware of Kubrick’s hypersensitivity concerning authorial credit, as demonstrated by his very public statements in 1964 diminishing Terry Southern’s role in crafting the Dr. Strangelove script. Under the circumstances, any implication that the novel might see print without Kubrick’s name on its cover was the equivalent of a cannon

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d done many innovative and even extraordinary things in that time. Most recently, he’d helped divide Peter Sellers into three readily distinguishable characters in Dr. Strangelove, including an earnestly balding President Muffley and the film’s namesake, a megalomaniacal wheelchair-bound Nazi rocket scientist with a bad case of phantom limb

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Bob Gaffney, was visiting Borehamwood that day and witnessed the scene. Along with Peter Sellers, Gaffney had brought Terry Southern to Kubrick’s attention while Dr. Strangelove was still in the script stage. Prior to that, he’d driven around New England with the director, filming B-roll material for Lolita.

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a budget like he has, MGM should have an opportunity to protect itself.” Terrell concluded with remarks about how the Columbia Pictures ad campaign for Dr. Strangelove had been “terrible” due to Kubrick’s insistence on various ill-advised points concerning style. “I don’t think he’s always realistic in

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comparative contributions of the people principally responsible for the Special Effects work.” This public slapdown, so similar to Kubrick’s disavowal of Terry Southern after Dr. Strangelove, was, of course, a humiliation for Trumbull, and led to a break between them that lasted for years. Finally, after about a decade, Trumbull—

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, 1958; Clarke to Koch, August 13, 1958; Koch to Clarke, February 2, 1961; Clarke to Koch, March 6, 1961; Koch to Clarke, September 21, 1967. Dr. Strangelove is, in a word, a masterpiece: Val Cleaver to Clarke, February 12, 1964. “Kubrick is obviously an astonishing man” . . . “passed by the censors”: Clarke

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1979, October 12, 1961; Jon Ronson, “Citizen Kubrick,” The Guardian, March 27, 2004. good books make bad films: Frewin, “Chairman Stanley.” “a weird, hydra-headed”: Dr. Strangelove script dated March 31, 1963, Kubrick Archive, UAL. “I was disgusted”: Christiane Kubrick, interview by author, September 22, 2016. it emerged that Shaw was also

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C. Clarke: Christiane Kubrick, interview by author, June 5, 2016. Shaw’s recommendation of Clarke is further substantiated by Clarke’s timeline for “Son of Dr. Strangelove,” his unpublished draft article for Life magazine, dated September 22, 1966, at the Sir Arthur C. Clarke Papers, Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum

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had been delayed not by hours but by two days: Clarke to Meredith, April 11, 1964. “Its impressive technical virtuosity”: Arthur C. Clarke, “Son of Dr. Strangelove,” unpublished draft, January 23, 1967. where he mingled with: Neil McAleer, Visionary: The Odyssey of Sir Arthur C. Clarke (Baltimore: Clarke Project, 2010), 143. “

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look”: Jeremy Bernstein, “How About a Little Game,” New Yorker, November 12, 1966. “pure intelligence” . . . “Kubrick grasps new ideas” . . . “Please tell Wernher”: Clarke, “Son of Dr. Strangelove.” “I never did, because (a) I didn’t believe it”: Arthur C. Clarke, Astounding Days: A Science Fictional Autobiography (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), 183

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a great ability to concentrate”: Christiane Kubrick, interview by author, June 5, 2016. “Somewhat to my chagrin” . . . “This is a bit ungenerous”: Clarke, “Son of Dr. Strangelove.” “Even from the beginning” . . . “When I met Stanley for the first time”: Arthur C. Clarke, The Lost Worlds of 2001 (New York: Signet, 1972), 29

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. eight hours of talking: Clarke, “Son of Dr. Strangelove.” “perhaps the most intelligent person”: Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, a documentary film directed by Jan Harlan (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Home Video, 2001

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-Life during the day”: Jeremy Bernstein, “Out of the Ego Chamber,” New Yorker, August 9, 1969. “exclaimed in anguish, ‘What are you’ ”: Clarke, “Son of Dr. Strangelove.” “busily cribbing” . . . “Still spending every spare minute with Stanley K.”: Clarke to Mike Wilson, May 14, 1964. “A very good plot is a minor

