American History and Film Summer Session II 2008 Class Homepage

Question for Discussion: How does the dark
comedy of Dr Strangelove help us
understand American fears about nuclear
war in the 1950s and early 1960s?

Reading: Levine and Papasotiriou, pp. 95-103;
Quart and Auster, pp. 67-79;
Kingsbury, “Just a Misstep away from Doomsday”
Schell,"The Fate of the Earth ;
Greenberg, "Fallout can be Fun";
50 Facts about Nuclear Weapons

Music: Tom Lehrer, "So Long Mom, I Am
Off to Drop the Bomb"; "We Will All Go
Together When We Go" "; Jesus Hits Like An
Atom Bomb"; "The Eve of Destruction"

Video: Dr. Strangelove (1964), Atomic Cafe (1982)

Critical Reviews of Dr. Strangelove (1964)

American Prepares for Nuclear War

The Cuban Missile Crisis and
the Real War

Eisenhower and Massive Retaliation

Eisenhower describes U.S. nuclear strategy

Figure of US and USSR-Russian Total
Strategic Warheads (Force Loadings),
1945-1996

U.S. Nuclear Superiority during the Missile
Crisis

Table I. Sixteen Nuclear Crises of the
Cold War- Dates and Weapons

World Map (1997)

Classic Nuclear War Movies
during the Cold War

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
The Day the World Ended (1956)
On the Beach (1959)
The Mouse that Roared (1959)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to
stop Worrying and Love the bomb
Fail Safe (1964)
Colossus: The Forbin Project (1969)
A Boy and His Dog, (1975)
Mad Max: The Road Warrior (1979)
The Day After (1983) (TV)
Wargames (1983)
Testament (1983)
The Terminator (1984)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines(2003)
Terminator 4: Salvation (2009)

The 1950s Liberal Consensus

"In the days after it first opened in early 1964, Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" took on the enchanted aura of a film that had gotten away with something. Johnson was in the White House, the Republicans were grooming Goldwater, both sides took the Cold War with grim solemnity, and the world was learning to be comfortable with the term "nuclear deterrent," which meant that if you blow me up, I'm gonna blow you up, and then we'll all be dead. "Better dead than Red," some said. Others said the opposite. The choice was not appealing."
Roger Ebert's review of Dr. Strangelove

THE PORT HURON STATEMENT OF THE STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY (1962)

As we grew, however, our comfort was
penetrated by events too troubling to
dismiss. First, the permeating and
victimizing fact of human degradation,
symbolized by the Southern struggle
against racial bigotry, compelled most
of us from silence to activism. Second,
the enclosing fact of the Cold War,
symbolized by the presence of the
Bomb, brought awareness that we
ourselves, and our friends, and
millions of abstract "others" we
knew more directly because of our
common peril, might die at any time.
We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or
fail to feel all other human problems, but not these
two, for these were too immediate and crushing in
their impact, too challenging in the demand that we
as individuals take the responsibility for encounter
and resolution....

Our work is guided by the sense
that we may be the last generation
in the experiment with living. But
we are a minority -- the vast majority
of our people regard the temporary
equilibriums of our society and world
as eternally-functional parts. In this is
perhaps the outstanding paradox: we
ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet
the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the common
opinion that America will "muddle
through", beneath the stagnation of
those who have closed their minds to
the future, is the pervading feeling
that there simply are no alternatives,
that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not
only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well.
Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness
of life, people are fearful of the thought that at any
moment things might thrust out of control. They fear
change itself, since change might smash whatever
invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for
them now. For most Americans, all crusades are
suspect, threatening. The fact that each individual
sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common
reluctance to organize for change. The dominant
institutions are complex enough to blunt the minds of
their potential critics, and entrenched enough to
swiftly dissipate or entirely repel the energies of
protest and reform, thus limiting human expectancies.
Then, too, we are a materially improved society, and
by our own improvements we seem to have weakened
the case for further change.

