On August 6, 1945, the United States destroyed much of the Japanese city of Hiroshima with a single explosion. A grim new reality quickly enveloped the world. Within days, people were predicting a permanent arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, as the two remaining superpowers would produce increasingly powerful weapons, including self-guided nuclear missiles, against which there could be no defense. The command and control of technological horrors became an urgent necessity in a way few could have imagined a few weeks before. In many ways, the ensuing Cold War was a contest over who could develop the most powerful systems of control over their people and their technologies. Cold Warriors wanted to take control and, perhaps even more importantly, make others believe that once they had control they couldn’t possibly lose it.1
Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satire Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a film about accepting the reality of events that are officially impossible. Except for Jack D. Ripper, the unstable US Air Force general who orders a nuclear attack on the USSR, every character in the film is desperately trying to comprehend their position in a strictly ordered world that’s suddenly gone totally out of control. When we discuss Strangelove today, we usually focus on things like the hubris of nuclear technology, the arrogance of a runaway military-industrial complex, or the too-real admission from Ripper that he’s blowing up the world because he couldn’t maintain an erection. But it’s worth remembering that the film’s original tagline was “the hot-line suspense comedy.” Almost the entire script, from major plot points to simple gags, turns around getting people on the phone. Examining the film’s depiction of telephones can help us understand its overall analysis of Cold War command-control systems, of which telephone infrastructure was but one part.
Poster by Tomi Ungerer.
When US President Merkin Muffley first learns of Ripper’s order, he of course attempts to call the general. But Ripper has cut off his Strategic Air Command base from the outside world, telling his soldiers the Soviets have attacked and confiscating their private radios in case the Soviets try to subvert the chain of command. Muffley orders the Army to take the base and put Ripper in “immediate telephone contact” with him. Rather than be forced to reveal the secret code that could recall his bombers, Ripper commits suicide. To make matters worse, telephone lines are destroyed in the fighting, so by the time Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Ripper’s plucky executive officer on exchange from the Royal Air Force) deduces the code, the emergency phone he picks up is dead. Mandrake is detained by Colonel Bat Guano, who grudgingly allows him to use a nearby pay phone. Miraculously, the phone still works, but, after tense moments translating British idioms for the American switchboard operator, Mandrake still can’t reach the Pentagon — they won’t accept a collect call, and he doesn’t have enough change for anything else. Mandrake orders Guano to break into a Coke machine for coins, but Guano protests that it’s private property, sternly declaring that Mandrake will have to answer to the Coca-Cola company.
While the Army assaults Burpelson Air Force Base, President Muffley is busy at the Pentagon. Muffley has been trying to get Soviet Premier Dimitri Kissov on the “hot-line,” the storied direct line between superpowers, but no one in Kissov’s office can find him. The Soviet ambassador arrives and provides a private phone number, noting the Premier is “a man of the people, but he is also a man if you catch my meaning.” And so roughly 30 men arrange themselves around a giant circular table in the War Room, each holding a telephone receiver to their ear while covering the microphone, giving them the air of so many boys listening in on an older sibling’s call. Kissov turns out to be too drunk for the kind of Great Power posturing we might expect. Luckily, he’s a happy drunk. As Muffley struggles through bubbling salutations to explain that one of his commanders is trying to end the world, the conversation spirals into higher and higher registers until they’re shouting about their feelings. But Kissov’s unfiltered vulnerability might be the only thing that saves them from a declaration of war. Muffley and Kissov find they’re both scared, neither of them wants to die, and they should work on that together. Muffley orders his staff to tell the Soviets how to find and destroy the American bombers.
Just then, stolen change in hand, Lionel Mandrake completes his heroic phone call and relays Ripper’s code; Muffley recalls the bombers. Unfortunately, in yet another missed connection, one of the bombers’ radios was destroyed while evading the Soviet air defense and can no longer receive the message to retreat. Rapidly leaking fuel and unable to reach their primary or secondary targets where the Soviets now know to expect them, the crew attacks their nearest target of opportunity, triggering an automatic Soviet Doomsday Device that destroys all life on Earth.