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still creatures”: Clarke, “Rocket to the Renaissance,” 216. “The old idea that man invented tools”: ibid., 218. “from the fog of words”: Clarke, “Son of Dr. Strangelove.” “a whole microcosm of living creatures”: Arthur C. Clarke, “Before Eden,” in The Collected Stories (London: Victor Gollancz, 2001). Before we start, I’d like

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in the Dawn,” first published in Amazing Stories, June/July 1953. “It’s impossible” . . . “This is altogether too much of a coincidence”: Clarke, “Son of Dr. Strangelove.” The whole episode had lasted: Stanley Kubrick to US Air Force Colonel Jacks, June 17, 1964. “That’s the most spectacular” . . . “So Stanley had seen

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his first artificial satellite” . . . “Why this wasn’t listed in the Times”: Clarke, “Son of Dr. Strangelove.” Clarke didn’t like to get too involved: substantiated by Clarke to Koch, February 26, 1961, and comments made to the author by Clarke in

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up . . . “hilariously optimistic”: Clarke, Lost Worlds, 32. On the way there on the late morning . . . “put Stan onto me”: Clarke, timeline for “Son of Dr. Strangelove.” about a thousand words a day: Clarke, Lost Worlds, 33. “We will not sit down and write a screenplay”: Clarke, interview by Gelmis, Camera Three

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by a diet of liver paté: Peter Arthurs, interview by McAleer, May 27, 1989. “nb Stan’s enthusiasm for material”: Clarke, timeline for “Son of Dr. Strangelove.” “Finished the opening chapter”: Clarke, Lost Worlds, 32–33. “And they would remember”: ibid., 13. “roughly the size and shape of a man” . . . “generating

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bestseller here” . . . “He’s fascinated” . . . “coming apart at the seams”: Clarke, Lost Worlds, 33. “Chose hero’s name—D.B”: Clarke, timeline for “Son of Dr. Strangelove.” “It was literally months”: Clarke, interview by Gelmis, Camera Three. “The Odyssean parallel was clear”: Clarke, “The Myth of 2001,” in Report on Planet Three

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“What we want is”: Clarke, Lost Worlds, 33. “[D]uring this period” . . . “This sounds pompous” . . . There were times . . . “Again, implication you do”: Clarke, “Son of Dr. Strangelove.” “We spent the better part”: Hollis Alpert, “Offbeat Director in Outer Space,” New York Times, January 16, 1966. “We’re in fantastic shape” . . . “I was

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Linguistic Review 1, no. 4 (1953). “Came across a striking”: Clarke, Lost Worlds, 34. And they changed their working title: Clarke, timeline for “Son of Dr. Strangelove.” We were born of risen apes: Ardrey, African Genesis, 354. “A hero ventures forth” . . . “Clashing Rocks” . . . “power to wrest”: Campbell, Hero with a Thousand

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”: ibid., 225. “something that could not possibly”: ibid., 217. “Stanley Kubrick and I”: ibid., 199. “Stan’s idea ‘camp’ robots”: Clarke, timeline for “Son of Dr. Strangelove.” “Stanley has invented”: Clarke, Lost Worlds, 34. “Stan, I want you to know” . . . “Yeah, I know” . . . “like a schoolteacher” . . . “He was very pleased”: Christiane

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2001: A Space Odyssey (New York: New American Library, 1968; repr., with new introduction, 1999), x. “Later, I had the quaint experience”: Clarke, “Son of Dr. Strangelove.” Note that Clarke meekly modified this to “a nominal fee” in the published version; see Clarke, Report on Planet Three, 248. “I said, ‘You bastard

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let’s just make a black one”: Shay and Duncan, “2001: A Time Capsule”; Masters, interview by Shay. “How the underwriters managed”: Clarke, “Son of Dr. Strangelove.” “unbelievably graceful and beautiful humanoid”: 2001 script draft, June 7, 1965. “fighting hard to stop Stan”: Clarke, Lost Worlds, 37. “sleeping beauties”: 2001 script draft