Adjusted for Inflation: The United States will spend 4.5 billion a year on its nuclear-arms program
through the year 2008. The U.S. spent on average about 3.7 billion a year on its nuclear-arms program during the Cold War.

John Connor : We're not gonna make it, are we? People, I mean.
The Terminator : It's in your nature to destroy yourselves.
John Connor : Yeah. Major drag, huh?

Sarah Connor : There is no fate but we make it.

Sarah Connor : [ narrating ] The unknown future rolls toward us. I face it, for the first time, with a sense of hope. Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

The future has not been written. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves. I wish I could believe that. My name is John Connor, they tried to murder me before I was born, when I was 13 they tried again. Machines from the future. Terminators. All my life my mother told me the storm was coming, Judgment Day, the beginning of the war between man and machines. Three billion lives vanished in an instant, and I would lead what was left of the human race to ultimate victory. It hasn't happened, no bombs fell, computers didn't take control, we stopped Judgment Day. I should feel safe, but I don't, ...

John Connor, The Rise of the Machines (2003)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

John Connor : By the time Skynet became self-aware it had spread into millions of computer servers across the planet. Ordinary computers in office buildings, dorm rooms; everywhere. It was software; in cyberspace. There was no system core; it could not be shutdown. The attack began at 6:18 PM, just as he said it would. Judgment Day, the day the human race was almost destroyed by the weapons they'd built to protect themselves. I should have realized it was never our destiny to stop Judgment Day, it was merely to survive it, together. The Terminator knew; he tried to tell us, but I didn't want to hear it. Maybe the future has been written. I don't know; all I know is what the Terminator taught me; never stop fighting. And I never will. The battle has just begun.

John Connor : No, you shouldn't exist. We took out Cyberdyne over ten years ago. We stopped Judgment Day.

Terminator : You only postponed it. Judgment Day is inevitable.

John Connor : I feel the weight of the world bearing down on me. A future I don't want. So I keep running as fast as I can... anywhere... nowhere.

--------------------------------------

John Connor: We stopped Judgment Day.
Terminator: You only postponed it. Judgment Day is inevitable.

From 1945 to the present, the United States has relied on the threat of nuclear war to deter its enemies. During the Cold War, the U.S. threatened the Soviet Union on a number of occasions with full-scale nuclear war. But this policy created a real dilemma for American leaders in 1949 when the Russians exploded their first atomic bomb; and later in 1953, when the Russians exploded their first hydrogen bomb. Now, American threats to fight and win nuclear war might lead to nuclear war, in which the U.S. itself is attacked with nuclear weapons. In the 1950s and 1960s, the government's response to this dilemma was not to stop threatening to wage nuclear war but to prepare the American people to survive a nuclear war. In order to reduce American's fears about nuclear war in the 1950s and early 1960s, the federal government created a propaganda campaign to convince Americans that with the proper precautions and planning they could survive a nuclear war.

The film, "Atomic Cafe," was first released in 1983. It is a collection of U.S. government propaganda films in the 1950s and early 1960s preparing the American people for nuclear war. The government tried to convince Americans that nuclear war as a "risk," and risks were just part of our everyday lives, so we shouldn't spend a lot of time worrying about it. However, after viewing government civil defense programs and nuclear war education programs in "Atomic Cafe," it seems to me that instead of reducing American's fears about nuclear war, these programs actually increased American's anxieties. You can see this in the government survey of housewives about whether they felt they were prepared for a nuclear war in the early 1960s :

Survey of Texas Women about Preparedness
for Nuclear War

Despite scaring the American people, and especially young children, with their campaign to prepare Americans for nuclear war, the United States government continued its civil defense programs and propaganda about surviving a nuclear war. American leaders wanted the Soviet Union to believe that we were ready to fight and win a nuclear war, and our civil defense programs were proof of our commitment to do so. In some way, Tom Lehrer's song, "We will all go together when we go," reflects the American anxiety about and the absurdity of these preparations for nuclear war. The most prosperous and democratic society on Earth was basing its future and security on the threat to wage nuclear war. This contradiction still haunts the children and adults who lived through the Cold War and experienced this civil defense propaganda. Whenever the civil defense warning tests went off on the radios, we stopped and wondered if this was just a test of "the emergency broadcast system" and not an "real and actual emergency"--the announcement of a nuclear war. This was the real legacy of the United States civil defense programs to prepare Americans for nuclear war.

