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Strangelove in 2001
Kubrick's Lost Doomsday Scenario : A "suitcase nuclear bomb" being detonated by a "potential enemy" in Washington, DC in a sneak attack? Film director Stanley Kubrick suggested just such a scenario in 1994. What seemed wildly implausible before September 11th—like a subplot from the director's apocalyptic classic Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb—no longer seems so far-fetched. Kubrick's politically-charged essay, which The New York Times refused to publish in 1994, warned of the potential of nuclear attack caused by "accident, miscalculation or madness."

In a nuclear crisis, tens of millions of lives would depend on communications. We've been given some information about the "hot-line" but the nuclear powers should be much more open about the details. Like so many other things that are secret and never used, sloppiness, complacency and lack of imagination tend to take over.

At first, it seems counter-intuitive to be open about the details of your nuclear arsenal, but, in the words of Dr. Strangelove, "the whole point of the doomsday machine is lost . . . if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, ay?!"

Another Strangelove quote: "Deterrence is the art of producing, in the mind of the enemy, the fear to attack!" The scary thing about our current war on terrorism is that the conventional wisdom present in these quotes might not really apply. They've certainly proved that they have no fear of attacking us, its just a matter of whether or not they'd go nuclear...

This post is part of the Kaedrin Weblog. It's been categorized under Movies and was originally published in November 2001.

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