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. “the blunt truth”: Meredith to Clarke, June 13, 1966. “During one of my more frantic”: Clarke, Lost Worlds, 47. “Tears, hysterics, sulks”: Clarke, “Son of Dr. Strangelove.” “The publishers are so pleased”: Clarke to Kubrick, June 15, 1966. “some very acute” . . . “[s]ince the book will be coming” . . . “a puppet controlled

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leaving in disgust”: Clarke to Willson Hunter, July 5, 1966. Clear evidence exists: Wilson to Clarke, March 11, 1986; see also Clarke, “Son of Dr. Strangelove,” and Stanley Kubrick’s mail to Caras warning about a potential lawsuit, August 15, 1966. “an impressive two-page”: Clarke, Lost Worlds, 49. More on

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abstraction” . . . It would not feel like special effects: Cantwell, interview by Larson. “If you can describe it, I can film it”: Clarke, “Son of Dr. Strangelove.” “This is really Stanley Kubrick’s movie”: Arthur C. Clarke talk at MGM promotional event, April 4th, 1968, www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEEtfhxLQbw. “We

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to shoot some footage of aliens” . . . “I have come to realize”: Richter, Moonwatcher’s Memoir 136–37. “like a slightly cynical rabbi”: Clarke, “Son of Dr. Strangelove.” “nice and tight” . . . “stamp out perfect rounds” . . . And we went all over his body: Shay and Duncan, “2001: A Time Capsule.” “I think it

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235, 438 death of, 440 dictation device of, 348–49 directorial career and methods of, 4–5 documentary on, 429–30 driving of, 203 Dr. Strangelove, see Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb D. W. Griffith Lifetime Achievement Award of, 439–40 efficient communication ideas of, 347

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

by Rick Perlstein · 17 Mar 2009 · 1,037pp · 294,916 words

power to move minds paled in comparison to a third film gracing the screens of the nation as the New Hampshire primary hit its stride. Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was a war picture. But the country that heard Jimmy Stewart, in Strategic Air

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fear America might do it first and leave the Soviets without the means to defend themselves. Though, spoken out loud, the idea sounded rather insane. Dr. Strangelove’s director, Stanley Kubrick, paid very close attention to these sorts of things. For years his bedside reading had been treatises thick with the mathematical

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new, top secret “doomsday machine” with the power to destroy all life on earth. Out of the shadows glides a queer man in a wheelchair—Dr. Strangelove, America’s director of weapons research—who muses, impressed, in a thick German accent (suggesting at once the three towering emigre giants of American strategic

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, and seemple to understand, and complete-ly credible and conveencing.” (“Gee, I wish we had one of those doomsday machines!” General Turgidson whispers lustily.) Then Dr. Strangelove screams: “Zee only problem is that the whole point of a doomsday machine ees lost if you keep it a secret! Vye didn’t you

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of terror, delicate or not, is too clever by far more than half. As they speak, a single B-52 gets through the Soviets’ defenses. Dr. Strangelove, the only one who grasps the whole mad system, is revealed to be a madman himself—the maddest of all, in fact. The gung ho

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earlier Goldwater had gone even further in an interview—insisting that atomic weapons should be used—and no one had paid any attention. But after Dr. Strangelove, a threshold had been crossed. Now merely mentioning the Bomb as a bad idea that had been proposed was enough to seal the conclusion for

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Goldwater had given Seattle listeners the night before, this metaphor, which some might also have remembered as the opinion of General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, was the most injudicious imaginable). He went on to accuse the Warren Court of exercising “raw and naked power.” Historically minded commentators drew attention to

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deluded about the line between fantasy and reality himself, recognized in the candidate “a type accurately depicted by another Air Force general in the movie Dr. Strangelove.” Another doctor, paranoid, advised, “Strategy against the paranoid fringe must be very carefully worked out. A frontal attack on paranoids causes them to band together

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, 1961, speech is in PPP: JFK, 533-40. 143 For the bomb shelter panic in the summer of 1961 I draw on Margot A. Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 200-217; and Allan M. Winkler, Life Under a Cloud