"World War III began before World War II ended. Even as allied armies battled Nazi forces to the death in
Europe, Stalin had his eye clearly fixed on his postwar objectives. In April 1945, as American and Russian soldiers were embracing at the Elbe River in Germany, Stalin was spelling out his blueprint for a divided postwar world. "This war is not as in the past," he said, "whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system as far as his army can reach. It cannot
be otherwise." (p.19)

"World War III has proceeded from the Soviet seizure of Eastern Europe, through the communist conquest of
China, the wars in Korea and IndoChina, and the establishment of Soviet power in Cuba, to the present thrusts by the Soviet Union and its allies into Africa,
the Islamic crescent, and Central America. The expansionism has been accompanied by a prodigious military buildup that has brought the Soviet Union to the verge of decisive supremacy over the West.....

"World War III is the first truly global war. No corner of the earth is beyond its reach. The United States and the Soviet Union have both become global powers, and whatever affects the balance between us anywhere affects the balance everywhere. The Soviets understand this. We too must understand it, and learn to think in global terms." (p. 21)
........Richard Nixon, The Real War (1979)

"The whole success of the proposed program hangs ultimately on recognition by this Government, the American people, and all free peoples, that the cold war is
in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake."
......NSC 68 (1950)

President Eisenhower told congressional
leaders that the general idea [behind massive
retaliation] was "to blow the hell out of them [communists] in a hurry if they start anything."

Kennan was one of the most intelligent and lucid of US planners, and a major figure in shaping the
postwar world. His writings are an extremely
interesting illustration of the dovish position. One document to look at if you want to understand your country is Policy Planning Study 23 , written by
Kennan for the State Department planning staff in 1948. Here's some of what it says:

"We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population....In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity....To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives.... We should cease to talk about vague and...unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."

This point is also made clear in the public record.
For example, a high-level study group in 1955 stated that the essential threat of the Communist powers (the real meaning of the term Communism in practice) is their refusal to fulfill their service role -- that is, "to complement the industrial economies of the West."

Kennan went on to explain the means we have to use against our enemies who fall prey to this heresy:

"The final answer might be an unpleasant one, but... we should not hesitate before police repression by the local government. This is not shameful since the Communists are essentially traitors....It is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists. "

Faced with the Soviet Union's resistance to accept American global economic and political dominance, the United States began preparing for a prolonged "Cold War" with the Russians. Our larger objective in the Cold War was to undermine Soviet communism and eliminate the Soviet Union as a challenger to American global hegemony. In 1948, American leaders spelled out the United States' larger goals in the Cold War in NSC 20, a top secret National Security Council policy directive that described American political and military goals in the Cold War.
NSC 20 said America's primary
objective must be to reduce the "power and influence of the Soviet Union" by all means possible. NSC 20 went on to describe the military and political strategy to undermine Soviet power and influence:

1). Liberate Eastern Europe from Soviet domination and control.

2). Dismantle the Soviet military establishment and end the Soviet military threat to the "free world."

3). Cause the dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party and end communist rule in the Soviet Union.

NSC 20 concluded that if necessary the United States should be prepared to rely on nuclear weapons and air power to wage war with the Soviet Union. Clearly, NSC 20 is an aggressive military and political strategy for the United States to undermine Soviet communism. Even with the risk of global nuclear war, the United States is committed to defeating the Soviet Union and forcing it to accept American political, economic, and military
hegemony and dominance.

