On Jan. 29, 1964, a mere 15 months after the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the world to the brink of nuclear armageddon, Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” premiered in movie theaters.
The movie satirically depicts a mad Air Force general, consumed by anticommunist paranoia over the fluoridation of drinking water, launching a first-strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union without presidential authorization. Unbeknownst to the Pentagon, the Soviets were protected by a secret “Doomsday machine” that would automatically retaliate against U.S. targets (while encasing the Earth in a “doomsday shroud” for 93 years).
As wacky and unrealistic as this scenario might have seemed in 1964, there was some truth to “Dr. Strangelove.” As nuclear arms control expert Joe Cirincione explains in this episode of History As It Happens, during the Cold War the U.S. command and control structure did allow for military officers to launch a nuclear attack in the event the normal chain of command was destroyed by a Soviet first-strike. U.S. deterrence had to maintain its credibility. And the USSR did build a system of automatic retaliation, known as “the perimeter,” that it kept secret from the U.S. and its allies.
“If you think what you know about our nuclear strategy or others’ nuclear strategy is crazy enough, and you don’t know about the actual doomsday machine, you don’t know how crazy nuclear deterrence really is,” said Mr. Cirincione, who writes the Strategy & History Substack. “David Hoffman wrote a great book called ’The Dead Hand’ that describes the Soviet system that was actually built. It was called the perimeter system, and it was designed for exactly the purpose depicted in ’Dr. Strangelove.’” Its existence wasn’t discovered until after the Cold War ended.
“Dr. Strangelove” is not an important movie only because the director Kubrick nailed so many of the details. It remains timely in a world where the U.S. and Russia still control roughly 90% of all nuclear weapons while major arms control treaties expire or have been abrogated.
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