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: A Historian Reflects on America’s Half-Century Encounter with Nuclear Weapon (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 97. For narratives of the genesis of Dr. Strangelove, see http:~/www.krusch.com/kubricklQo5.html; and Peter Bogdanovich, “What They Say About Stanley Kubrick,” NYTM, July 4, 1999. 286 By January 20, four

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Sexual Revolution. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Heirich, Max. The Spiral of Conflict: Berkeley, 1964. New York: Columbia University Press, 1968. Henriksen, Margot A. Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Hess, Karl. In a Cause That Will Triumph: The Goldwater

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a Dream Walking? (Buckley) Diem, Ngo Dinh Dillon, Douglas Dirksen, Everett M. Disney, Walt Disneyland Divini Redemptoris (Pope Pius XII) Dixiecrats Dr. Kildare (television show) Dr. Strangelove (film) Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak) Dodd, Thomas J. Dole, Bob Dominick, Peter Dooley, Thomas Doolittle, General James Dorn, William Jennings Bryan Dos Passos, John Downing Coal

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trick-or-treaters by; in Arizona; Buckley’s distancing from; in California, Conscience of a Conservative distributed by members of; denounced at 1964 Republican Convention; Dr. Strangelove as satire of beliefs of; Eisenhower accused of Communist sympathies by, founding of; “Impeach Warren” campaign of, and Kennedy assassination, Kitchel in; libel suit against

Winds of Change

by Peter Hennessy · 27 Aug 2019 · 891pp · 220,950 words

about fifty feet long and thirty feet wide, lit with fluorescent tubes and with a large whiteboard at one end (perhaps the British equivalent of Dr Strangelove’s ‘Big Board’ in the classic 1964 Stanley Kubrick/Peter Sellers film of that name24). Overlooking it is a viewing area – a decision-takers’ gallery

How the Mind Works

by Steven Pinker · 1 Jan 1997 · 913pp · 265,787 words

to attack, because they would have known retaliation was certain. This train of reasoning was taken to its logical conclusion in the novel and film Dr. Strangelove. A deranged American officer has ordered a nuclear bomber to attack the Soviet Union, and it cannot be recalled. The president and his advisors meet

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building one and wanted to prevent a Doomsday gap. President Muffley (played by Peter Sellers) confers with the country’s top nuclear strategist, the brilliant Dr. Strangelove (played by Peter Sellers): “But,” Muffley said, “is it really possible for it to be triggered automatically and at the same time impossible to untrigger

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, “It was to be announced at the Party Congress “on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.” The German-accented, leather-gloved, wheelchair-bound Dr. Strangelove, with his disconcerting tic of giving the Nazi salute, is one of cinema’s all-time eeriest characters. He was meant to symbolize a kind

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, he can create one by having the kidnapper photograph him in some unspeakably degrading act. Threats, and defenses against threats, are the arena in which Dr. Strangelove really comes into his own. There are boring threats, in which the threatener has an interest in carrying out the threat—for example, when a

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some unlucky accident should befall my son, if my son is struck by a bolt of lightning, I will blame some of the people here.” Dr. Strangelove meets The Godfather. Is passion a doomsday machine? People consumed by pride, love, or rage have lost control. They may be irrational. They may act

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, 1993. 404 Reciprocal altruism and social psychology research: Trivers, 1971, 1981. 406 Within-group amity = between-group enmity: Dawkins, 1976/1989; Alexander, 1987. 408 Dr. Strangelove: from Peter George, Dr. Strangelove, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1963/1979, pp. 98–99. 409 Thinking the unthinkable: Poundstone, 1992. 409 Paradoxical tactics: Schelling, 1960. 412 The emotions

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Dowries and brideprices, 437, 474, 490, 491 Drake, Frank, 150–152, 572 Dreams, 174, 289–290, 557–558 Dretske, Fred, 568, 569 Dreyfus, Hubert, 570 Dr. Strangelove, 408, 414 Drugs, 207, 524, 557 Dr. Who, 3 Dryden, John, 539 Dueling, 497 Dunbar, Robin, 584 Duncan, John, 572 Durham, William, 575 Dworkin, Andrea

