The madness of MAD—the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction said to guide U.S. nuclear policy in the Cold War, is the subject of Stanley Kubrick’s classic Dr. Strangelove (1964). Kubrick brutally satirizes the apocalyptic game of chicken played at the highest levels in those years, but in reality, was MAD so bad? Contingency plans to destroy the world are disturbing and immoral, yet perhaps MAD achieved its goal of preventing nuclear war? The U.S. and USSR fought proxy wars in Vietnam and elsewhere, skirmished quietly at the edges of the world, yelled at each other at the UN, but World War III never happened and the Bomb never fell.
So, was Kubrick and the authors of other Doomsday fiction wrong (or at least guilt of serious overstatement)? That’s the thesis of Sean M. Maloney’s book Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove: The Secret History of Nuclear War Films. Fear not: Maloney isn’t “deconstructing” according to the doctrine of some unreadable French theorist but as in taking apart Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe and others with an aggressively wielded wrench.
Fascinating but annoying, the wealth of knowledge contained in Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove is filtered through a perspective suitable for Fox News. Not that the Canadian military historian has ever been a Fox guest commentator to my knowledge, but Maloney’s rightest interpretation of America might be comfortable in those environs. Particularly egregious is his defense of General Curtis LeMay, Cold War commander of the Strategic Air Command, probable source for Kubrick’s caricatured Air Force brass and running mate for George Wallace in the 1968 election.
On that last point, Maloney disingenuously acknowledges LeMay’s vice-presidential bid without judgement as if partnering with the notorious white supremacist was unconnected to the long train of thought from a man once entrusted with the keys to America’s nuclear arsenal. LaMay might have been a competent general, and he might not have been as loony as Kubrick’s Jack D. Ripper, but his strident bluster was always unnerving and at the edge.
Maloney carries on a campaign against the Kennedy administration through much of Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove, accusing them of knee-jerk anti-military attitudes and of looking their patrician noses down at the men who served as American’s line of defense. Somehow, he overlooks how John F. Kennedy’s status was based in part on the wartime legend of his service as a PT boat commander. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was an Army officer in World War II and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was an officer in the Army Air Force. There weren’t any bearded, sign-carrying peaceniks in the Kennedy crew.
Maloney charges that Dr. Strangelove and similar critiques of U.S. nuclear policy gave aid and comfort to our Cold War enemies. That was no doubt an unintended consequence as Soviet propagandists retooled material from any source to fit their anti-American agenda. However, Maloney then goes overboard by claiming that Bolshevik-inspired oppression awaited the 2010s for cinematic denouncement. Hollywood was making anti-Communist movies in the silent era and through the Cold War. Does he think The Manchurian Candidate (1962) is a favorable depiction of Communist brainwashing? Did he miss The Killing Fields (1984) when it was released? Look for it on Netflix.
After the apologists for Stalinism were confined to the shriveled cadres of the American Communist Party, elements of the left continued to engage—as Maloney states—in a game of moral equivalence. They admitted to the rottenness of the Soviet system while adding that ours is bad, too. They were guilty as Maloney charges, confusing the moral equivalence of actions taken by the U.S. and USSR with moral equivalence of the two systems. America has many sins to answer for, especially concerning race, but in the 20th century, it never murdered millions of its own citizens.
Did Mutually Assured Destruction work? Well, we’re still here and the Cold War never heated into the much-anticipated World War III. Relatively sane men were at the helm in those years.
Despite many mixed thoughts, I’m pleased to have read Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove and will keep it on my shelf for reference. I wish I’d had Maloney’s book on hand when I wrote the Cold War chapter for my 2014 book about cinema and historical memory, War on the Silver Screen. Maloney knows as much as can be known about nuclear weapons procedures and his knowledge on the authors and content of the novels adapted into Cold War movies is vast and inviting. There is much more to the film and literature of the Cold War than Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe. Maloney offers a fascinating survey.
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