Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact • Hacker News Board

Re: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

#61

Post by stan_rogers » Sat, Nov 08, 2014, 6:59 PM UTC

bane wrote: post #18

cstross wrote: post #8

Young folks today just don't believe how downright surreal (and scary) the cold war was to live through. Look, just read this wikipedia entry about the British Blue Peacock nuclear device, and boggle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peacock Yes. It's a chicken-heated atomic landmine. Not a joke: it was a Real Thing. And so was this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_%28nuclear_device... The M-29 Davy Crock…

I grew up right at the tail-end of it, the 1984 Red Dawn was a perfectly reasonable scenario. Whenever I think the hysteria was completely insane I think back to my parents and grandparents and some of the truly bizarre notions that happened during their youth: duck and cover, public bomb shelter drills, etc. People actually paid significant parts of their yearly salary to build, stock and maintain nuclear bomb shelt…

I remember when the monthly air-raid drills — first Wednesday of the month, 1:00PM — stopped, not because the Cold War had gotten any colder, but because the missile threat made the "I've got plenty of time to get to the shelter" bomber scenario almost laughable. I also remember the panic I felt, several years later, when the damned local siren went off (on the wrong day and at the wrong time of the day) because someone was digging where they shouldn't have been digging. I served in the Cold War military, and I'll admit to having an involuntary physiological reaction to hearing Slavic accents to this day. I mean, we knew that the apparent "sanity" of our leadership was really just a delicate spiderweb of constraints based on the desire to remain electable; we sort of hoped that there were similar little wire baskets holding the champagne-corks in place on the other side as well, even if they worked differently. And yes, we always suspected that somebody on the other side would go rogue, and had no reason to believe that the people on the other side didn't see us the same way. We feared an accidental launch, but we also feared that some idiot, somewhere, would decide that they could actually get away with a first strike. To me, this stuff is all "just the other day"; I really can't tell you how happy I am to hear that there's a whole generation or two of people who can't really understand a goddamned word I'm saying when I talk about the old days.

Re: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

#62

Post by filereaper » Sat, Nov 08, 2014, 7:22 PM UTC

The character Dr. Strangelove is itself worth an entire movie, he was supposed to be the combination of the following:

- Edward Teller (Father of Hydrogen Bomb "the super")

- John von Neumann (legendary mathematician and computer scientist)

- Werner von Braun (designer of V2, and later on Saturn V5 for NASA)

the 1900's to 1960's was an amazing time to be in a STEM field, hell being a Physicist was so freaking cool. Now everything's about Finance and Wall Street...

Re: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

#63

Post by acdha » Sat, Nov 08, 2014, 7:24 PM UTC

haukur wrote: post #25

acdha wrote: post #16

Both my wife and I somehow managed to avoid seeing Dr. Strangelove before this summer. While watching it, I was repeatedly struck by the same realization as in the article: for all the reputation as a wild farce, there was a rather disturbingly small gap between the film and history which has subsequently been publicly released – and Dr. Strangelove came out decades before we reached the point of having an astrologis…

> we reached the point of having an astrologist in the loop for international decisions. I'm a little bit curious, did you mean to say astronomer or does the US government have an astrologist advisor?

Sorry, that was a bit terse – adrianhoward already provided the link to Joan Quigley's bio. I'm not particularly upset by it – Reagan certainly received far worse advice from Very Serious People – but but the idea that “every major move and decision the Reagans made … was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment” seems like the kind of thing people would reject in a movie as too implausible.

Re: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

#64

Post by mark_l_watson » Sat, Nov 08, 2014, 7:29 PM UTC

filereaper wrote: post #62

The character Dr. Strangelove is itself worth an entire movie, he was supposed to be the combination of the following: - Edward Teller (Father of Hydrogen Bomb "the super") - John von Neumann (legendary mathematician and computer scientist) - Werner von Braun (designer of V2, and later on Saturn V5 for NASA) the 1900's to 1960's was an amazing time to be in a STEM field, hell being a Physicist was so freaking cool. N…

My Dad worked with Edward Teller, and Teller was often at our house while I was growing up. The Peter Sellers character was totally different than Teller in real life. Teller was a refined gentleman. Peter Seller's character was funny, and not at all like Teller.

BTW, I think that we are fortunate to have all survived the cold war!

Re: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

#65

Post by a3n » Sat, Nov 08, 2014, 7:30 PM UTC

acqq wrote: post #49

cpursley wrote: post #29

I toured Stalin's secret bunker this summer in Moscow where USSR'S top generals held up during the entire Cuban Missile Crisis. This bunker was the control center for the Soviet's nuclear arsenal at the time. According to the guide, the top leaders debated back and forth whether to preemptively strike the United States. The entire thing was surreal - complete with a freighting nuclear attack simulation (America strik…

Not too long after Hiroshima some US decision makers actually proposed "pre-emptively" bombing the USSR with the nuclear bombs. Why? Well, the communists are dangerous, that's enough, better earlier than later(!) The idea was rejected with the apparent main argument that the US didn't have enough nuclear bombs to annihilate the whole USSR: too many soldiers would continue to fight! US eventually produced enough nucle…

John von Neumann, one of a handful of people most responsible for the existence of your job, proposed a pre-emptive strike. He needed fast digital computers to calculate bomb parameters and effects, so he helped invent them.