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

by Nate Silver · 12 Aug 2024 · 848pp · 227,015 words

Kurganov. At other times, though, supposed altruism can have an uncanny way of converging with self-interest. Like in the scene at the end of Dr. Strangelove, where Strangelove proposes a ratio of ten women to one man to repopulate humanity in underground bunkers in the event of a nuclear war—and

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weapons because if they do, their superpower rival will retaliate and nuke them into oblivion, the most −EV outcome imaginable. This was the premise of Dr. Strangelove;[*17] in the film, the Soviets had built a doomsday machine that would automatically retaliate if it detected a nuclear attack, taking the decision out

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’d never get out again, is pretty accurate,” said Paul Edwards, a Stanford climatologist who teaches a class on existential risk. *17 The character of Dr. Strangelove is thought to have been partially inspired by von Neumann. *18 This equates to roughly a 5 percent chance. *19 For instance, many people prefer

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, Ross, 466 Downriver, 21–22, 374, 483 See also casinos drawing dead, 483 Dresher, Melvin, 52, 494 drowning child parable, 357, 358, 359, 368, 483 Dr. Strangelove, 344–45, 425 Dryden, Ken, 94 Duke, Annie, 90, 104–5, 116, 120, 230 Dunst, Tony, 95 Dwan, Tom “durrrr,” 96n, 237–38 dystopias, 483

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, 270 See also River-Village conflict VIP (gambling), 500 Viscusi, Kip, 351 Vogelsang, Christoph, 49 von Neumann, John autism and, 283 on computer applications, 61 Dr. Strangelove and, 425n existential risk and, 419–20, 422 game theory development and, 22, 50–51 Kelly criterion and, 396 on technological singularities, 450n Voulgaris, Haralabos

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era

by Craig Nelson · 25 Mar 2014 · 684pp · 188,584 words

. Confusing. Conflicted. These are hallmarks of the whole of nuclear history. What was once an era heralded by Curie, Einstein, and Oppenheimer became degraded to Dr. Strangelove, $50 billion wasted on Reagan’s failed Star Wars, the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl, and the 2011

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earth, and its force propels the tectonic shift of the continents. Its invisible rays trigger biological damage, birth defects, tumors, and cellular mayhem. Hiroshima; Godzilla; Dr. Strangelove; Nagasaki; Bikini; Spider-Man. What other history combines unimaginable horrors with genetic monstrosities, Armageddon fantasies, Hollywood tentpole grandees, and a revolution in swimwear? No wonder

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on the origin of starlight and who would become the chief of the Los Alamos theory group (inadvertently thrusting Edward Teller into a career combining Dr. Strangelove with Ronald Reagan), spent most of 1931 with the Fermi team: Fermi worked in the Institute of Physics, which was on a small hill in

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.” With a face like an abdominal muscle foreshadowed by a prow of beetle brows, Hungarian Quartet member Edward Teller would, over the decades, become the Dr. Strangelove of this history and the Saruman of this real-life Lord of the Rings, with a fairly distinct personality: “Fermi once told me with hardly

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could be designed that would bring an end to all life on earth, inspiring movie director Stanley Kubrick to fashion cobalt bombs for his satire Dr. Strangelove. Leo wrote to Stalin in 1947, and then to Khrushchev in 1960; Stalin never answered, but Khrushchev said he would meet him on September 27

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arms escalation and a communications hotline between the Soviet premier and the American president in case of nuclear crisis. That hotline would also appear in Dr. Strangelove, but would not exist in the real world until the Cuban Missile Crisis and its series of delayed telegrams made it clear to both sides

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there and repeating that phrase to myself: ‘Only 500 million people!’ ” On Thermonuclear War was one of the key inspirations for Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove, with Peter Sellers’s title character being a mélange of Kahn, Teller, von Neumann, and Nazi rocketeer Wernher von Braun; his Austrian accent was inspired

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by Kubrick’s photographic consultant, Weegee. So much of Kahn’s book reappears in Dr. Strangelove—in such preposterous moments as George C. Scott’s general explaining, “Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But

