nuclear-news

Directed by the prolific Sidney Lumet (of 12 Angry Men and Network), the film depicts a nuclear attack launched accidentally by the United States against the Soviet Union. The strike order comes not, as in Strangelove, from a rather overeager general, but from a malfunctioning machine. Otherwise, the broad outlines of the movies are the same……..

In many ways, Fail-Safe’s warning about the likelihood of a nuclear mishap is vindicated by Eric Schlosser’s stunning 2013 book Command and Control, which details the U.S. nuclear weapons program’s decades of jarringly lax safety standards, with scores of accidents that nearly resulted in detonation. The movie was met with criticism from military analysts on technical grounds, but whatever the particulars, Schlosser’s book pretty well bears out the broader message. One U.S. general attributes the lack of any inadvertent detonation so far to “skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.”…………….

Where Dr. Strangelove’s subversiveness comes from its suggestion that the military leadership gets off on the prospect of nuclear war, Fail-Safe makes clear that none of its characters wanted the attack. The closest thing to an antagonist is professor Groeteschele. Like the titular Dr. Strangelove, he is philosophically drawn fromHerman Kahn, the man who created the theory of nuclear strategy, of acceptable losses in millions of deaths………