The Doomsday Machine, Dr. Strangelove’s Strange Truth, + Tales from Tina Brown
This Week: Nuclear Nightmare -with Daniel Ellsberg, William Perry, Senator Ed Markey, and Vincent Intondi. Listen today at 2pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
We hate to end the year on a sore subject— but the occasion is an important new book by a heroic man with an urgent message.
Mary McGrath: Dan Ellsberg risked his life leaking the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War, but even then, 50 years ago, he was compiling an even more awful story about our nuclear nightmare—Dr. Strangelove as fact. Ellsberg was a Cold Warrior and insider whiz kid at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica in the 50’s (and later in the Kennedy administration) where he studied deterrence theory and the command and control procedures in “retaliatory genocide” that would level the Soviet Union and the rest of the planet. It’s a terrifying narrative of group think; dudes too smart for their own good to worry about ours.
He says they were in the grip of “institutionalized madness” and what woke him up was
the discovery that these conscientious ordinary but very intelligent staffers colonels, majors and generals that I worked with, people that I drank beer with in the evening were during their day planning the possible extermination or readiness to exterminate half a billion people — was just stunning to me. I thought if they’re willing to plan this then when the time comes and somebody gives the order, the system will respond and they will do it. I thought this is the most evil and insane planning that has ever existed in the history of our species. And I think that’s actually been true ever since.
Ellsberg’s final mission is to make the world woke to the doomsday machines still on hair trigger, still ticking away in both the U.S. and Russia.
I get the feeling we’re on the Titanic — sailing into iceberg waters at full speed on a dark night. That’s what happened. Now it wasn’t inevitable that the Titanic would go down. Every other ship in that area stopped, knowing there were icebergs ahead, or went south, or moved ahead very slowly. No other ship went down, the Titanic alone chose to go at full speed on the same course. And they say it wasn’t inevitable … I feel I’m sort of like a passenger on that ship who happened to have heard the warnings of the icebergs, and realized that we were moving ahead. I’m trying to warn my fellow passengers on our ark, the earth, that it’s time for mutiny or for exposure for investigation for reexamining the decisions that are being made at the top. And I think we have a chance to do that, yet we haven’t hit the iceberg yet on nuclear weapons.We may have on climate at this point — past the tipping point without even knowing it. But in either case, I propose to act as if we still had a possibility of averting this, and I’m looking for other people to join that.
The interview is incredibly compelling (and we’ll be releasing most of an hour -long version on Monday for our patrons on patreon. It’s not too late to sign up!). Grab Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner for the doomsdayer nearest and dearest on your Christmas list.
Adam Shatz’s recent piece in the London Review of Books, “The President and the Bomb,” was an excellent resource for us this week. So was this Radioloab hour, and all the links on their website.
The public radio show Reveal did a terrific profile of Ellsberg and the story of the Pentagon Papers, and you’ll find us in line on December 22nd to see “The Post.” Dear Santa: More heroes, please.
Daniel Ellsberg told us this week that many of the more phantasmagorical aspects of Dr. Strangelove and the doomsday machine were actually factually grounded. He even went so far as to even muse that Dr. Strangelove could be considered a documentary.
David Bromwich, perennial guest of Open Source and Sterling professor of English at Yale, chooses to place Dr. Strangelove within the canonical tradition of satire leading back to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. In an ever-incisive and illuminating essay for the Criterion Collection, Bromwich writes:
Jonathan Swift, in his impersonation of an eighteenth-century explorer memoirist, offered a point-by-point negation of Enlightenment humanism, and Kubrick aimed for an approach just as unsparing toward the optimism of mass democracy and modern technology: the little-guy heroes of Dr. Strangelove are slated to bomb “the missile complex at Laputa.” What Swift’s novel did for the age of the orrery, Kubrick doubtless hoped his film would do for the age of the cyclotron. Yet Swift elsewhere added a reservation about the mode in which he worked: “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own” — a pertinent warning about how cheaply satire may buoy up the complacency of the spectator. Only by a masterly deployment of cinematic realism, grafted onto a plot and characters of the grossest extravagance, was Kubrick able to construct a mirror in which we discover a face that resembles our own.
Some bonus Strangelove trivia for fans of our Otis Redding show: did you know that Kubrick’s soundtrack opens with a string arrangement of Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness?
Friend-of-the-show Alan Andres messaged us on Twitter about his own experience of hearing this opening music for the first time in theatre:
It was a pretty blatant joke in the 1964 when the music was well known. It had to be (partly) explained to me when I was a ten year-old (!). Everyone in the theater was laughing at the juxtaposition of the images and the music and I was puzzled…
The Artist’s Corner: Tina Brown
Susan Coyne: I saw Tina Brown at the Brattle Theatre, in town to talk about her new book The Vanity Fair Diaries. She shared stories of her time as editor of Vanity Fair, a title she was given before the age of 30, and her philosophy behind building magazines — “It’s all about seduction.” Donald Trump, a fixture in 1980s New York nightlife, was a frequent figure in her diaries, first as a source of bemusement as he shouted at her across the table that he was on the cover of Newsweek (“Time is better,” she replied), and then as a scourge once she began covering his bankruptcies. After a journalist friend had been critical of him in an article, he poured white wine down the back of her dress and scuttled away.
Brown also talked about her editorial approach at the New Yorker, which she ran in the mid- to late nineties. “I wanted to make it a reader’s magazine as well as a writer’s magazine.” She fired about seventy writers and brought fifty new ones in, including David Remnick, Malcolm Gladwell, and Adam Gopnik.
In Case You Missed It:
We’ll be on tape the next two weeks with two killer shows: we’ll ring out the year with Noam Chomsky who left Boston this fall for warmer climes in Arizonia, and we’ll ring it in with the rocker Billy Bragg. And we get to share once more two of our favorite illustrations from the uber talented artist, Susan Coyne.
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Til next year,
The OS Bomb Squad
