So I'm reading my birthday present from my friend Jesse, a copy of This New Ocean by William E. Burrows, and it's tossed me right back into the paranoid and weirdly retrofuturistic world I last visited while reading James Bamford's Body Of Secrets. When I was a kid, I thought that fighter jets were incredibly cool, and all I really wanted was to be an astronaut. At the same time, I was totally freaked out by the thought of nuclear annihilation, and I didn't really see how my desire to be an astronaut and the source of a lot of my nightmares could be linked. But linked they were, and intimately so, as Burrows' book makes amply clear.

I'm not finished with This New Ocean yet, so I'm not prepared to review it, but I was reminded of it while reading this New York Times article about the 40th anniversary of the release of Stanley Kubrick's brilliant and mordant Dr. Strangelove, probably the most important movie Kubrick made (if not my favorite). Frank Kaplan, the author of the article, basically says that Kubrick's research was so exhaustive that the movie might as well have been a documentary:

The most popular guessing game about the movie is whether there a real-life counterpart to the character of Dr. Strangelove (another Sellers part), the wheelchaired ex-Nazi who directs the Pentagon's weapons research and proposes sheltering political leaders in well-stocked mineshafts, where they can survive the coming nuclear war and breed with beautiful women. Over the years, some have speculated that Strangelove was inspired by Edward Teller, Henry Kissinger or Werner Von Braun.

But the real model was almost certainly Herman Kahn, an eccentric, voluble nuclear strategist at the RAND Corporation, a prominent Air Force think tank. In 1960, Mr. Kahn published a 652-page tome called “On Thermonuclear War,” which sold 30,000 copies in hardcover.

According to a special-feature documentary on the new DVD, Mr. Kubrick read “On Thermonuclear War” several times. But what the documentary doesn't note is that the final scenes of “Dr. Strangelove” come straight out of its pages.

Given that the book on which Dr. Strangelove was based, Peter George's Red Alert, was exhaustively researched itself, and Kubrick himself was borderline obsessive about getting the details of his movies correct, it seems a little disingenuous on Kaplan's part to act surprised about the movie's accuracy — particularly given that he's written a history of America's nuclear strategy himself. At the same time, it buttresses my belief that Dr. Strangelove is the definitive Cold War movie: science, technology, and totally lunatic politics all come together in just the right proportions. More than a little lunacy fueled the real-life space race: two nations drastically distorted their economies, handicapped their own military strategy, and nearly destroyed each other over largely phantasmal fears.

I'm a huge proponent of space exploration, but the same thought processes that put humans on the moon also drove the development of mutually assured destruction. But if I start talking about that, I'm going to drag out into the open the deep, unreasoning anger I feel whenever I read Werner von Braun's endlessly self-serving claims that he and his rocketeers bore no responsibility for the atrocities at Dora and Nordhausen, and then I'll start ranting about Gravity's Rainbow and its prescience, and we'll be here all night. It's a hard thing to come to grips with how intimately tied your life-long dream is to several of history's greatest nightmares.

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