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1179883.ece

quote:

This unsettling scenario might be pre-empted by a more apocalyptic one: nuclear Armageddon. George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral [1] reveals how the computing torch was passed after 1945 from Turing (himself an excellent marathon runner) to John von Neumann (who preferred driving fast cars; Dyson observes that he bought “a new one at least once a year, whether he had wrecked the previous one or not”). While Turing may have been a victim of the Cold War, von Neumann was its champion, influencing the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction from his commanding positions at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study and the Atomic Energy Commission. Born to a wealthy family in Hungary in 1903, he experienced at first hand the Communist government that briefly came to power after the First World War, and became an ardent foe of Communism. He acknowledged that atomic weaponry was a “monster” but perceived it as the lesser of two evils, advocating a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the USSR. Hoping to create a hydrogen bomb, he needed a stored-program electronic computer, and in 1945 began to construct one at the Institute.

[1] I highly recommend the reviewed book, Turing's Cathedral. Besides copious vintage tech porn, the social, political and personal background was surprising to me.

Re: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

#66

Post by arethuza » Sat, Nov 08, 2014, 7:31 PM UTC

mercer wrote: post #37

bane wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up right at the tail-end of it, the 1984 Red Dawn was a perfectly reasonable scenario. Whenever I think the hysteria was completely insane I think back to my parents and grandparents and some of the truly bizarre notions that happened during their youth: duck and cover, public bomb shelter drills, etc. People actually paid significant parts of their yearly salary to build, stock and maintain nuclear bomb shelt…

> People, large numbers of them, actually believed (and it may have been true) that extinction-level global war was an accidental launch away. Considering the Cuba Missile Crisis, perhaps that wasn't an entirely unreasonable expectation... Reminds me of a fascinating (and rather depressing) alternative history of the missile crisis I read a while ago. I couldn't stop reading: http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussio…

A novel with a back-story of a similar scenario is Resurrection Day:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_Day

Re: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

#67

Post by arethuza » Sat, Nov 08, 2014, 7:34 PM UTC

paulhauggis wrote: post #33

simonsarris wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wars would be a lot better if guys would say to themselves sometimes "Jesus, I'm not going to do that to the enemy. That's too much." -Kurt Vonnegut

The problem is that in some wars, if you don't, the enemy will strike you just as hard or harder.

Fortunately the political leaders on both sides knew that they could never use nuclear weapons. Reagan was horrified and changed his policies, much to his credit, when he realised that the Soviets really were terrified of an attack from the West.

Even Khrushchev, who had a lot of blood on his hands, couldn't sleep for days after he had been briefed on what a nuclear war would actually mean - he only calmed down once he realised that the things would never be used by either side.

Re: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

#68

Post by dang » Sat, Nov 08, 2014, 7:40 PM UTC

lmg643 wrote: post #11

Kind of a link-bait headline from the New Yorker. "There were glaring weaknesses in America's nuclear security during the cold war, some of which were used as the basis for the movie." True. " Almost everything ... uh ... first thing that came to mind is whether a nuke was dropped with a soldier riding it like a horse. No? So what else... This topic was covered earlier and in a more comprehensive manner by Wired IIRC…

I agree with you (though obviously a bunch of users don't). But comments on link-bait and misleading headlines are more helpful when they suggest a better headline, or how to fix it. e.g. Replace "true" with "based on fact"? We can try that.

Re: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

#69

Post by arethuza » Sat, Nov 08, 2014, 7:50 PM UTC

mark_l_watson wrote: post #64

filereaper wrote: post #62

The character Dr. Strangelove is itself worth an entire movie, he was supposed to be the combination of the following: - Edward Teller (Father of Hydrogen Bomb "the super") - John von Neumann (legendary mathematician and computer scientist) - Werner von Braun (designer of V2, and later on Saturn V5 for NASA) the 1900's to 1960's was an amazing time to be in a STEM field, hell being a Physicist was so freaking cool. N…

My Dad worked with Edward Teller, and Teller was often at our house while I was growing up. The Peter Sellers character was totally different than Teller in real life. Teller was a refined gentleman. Peter Seller's character was funny, and not at all like Teller. BTW, I think that we are fortunate to have all survived the cold war!

The book "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" doesn't present Teller in a particularly favorable light - he is presented as being very political, scheming and rather two faced (i.e. being perfectly civilized directly to Oppenheimer while working closely with those people who undermine Oppenheimer).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Prometheus

Re: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

#70

Post by arethuza » Sat, Nov 08, 2014, 7:54 PM UTC

PythonicAlpha wrote: post #56

cstross wrote: post #8

Young folks today just don't believe how downright surreal (and scary) the cold war was to live through. Look, just read this wikipedia entry about the British Blue Peacock nuclear device, and boggle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peacock Yes. It's a chicken-heated atomic landmine. Not a joke: it was a Real Thing. And so was this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_%28nuclear_device... The M-29 Davy Crock…

Living in Middle Europe was not less surreal at all in this times. While the US people thought, that their Minuteman, other missiles and strategic bombers would give some protection, in Germany many people knew, that a third world war could not only start there, but also be the main place where it would be fought. When in some era (I think, it was in Reagan's era, maybe a little later), the Generals where thinking, t…

Same for the UK - optimistic estimates for the impact of a nuclear attack on the UK had under 5% of the population surviving in the long term (NB Threads was very optimistic!).