Throughout the film, manly men struggle to communicate. Clockwise from top left: Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) lies to Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers), who demands change for a phone call to President Muffley (also Sellers), who breaks the news to Soviet Premier Kissov (who we never see or hear), while Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) listens in and glares.
Command-control systems, which integrate massively distributed and largely independent data collection and processing systems with a more traditional military chain of command, were a new development when Dr. Strangelove was made. Throughout the film, Kubrick whipsaws back and forth between hyper-realistic exploration of these command-control systems and pratfalling ridicule of the people who designed them. At times it’s difficult to find the line between reality and satire. To my knowledge, the RAND corporation (lampooned as “BLAND”) never published a study called “World Targets in Megadeaths,” while the Strategic Air Command motto really was “Peace is Our Profession,” despite its primary responsibility for the deadliest weapons in the history of the world. The tension between sanitized euphemism (“Peace”) and unfeeling analysis of explicit horror (“Megadeaths”) is both the sharpest critique in the film and its best representation of the era. When the federal government pivoted from total war in the 1940s to massive investment in Cold War research and development, technocrats in the US strove to rationalize and “systematize” everything from military administration to universities and municipal governments. Choices became simultaneously more evidence-based as funding poured into new disciplines like systems engineering and increasingly disconnected from reality as the people generating the evidence were compartmentalized into ever more labyrinthine organizations.2
Multiple studies of the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, the United States’s command and control system for missile defense between the 1950s and the 1980s, have shown that Kubrick’s film is arguably more accurate than a documentary using public information could have been at the time.3 Rather than producing the kind of perfectly functioning technocratic decision machines (the stuff of administrators’ imagination), we now know that these systems are managerial behemoths as much as they are technological ones. Large technical systems do not become less dependent on human agents as they become more complex. Instead, human operators and maintenance workers become much more critical and more tightly integrated into the system as the demand for telecommunications, computing, and data collection infrastructure grows. Cutting-edge technologies like automatic radar tracking systems render more commonplace systems invisible but not irrelevant; it becomes easier to imagine a world in which commanders rule combat operations from a bunker in Virginia than a world in which they cannot rely on their telephones or toilets. It takes a farce like Dr. Strangelove to point out how fragile these systems of control really are.4
The biggest concern in Strangelove isn’t really nuclear weapons. It’s that no matter how sophisticated command and control systems might become, our survival is always going to depend on clear communication and mutual solidarity. I am reminded of this when I hear people in the West call for a “no-fly zone” in Ukraine, jargon for the US or NATO entering a shooting war with a nuclear-armed megalomaniac. I wonder to what extent these people understand they’re using that euphemism exactly how it was intended: to invoke administrative control of a region rather than confess that it means blowing up anti-aircraft batteries set up on homes and hospitals. I wonder if they are able to say what they mean: that they are afraid, that they believe we are on the brink of world war, and that they want to commit to that war and all its atrocities rather than risk losing entirely their false sense of stability. It is hard to believe, when these conversations are obscured by layer upon layer of pretense and misdirection, that democratic consent for military action is even possible. The thing that should keep us up at night is that powerful people might not tell each other the right thing at the right time — that they will be too obsessed with maintaining control to be honest about what they need from each other.
- Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture At the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006).
- Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Rebecca Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Margaret O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
- Edwards, Closed World; Kent C. Redmond and Thomas M. Smith, From Whirlwind to MITRE: The R&D Story of The SAGE Air Defense Computer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
- The definition and creation of infrastructures like utilities and information systems has been well documented since the late 1980s by scholars including Geoffrey Bowker, Paul Edwards, Thomas Hughes, and Susan Leigh Star. Their initial focus on the creation of infrastructures and “large technical systems” has led to more recent work on the evolution of systems over time from scholars like The Maintainers.
