“Well boys, I reckon this is it: nuclear combat, toe to toe with the Russkies.”
— Maj. T.J. “King” Kong
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — More than 45 years ago, actor Slim Pickens delivered those words in “Dr. Strangelove,” a seminal Cold War black comedy.
In the film, a rogue Air Force general, Jack Ripper, convinced that fluoridated water is a communist plot, orders a nuclear attack on the Soviets, triggering Armageddon.
It's a tad late, but the United States Air Force has more to say on the matter.
“SAC Command Post,” an 18-minute film made in 1963 belittling the possibility of such an unauthorized U.S. nuclear strike, has been unearthed at the National Archives in College Park, Md.
There's no evidence it was ever released publicly. But now it can be seen on a George Washington University Web site, where it was posted earlier this month.
The film includes a tour of the Strategic Air Command's underground control center near Omaha and mentions that several measures have been taken to allow control center operations to continue even during a nuclear attack. Special air conditioners, for example, would filter out “nuclear contaminants.” The “gold phone,” which would be used to receive the orders triggering a nuclear attack, also is shown.
The film also went to great lengths to emphasize that procedures were in place so that, in the narrator's words, “World War III can't be triggered by an unauthorized launching of a nuclear bomb.”
“They went to a lot of trouble to produce this,” said William Burr, a senior analyst in charge of the nuclear history documentation project for the National Security Archive, an independent research organization at George Washington University.
Burr discovered the film last year after he heard that the National Archives had a cache of Air Force films. Reviewing index cards describing the collection, he found “SAC Command Post” and ordered a DVD copy.
Burr figured that it was made in 1963, from the date on an Omaha World-Herald newspaper shown in the film.
“Dr. Strangelove” wasn't released until the next year. But there had already been newspaper stories about it, including a New York Times interview in which director Stanley Kubrick outlined the plot, complete with the psychotic general who believed fluoridation was a conspiracy to sap and pollute our “precious bodily fluids.”
The SAC film also countered “Fail-Safe,” a 1962 novel that would be made into a movie in 1964. It was about an attack order accidentally sent to a SAC bomber, which carried out a nuclear strike.
One mystery is why the SAC movie was never released.
Burr said it's possible that the timing was simply wrong. By the time “Dr. Strangelove” came out, President Lyndon Johnson was trying to smooth relations with the Soviet Union, so a film about a finely tuned Strategic Air Command capable of delivering a nuclear strike would have been off message.
Barry Spink, an archivist with the Air Force Historical Research Agency, said he found a reference confirming the film was made in 1963 and another reference to a film that sounded like “SAC Command Post” and was intended to be shown to civic groups but apparently never was.
Besides obscurity, the SAC film had another problem: Its assertion that “the expenditure of nuclear weapons against an enemy” could be ordered only by the president wasn't exactly true.
In 1963, one of the deepest Cold War secrets was a delegation procedure that would have allowed senior Air Force or Navy commanders to launch a nuclear attack if one had already been made on the U.S. and the president could not be reached. Information about that policy wasn't declassified until the late 1990s — but the plot of “Dr. Strangelove” hinged on an eerily similar Plan “R,” which Ripper abused to order an attack.
The film — full title “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” — starred Peter Sellers, George C. Scott and Sterling Hayden as Ripper. It became a classic, and the American Film Institute named it among the best films ever made. But some of the most interesting reactions have come from those most familiar with the country's nuclear strategy.
Fred Kaplan, in his book “The Wizards of Armageddon,” tells about Daniel Ellsberg and a midlevel government official taking an afternoon off in 1964 to see “Dr. Strangelove.”
Ellsberg, the man who would later leak the Pentagon Papers, had been a RAND analyst and a consultant at the Defense Department. As he left the theater, Ellsberg turned to his colleague and said, “That was a documentary!”