In order to understand why American leaders were willing to accept such an aggressive strategy to undermine Soviet communism, we need to look at President Truman's March 1947 speech before Congress. In this speech Truman lays out his view of the larger global struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. Truman describes the emerging Cold War as a global conflict between two "alternative ways of life":

"One way of life is based on the will of the majority, and it distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political repression."

whereas

[Their] "way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms."

Declaring what has become known as "the Truman Doctrine," President Truman said that "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." In this speech, Truman is declaring that the United States should and must be the "global policemen," protecting and securing freedom and democracy in the "free world," all countries not presently controlled or dominated by Soviet communism. For Truman and future American Presidents, the Soviet Union was seen as the greatest threat to the free world, and this threat justified the United States taking extreme measures and aggressive action to protect freedom and democracy throughout the world.

In 1950, President Truman approved NSC 68, another top secret Nation Security strategy to undermine Soviet power and influence. NSC 68 provides an additional window into the minds of American leaders who chose to pursue and aggressive Cold War with the Soviet Union. NSC 68 begins by noting that at the end of World War II with the defeat of the German and Japanese empires, and the decline of the French and British empires, there are now two major global powers competing for global leadership and dominance, the United States and the Soviet Union. Declaring that the Soviet want to expand their control over the Eurasian land mass and eventually dominate the world, the United States is faced with a threat that could lead to the "destruction not only of the Republic but of civilization itself." NSC 68 declares that "unwillingly our free society finds itself mortally challenged by the Soviet system."

Faced with this Soviet threat, NSC 68 declares that American policy is to "foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish." It goes on to observe that it would be American policy to develop a "healthy international community" even if there were no Soviet threat. In the face of the Soviet challenge to American efforts to create this global community of nations led by the United States, the United States must contain the Soviet system and protect the "free world" from Soviet power and influence. NSC 68 describes the American commitment to create "a military shield under which...[the peoples of the free world] can develop," a military shield strong enough "to deter, if possible, Soviet expansion, and to defeat, if necessary, aggressive Soviet or Soviet-directed actions of a limited or total character."

NSC 68 describes an American policy to use the Soviet threat to support the United States efforts to increasingly impose American political, economic, and military dominance over the entire world. The Soviet Union and the "Soviet threat" justifies American aspirations for global hegemony and dominance. Using the Soviet threat as a justification, the United States will attempt to impose its political and economic will on the nations of the "free world."

But NSC 68 does not stop at American domination over the Soviet Union in a bipolar world, the free world and the communist world. NSC 68 declares that this Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union is, in fact, a "real war":

"The whole success of the proposed program hangs ultimately on the recognition by this Government, the American people, and all free peoples, that the cold war is is fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake."

Describing the Cold War as a real war, NSC 68 now lays out aggressive political and military actions that the United States can take to win this war. It calls for to wage "overt psychological warfare calculated to encourage mass defections from Soviet allegiance and to frustrate the Kremlin designs in other ways." NSC 68 also calls for the United States to use covert means to wage "economic warfare and political and psychological warfare with a view to fomenting and supporting unrest and revolt in selected strategic satellite countries." Finally, NSC 68 calls for the development of "internal security and civilian defense programs" in order to prepare the American people to accept the Cold War and the need to be prepared to fight and win global nuclear wars.

In June 1950, after Secretary of State Dean Acheson declared Korea to be outside of America's sphere of influence, the North Koreans invaded South Korea and attempted to reunify the country under communist rule. President Truman immediately declared Korea a "global police action" and attempted to drive the North Koreans out of South Korea. In fact, the United States secret larger goal in the Korean war was to defeat North Korean communism and create a unified Korea under American domination and control. Korea was supposed to be the first major effort to rollback global communism. However, communist China, feeling threatened that aggressive American actions against North Korea would be followed by American attempts to undermine Chinese communism, entered the Korean war against the United States and its South Korean ally. The Korea war quickly proved to be a deadly stalemate between the United States and communist China. Only in 1953, after President Eisenhower secretly threatened to drop atomic bombs on China, did the Chinese agree to an end to the war, leaving North and South Korea divided just as they were at the beginning of the war.