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, triggered by command from the communications rockets.” Dead Hand became operational in 1985, just one more ingredient in the superpowers’ nuclear operations that might bring Dr. Strangelove’s accidental Armageddon to life. Several times in the 1950s, American defense forces’ alarms warned of incoming Soviet missiles, which turned out to be flocks

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15, 2013. Krulwich, Robert. “Don’t Come to Stockholm! Madame Curie’s Nobel Scandal.” National Public Radio, December 14, 2010. Kubrick, Stanley, producer and director. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Columbia Pictures, 1964. Kumar, Manjit. Quantum. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010. Kunkin, Art

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, 335 Dluski, Bronisława (Bronya) Skłodowska, 16, 18, 19, 20, 29, 38, 39, 42, 48, 51, 53 Dluski, Casimir, 18, 20, 29 Dobrynin, Anatoly, 297–98 Dr. Strangelove (movie), 6, 267, 291–92, 293 Donne, John, 189 Doolittle, James, 227, 255 Doomsday Machine, 291–92 Döpel, Robert, 183–84 Douple, Evan, 366 downwinders

The Future of War

by Lawrence Freedman · 9 Oct 2017 · 592pp · 161,798 words

well-regarded movies. The first and most memorable was Red Alert, except that director Stanley Kubrick turned it into a black comedy and renamed it Dr. Strangelove.21 The deranged general responsible for the disaster became Jack D. Ripper, convinced that Russia was seeking to pollute the ‘precious bodily fluids’ of Americans

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also spent some time at RAND and eventually got a Nobel Prize for Economics, took the scenario seriously and advised Kubrick on the screenplay of Dr. Strangelove. After reading the novel he developed his ideas for a communications link between Moscow and Washington to reduce the dangers the book described.27 In

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was barely a chance for human intervention.4 The theme of lost control over a situation hurtling towards tragedy was the basis of the movies Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe. IN 1979 TWO SCREENWRITERS, LARRY LASKER AND WALTER Parkes, developed an idea for a movie based on the interaction between a dying

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the nuclear arsenal being out of human control. Whether or not the intent was to make a film in the spirit of Fail-Safe or Dr. Strangelove, alerting the audience to the risks of an inadvertent nuclear catastrophe, the main thought left by WarGames was the ease with which an outsider might

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Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Schlosser, Eric. ‘Deconstructing “Dr. Strangelove”’. New Yorker, 18 Jan. 18 2014. Available: http://www.newyorker.com/News/News-Desk/Deconstructing-Dr-Strangelove. Schnabel, Albrecht, and Thakur, Ramesh, eds. Kosovo and the Challenge of Humanitarian Intervention: Selective Indignation, Collective Action, and

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had been put to use after the war at the Army’s Redstone Arsenal. See Eric Schlosser, ‘Deconstructing “Dr. Strangelove”’, New Yorker, 18 Jan. 18 2014. Available: http://www.newyorker.com/News/News-Desk/Deconstructing-Dr-Strangelove 26. Kahn 228. 27. See Ghamari-Tabrizi. 28. Thomas Schelling, ‘Meteors, Mischief, and War’, Bulletin of the

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Disease and Non-Battle Injury (DNBI), 127 Dobrynin, Anatoly, 103 doomsday machine, 77–79, 232 Douhet, Giulio, 56 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 40 Doyle, Michael, 137 Dr. Strangelove (film), 77–80, 231–232 DRC. See Democratic Republic of the Congo driverless cars, 246 drones, 241–253 See also artificial intelligence; driverless cars drought

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought

by Jim Holt · 14 May 2018 · 436pp · 127,642 words

important logic problem of his time, saved countless lives by defeating a Nazi code, conceived the computer, and rethought how mind arises from matter. 16 Dr. Strangelove Makes a Thinking Machine The digital universe came into existence, physically speaking, late in 1950, in Princeton, New Jersey, at the end of Olden Lane

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ardent of the cold warriors, an advocate of a preemptive military attack on the Soviet Union, and one of the models for the film character Dr. Strangelove. “The digital universe and the hydrogen bomb were brought into existence at the same time,” the historian of science George Dyson has observed. Von Neumann

