Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove by Sean M. Maloney

Author:Sean M. Maloney [Maloney, Sean M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030 Performing Arts / Film & Video / History & Criticism, HIS037070 History / Modern / 20th Century
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

8

Strategic Underground Command

The ICBM Force in Film and History

ICBM. The intercontinental ballistic missile. No acronym is more closely associated with the Cold War than this. The technological extrapolations of Nazi-era terror weapons put to use as the cornerstones of the deterrent system, they bore mighty names (aspirations?): Atlas, Titan, Minuteman, Peacekeeper. Their opponents were Soviet missiles with code-names like Shyster and Satan. ICBMs harnessed the potential of the H-Bomb plus the ballistic missile plus speed of delivery, changing the strategic dimensions of the Cold War. Now a whole war could be conducted in an hour with unprecedented levels of destruction.

By 1965 that potential was fully realized. By the 1970s the drama of the bomber crew in Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe was replaced with a new type of drama in both WarGames and By Dawn’s Early Light: Do we fire or not fire? Oh, and we have less than thirty minutes to make a decision, not hours to negotiate over the Hot Line. This drama was augmented by connecting that anxiety with having the world-ending decision made with little or no human input. The logical extension of that system found expression in Dr. Strangelove, Colossus, and WarGames.

The stereotypical view of the ICBM goes like this: It is a big, dumb rocket that goes from A to B in thirty minutes, launched from an underground facility called a silo. Two guys (and later girls) out in a cornfield the middle of nowhere in a flyover state, probably one of the Dakotas, sit in a secure underground capsule, each with a key and connected to a communications system that tells them when to launch the missile, not why or at what. They carry pistols, which seems to be contradictory given the fact it takes two to launch the weapons. Morale patches for their uniforms are a must: one of them, playing on the quote about the Minuteman ICBMs being America’s “ace in the hole,” has a skeletal hand holding playing cards full of mushrooms clouds: “Play the hand you’re dealt.” (In another squadron it is, “We play the last hand.”) The other wears a patch that asserts, “Death wears fuzzy bunny slippers” and depicts the Grim Reaper at a control panel with his scythe and nonregulation footwear. Gen. Thomas S. Power rotates in his grave because of the relaxation in SAC dress standards.

To those who served in the early ICBM units in the 1960s this was cutting-edge technology in an advanced career field working on a space launch vehicle, albeit one with a megaton-yield warhead.1 Atlas missile crews in a Kansas cornfield near Valley Falls were using the same system that NASA used at Cape Canaveral to put John Glenn and Gus Grissom in orbit.

To others the day-to-day operations of the capsule and its panels were humdrum compared to what bomber crews did: Herman Kahn apparently once suggested that the air force rename the ICBM units Strategic Underground Command; the derived acronym obviously did not go over well with the U.S. Air Force.

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