The Korean war, as many American leader later said, seem to justify America's global crusade against Soviet communism. It convinced many Americans of the truth of the United States governments warning that the Soviet were plotting to take over the world and impose communist domination over the free world. The Korean war would further justify American creation of the "nuclear umbrella" to shield the free world from Soviet expansion. As described by Secretary of State Dean Acheson in 1949, the nuclear umbrella was the American threat to wage nuclear war against the Soviet Union if the communists threatened any country in the free world. An attack on any member of the free world, thus, would be treated as an attack against the United States, which would lead America to wage nuclear war against the aggressor.

Under Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the United States became committed to not just "containing" the Soviet Union but "rolling back" Soviet communist, that is undermining communist rule in the Soviet dominated countries. In his 1953 testimony before Congress, Dulles declares that it must be American policy to liberate the captive peoples under Soviet domination. Dulles argues that it is "possible to disintegrate this present monolithic structure" and undermine Soviet rule and domination. Dulles concludes that "only by keeping alive the hope of liberation, by taking advantage of that wherever opportunity arises, that we will end this terrible peril which dominates the world, which imposes upon us such terrible sacrifices and so great fears for the future." The problem, however, created by an American rollback strategy is that we are pushing the Soviet Union into a corner and giving them no little or no option but to come out fighting for their own survival.

The Cuban missile crisis illustrates the danger of this aggressive rollback strategy. In 1962, the Soviet Union placed nuclear missiles in Cuba aimed at the United States. Feeling that the United States had nuclear missiles in bases surrounding the Soviet Union, the Soviets wanted to force the United States to understand the fear and danger of nuclear attack that they experienced every day. However, the United States responded to this Soviet challenge by putting its nuclear forces on full alert and threatening to wage a nuclear war with the Soviets unless they removed their missiles from Cuba. President Kennedy took the Soviets to the very edge of nuclear war before the Soviet leader backed down, fearing that the United States was on the verge of destroying the Soviet Union. But this nuclear showdown caused millions of Americans to fear that they would soon die in a nuclear war. The Cuban missile crisis caused many Americans to question the United States' reliance on nuclear war to deter Soviet aggression. Could we really be free if our freedom depended on the threat to blow up the Soviet Union and in turn have our cities blown up in a nuclear war?

[ During the Cuban Missile Crisis,] "the Soviet Union possessed at that time as few as 75, and no more than 300, strategic missiles. The United States could target and deliver perhaps as many as 5,000 nuclear warheads. To some Americans theorists this passed for a 'parity' of sorts, but surely it could not look like that to Moscow, even without factoring in Soviet paranoia. If Krushchev were so lunatic as to launch a first strike and kill thousands of Americans, it would be be a terrible prelude to having his country wiped off the face of the Earth. . "Krushchev knows that we have a substanial nuclear superiority," McGeorge Bundy was to write later, "but he also knows that we don't really live under fear of his nuclear weapons to the extent he has to live under fear of ours."
......Robert Manning, Assistant Secretary of State
under President Kennedy
......Newsweek, Oct. 20, 1997, p. 18.

The larger question posed by the Cuban missile crisis was the wisdom of America's aggressive military and political strategy to undermine Soviet power and influence. Should the United States risk nuclear war and global destruction in order to ensure its global political and economy dominance and hegemony? Could the United States and the Soviet Union coexist, reducing the danger of nuclear war and global military conflict? Was the Soviet Union really an aggressive global empire attempting to take over the world that justified aggressive American countermeasures? Most of these questions had never seriously been debated in public in the United States in the first twenty years of the Cold War. Only in the late 1960s did some Americans begin to question the wisdom of the United States' Cold War policies.

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© 2002 by Chris H. Lewis, Ph.D.
Sewall Academic Program; University of Colorado at Boulder
Created 7 August 2002: Last Modified: 15 July, 2009
E-mail: cclewis@spot.colorado.edu
URL: http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/film/indexss.htm