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: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer (Norton, 2006). Martin Davis, Engines of Logic: Mathematics and the Origin of the Computer (Norton, 2000). 16. DR. STRANGELOVE MAKES A THINKING MACHINE George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (Pantheon, 2012). Norman MacRae, John von Neumann: The Scientific Genius

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Romance,” “The Avatars of Higher Mathematics,” “Benoit Mandelbrot and the Discovery of Fractals,” “Geometrical Creatures,” “A Comedy of Colors,” “The Dangerous Idea of the Infinitesimal,” “Dr. Strangelove Makes a Thinking Machine,” and “Einstein, ‘Spooky Action,’ and the Reality of Space” in The New York Review of Books; “When Einstein Walked with Gödel

…

, Tragedy, and the Computer Age 14. The Ada Perplex: Was Byron’s Daughter the First Coder? 15. Alan Turing in Life, Logic, and Death 16. Dr. Strangelove Makes a Thinking Machine 17. Smarter, Happier, More Productive Part VII: The Cosmos Reconsidered 18. The String Theory Wars: Is Beauty Truth? 19. Einstein, “Spooky

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about nuclear war soon focused on the dangers of SAC’s airborne alert. The great risk—as depicted in the 1964 films Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove—wasn’t that a hydrogen bomb might accidentally explode during the crash of a B-52. It was that an order to attack the Soviet

…

Union could be sent without the president’s authorization, either through a mechanical glitch (Fail-Safe) or the scheming of a madman (Dr. Strangelove). The plot of both films strongly resembled that of the novel Red Alert. Its author, Peter George, cowrote the screenplay of

…

Dr. Strangelove and sued the producers of Fail-Safe for copyright infringement. The case was settled out of court. The threat of accidental nuclear war was the

…

the United States about the contraption defeats its purpose, inadvertently bringing the end of the world. “The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost,” Dr. Strangelove, the president’s eccentric science adviser, explains to the Soviet ambassador, “IF YOU KEEP IT A SECRET!” The growing public anxiety about accidental war prompted

…

-control system would make it “‘fail safe,’ not unsafe.” Gilpatric also suggested that permissive action links would thwart the sort of unauthorized attack depicted in Dr. Strangelove. In fact, there was nothing to stop the crew of a B-52 from dropping its hydrogen bombs on Moscow—except, perhaps, Soviet air defenses

…

of General LeMay appeared in film, the character was no longer a heroic defender of freedom. He was a buffoon, like General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove, willing to sacrifice twenty million American lives for the sake of defeating the Soviet Union. Or he was a crypto-fascist, like General James Mattoon

…

further down the chain of command, they automated the decision to use nuclear weapons. In 1974, little more than a decade after the release of Dr. Strangelove, the Soviet Union began work on the “Perimeter” system—a network of sensors and computers that could launch intercontinental ballistic missiles without any human oversight

…

meaningless; the Soviet computers weren’t programmed to allow pauses for negotiation. And the deterrent value of Perimeter was wasted. Like the doomsday machine in Dr. Strangelove, the system was kept secret from the United States. • • • IN MARCH 1991, three months after the Drell panel submitted its report to Congress, Bob Peurifoy

…

the age of forty-one. For George’s work and its influence upon the director Stanley Kubrick, see P. D. Smith, Doomsday Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon (New York: St. Martin’s, 2007), pp. 402–30. See also “Peter George, 41, British Novelist: Co-Author of

…

creators of Fail-Saft, see Scherman, “Everbody Blows UP.” “The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost”: The full title of the film is Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The screenplay was written by Stanley Kubrick, Peter George, and Terry Southern. Strangelove was

…

, Research and Education, 2004. Smith, Mark E., III. American Defense Policy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968. Smith, P.D. Doomsday Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007. Smith, Richard K. Seventy-five Years of Inflight Refueling: Highlights, 1923–1998

…

Douglas, Paul H., 298 Douglas Aircraft, 182 Dower, John W., 44 Drell, Sidney, 455–56, 468, 482 Drell Panel on Nuclear Weapons Safety, 456, 470 Dr. Strangelove (film), 297–98, 304, 467 Drug use, by military personnel, 349–51 Dulles, John Foster, 132, 199–200 Dummy weapons, EOD unit practice, 417, 422

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