Dr. Strangelove, "On Thermonuclear War," the CIA, and Nostalgia

Fred Kaplan wrote an article in the October 10th NY Times (Truth Stranger than 'Strangelove') that emphasized how closely Stanley Kubrick's 1964 movie "Dr. Strangelove" adhered to government thinking, convention, and personalities in the early 60's. According to the article, Daniel Ellsberg (a foremer RAND analyst) recently recalled that he turned to a colleague after seeing the dark comedy and said, "That was a documentary!"

The character of Dr. Strangelove supposedly represented the RAND Corporation's Dr. Herman Kahn, who wrote the disturbing insider classic "On Thermonuclear War," a huge book which I read carefully when I was 13-years-old, specifically because it was so vociferously denounced by liberals of all sorts at the time.

Kahn's sin was to discuss nuclear war in prosaic terms, to imagine how it could be survived, and how victory could be achieved even after millions die: dangerous thoughts with such potent weapons!

When I interviewed for a position with the CIA in 1987, I was unprepared for my emotional reaction. I wondered whether I would be mad, in a proper liberal way, at the secretive power of the company, or bedazzled by the cutting-edge technology, but none of that happened. Instead, I was overwhelmed with wave after wave of nostalgia. All the things that would make my teenage self swoon with delight were at last nearly within reach. Details of the Soviet war machine, and ours. Rockets and bombs. Telecommunications and satellites. Code speak and indecipherable runes. And yet that was all my old, teenage self.

I remember listening in the darkness to a lone frog croaking in a tiny, drought-stricken rivulet that flowed past a car dealership in Tyson's Corners, Virginia, as I struggled after the interview with the decision whether or not to join the company. I decided that Gorbachev's recent overtures to the U.S. probably spoke poorly for the CIA's immediate future. The CIA would become less, not more, influential with time, as detente waxed and as we all learned to get along.

I didn't know the half of it! The unanticipated collapse of the Soviet Union (unanticipated by most, that is, except by a few imaginative Soviet dissidents) practically derailed the agency. The current vicious policy struggles with the Pentagon threaten to make the CIA irrelevant: the Pentagon is bigger and badder than ever today. Cheney and Wolfowitz and Perle and Rumsfeld and Cambone encroach on the agency's power, and the CIA is forced into drastic black-bag jobs to expose Pentagon-supported traitors like Ahmed Chalabi. In a way, I'm glad I didn't join after all. Nostalgia doesn't extend all the way back to Roman Empire-like backstabbing and degeneration ('Sutsugua' indeed!)

Still, I can remember my first reaction as a ten-year-old to "Dr. Strangelove." As I recall, it was the Saturday Night Movie on NBC television in 1966, and I tuned in late. I gathered that it was a drama, in the manner of the tragic nuclear-war movie "Fail Safe," which had aired a few weeks prior, but I slowly noticed an unwanted, disturbing satirical edge. I remember protesting, "Wait! This isn't funny! What do they think they are doing? 'There won't be any fighting in the War Room': don't they realize some people will laugh at that?"

And yet it got funnier and funnier, and even I started chuckling after a while (and is that Peter Sellers? I thought the other guy was Peter Sellers?)

This is not, I repeat NOT, funny! Nostalgic, maybe. But NOT funny!