Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove: The Secret History of Nuclear War Films. Sean M. Maloney. Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2020. 

“Yaaa-hoo!” An ecstatic scream reverberates in the sky, as an American hydrogen bomb, mounted by a B-52E pilot donning a cowboy hat, drops to the ground. Its touchdown triggers the Soviets’ “doomsday machine,” and the world is soon engulfed in a nuclear apocalypse. This funny but horrifying scene marks the end of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Widely regarded as a cinematic masterpiece, this black comedy features a rogue U.S. general who initiates an emergency plan to attack the Soviet Union and eventually leads the world to its fateful destruction. Fortunately, humanity has been spared this kind of catastrophe, but the 1964 film, and other cinematic texts that portray the nuclear arms race, raised valid questions about the state of international affairs, especially during the height of the Cold War. For example, what were national leaders and policymakers thinking at the time? How close did they bring the world to an all-out nuclear war? Do these films accurately portray atomic diplomacy and strategy? Or are they hopelessly unrealistic?

Much of the analysis, thus, is devoted to a meticulous discussion of contemporary strategies, personnel, facilities, and beliefs that converged around nuclear weapons and the Cold War.

Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove: The Secret History of Nuclear War Films is a fresh study that attempts to answer these intriguing questions. Through a close reading of a cluster of “Cold War nuclear crisis films,” which is described as “a staple of the Cold War popular cultural milieu from the 1950s to the 1980s,” this clearly written and thought-provoking book explores how these screen narratives depicted the nuclear weapons apparatus and strategic decision-making.[1] But the book is more than a study of a film genre. Relying on extensive research conducted at a number of archives and museums, including the Library of Congress, the Strategic Air Command Museum, the South Dakota Air and Space Museum, and three Presidential Libraries, its author, Sean M. Maloney, aims to demonstrate how on-screen representations “stack[ed] up against historical reality.”[2] Much of the analysis, thus, is devoted to a meticulous discussion of contemporary strategies, personnel, facilities, and beliefs that converged around nuclear weapons and the Cold War.

Maloney demonstrates that the discrepancy between representation and reality was evident in other facets of nuclear narratives.

The book opens by exploring a handful of authors—including Peter George (Red Alert), Mark Rascovich (The Bedford Incident), and Antony Trew (Two Hours to Darkness)—who were largely “conservative in outlook” but helped form the core tropes of the fear-driven nuclear crisis film genre.[3] Maloney, then, compares the representation of U.S. military leaders to their actual counterparts, most notably Curtis LeMay and Thomas Power. Although difficult and demanding, these Cold War generals, according to the author, were neither mentally unstable nor trigger-happy, as so often portrayed on the screen. As architects of a larger deterrence campaign, these men strove to prevent the Soviets from launching a first strike. They never aimed to provoke or initiate a nuclear war.

Maloney demonstrates that the discrepancy between representation and reality was evident in other facets of nuclear narratives. For instance, the war rooms, as memorably recreated in films like Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe, were either simplified or distorted versions of the real command centers, and their “big board,” which offered real-time projections of flight and missile trajectories, “did not exist” in the 1950s and ‘60s.[4] In the cinematic universe, ICBM launch sites and control facilities, as in Twilight’s Last Gleaming, served as a stage for coups and insurrections, but such scenarios were unrealistic, and at best, highly unlikely to succeed. On-screen portraits of strategic bombers and “fail-safe” scenarios lacked the stringency and restraint that exists in practice. Films about submarine action, which the author divides into “incidents at sea” films and “boomer psychological thrillers,” varied in accuracy; some, like The Bedford Incident, carried realistic content, while others, such as Crimson Tide, seemed to be devoid of credibility.

Moreover, as is the case with the choice of films, Maloney’s analysis of real-life strategic deliberations privileges U.S. perspectives.

Maloney’s analysis stems from a belief that nuclear crisis films have unduly caricatured and denigrated the U.S. national security establishment. Thus, through an effort to “deconstruct” the filmic representation of atomic dangers, he strives to defend the reputation and integrity of the U.S. defense community. Maloney attempts this, for the most part, by challenging the exaggerations and inaccuracies that the genre offers. For this reason, some films that depict the U.S. military in favorable terms, such as Warner Bros.’s Bombers B-52 or the Air Force-made SAC Command Post, go unmentioned in the book. Also, its coverage, save exceptions like the BBC’s Threads, is Hollywood-centric. Even though films with dangerous nuclear-warfare plots have surfaced in other parts of the world, including the Soviet Union (Konflict/Conflict and Sluchay v kvadrate '36-80'/Incident at Map Grid 36-80), Japan (Sekai daisenso/The Last War and Future War 198X), and South Korea (Yuryeong/Phantom: The Submarine and Gangcheolbi/Steel Rain), the book primarily limits its focus to U.S. cinema. One is left to wonder how international representations of nuclear crises “stack up against historical reality.”[5]

Moreover, as is the case with the choice of films, Maloney’s analysis of real-life strategic deliberations privileges U.S. perspectives. The book concludes by asserting that humanity’s avoidance of an all-out nuclear war owes it to the “sheer professionalism” of U.S. personnel, and goes so far as to state that the Russians should be “thankful” for America’s judicious handling of the nuclear standoff.[6] But these statements are made without a careful examination of Soviet nuclear policy and strategy beyond U.S. assessments of them. In his “Epilogue,” Maloney complains about the lack of academic work on “Soviet command and control and nuclear accidents,” despite a growing literature that interrogates the USSR’s nuclear policies and programs, for instance by Kate Brown, Edward Geist, David Holloway, and Sonja Schmid.[7] The book would have benefitted from a wider, multi-perspectival lens that truly bridged ideological divides—in ways that the finest scholarship of the “new international history” and “new Cold War history” fields have done in recent years.[8]

Maloney’s conclusions may not convince some readers, and his book—amounting to 445 pages of text—does not yet tell the full story. But its prose is accessible, its research is impressive, and its comparison of film and fact is productive. In the end, Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove is a worthwhile study that sheds light on an important slice of Cold War history. It will urge readers to explore--or revisit--a fascinating body of film narratives and wonder what really happened and what might have been.

Hiroshi Kitamura is Associate Professor of History at William & Mary. He is the author of Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan. His recent publications include “Runaway Orientalism: MGM’s Teahouse and U.S.-Japanese Relations in the 1950s,” and “The Bomb and Beyond: Teaching Nuclear Issues through Popular Culture Texts,” (with Jeremy Stoddard).

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Notes:

[1] Sean M. Maloney, Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove: The Secret History of Nuclear War Films (Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2020), 2, 5.

[2] Maloney, Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove, 8.

[3] Maloney, Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove, 44.

[4] Maloney, Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove, 153.

[5] Maloney, Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove, 8.

[6] Maloney, Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove, 299, 359.

[7] Maloney, Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove, 358. On the literature of Soviet nuclear policy and history, see Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Edward Geist, “Was There a Real ‘Mine Shaft Gap’? Bomb Shelters in the USSR, 1945-1962,” Journal of Cold War Studies 14:2 (Spring 2012), 3-28; Geist, Armageddon Insurance: Civil Defense in the United States and Soviet Union, 1945-1991 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019); David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1936-1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Sonia D. Schmid, Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015).

[8] For key works on the “new international history,” see, among others, Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Also see Manela, “International History as Historical Subject,” Diplomatic History 44:2 (April 2020), 184-209. For key works on the “new Cold War history,” see, for example, Lorenz Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950-1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).