Recently I had the chance to see Stanley Kubrick's film "Dr Strangelove" again on the big screen - fifty years after it was first released in 1964.
The film, about a crazy US general triggering a nuclear attack against Russia, is breathtakingly perceptive. As the New Yorker noted in a recent article titled "Almost Everything in 'Dr Strangelove' was true":
“Although “Strangelove” was clearly a farce, with the comedian Peter Sellers playing three roles, it was criticized for being implausible. An expert at the Institute for Strategic Studies called the events in the film “impossible on a dozen counts.” A former Deputy Secretary of Defense dismissed the idea that someone could authorize the use of a nuclear weapon without the President’s approval: “Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.”...
The first casualty of every war is the truth—and the Cold War was no exception to that dictum. Half a century after Kubrick’s mad general, Jack D. Ripper, launched a nuclear strike on the Soviets to defend the purity of “our precious bodily fluids” from Communist subversion, we now know that American officers did indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own. And despite the introduction of rigorous safeguards in the years since then, the risk of an accidental or unauthorized nuclear detonation hasn’t been completely eliminated.”
Recent estimates put the number of nuclear bombs in existence at over 17,000. Insanely risky. A reminder that in politics the (politically) urgent always seems to get in the way of the important.