Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Mutually Assured Destruction

Stanley Kubrick’s classic, Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is a suspenseful cold war comedy that is also spiked with a realistic representation of the danger of anyone having control of too much potentially devastating power, and a representation of the possibly very grim outcome from adherence to the theory of mutually assured destruction. In Dr. Strangelove, a high-ranked U.S. military official–who is annoyed with the longevity of the cold war without any actual fighting and who is impatient with Washington–decides to take matters into his own hands by instructing bombers to nuke the Soviet Union in a way that they cannot be called back and stopped. Ironically, the military official’s plan to stage a preemptive strike to save the U.S. actually destroys the world, as the Soviet Union had recently completed building an unstoppable, automatic retaliatory device (the “Doomsday Machine”) with the hopes of thwarting such an attack, and his attack preempted their warning to the U.S. of its completion.

This film is definitely a must-see for everyone. But, did you know that at the very same time that Kubrick was working on this film, a device very similar to the “Doomsday Machine” was in the works? The diabolical development of a retaliatory device was not the brainchild of Moscow, but was actually being researched in the United States. This weapon, known as the Supersonic Low Altitude Missile, once reaching its predetermined destination, would drop small nuclear bombs on predetermined targets while venting radiation and killing life all along its path.

From Wikipedia (Supersonic_Low_Altitude_Missile):

“The Supersonic Low Altitude Missile or SLAM (not to be confused with the U.S. Navy’s current Standoff Land Attack Missile) was a cancelled U.S. Air Force project conceived around 1955; the height of the cold war. Although it never proceeded beyond the initial design and testing phase before being declared obsolete, it represented several radical innovations in tactical aircraft, some of which are now considered at the cutting edge of military technology. It was nicknamed The Flying Crowbar for its conceptual simplicity and structural strength.

The SLAM was designed to complement the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, and as a possible replacement for or augment to the Strategic Air Command system. In the event of nuclear war it was intended to fly below the cover of enemy radar at supersonic speeds, and deliver thermonuclear warheads to roughly 26 targets.

The primary innovation was the engine of the aircraft, which was developed under the aegis of a separate project code-named Pluto, after the Roman god of the underworld. It was a ramjet that used nuclear fission to superheat incoming air instead of chemical fuel. Project Pluto produced two working prototypes of this engine, the Tory-IIA and the Tory-IIC, which were successfully tested in the Nevada desert. Special ceramics had to be developed to meet the stringent weight and tremendous heat tolerances demanded of the SLAM’s reactor. These were developed by the Coors company, which was then in the business of fabricating porcelain. The reactor itself was designed at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory.

The use of a nuclear engine in the airframe gave the missile an unprecedented range, estimated to be roughly one hundred and thirteen thousand miles (almost 182000 km or over four and a half times the equatorial circumference of the earth). It also acted as a secondary weapon for the missile: the stream of fallout left in its wake would poison enemy territory, and when its fuel was spent it would severely contaminate its strategically-selected crash site. In addition, the sonic waves given off by its passage would damage ground installations.”

An interesting piece of trivia about the SLAM is that its development ended in the same year that Kubrick’s movie was released. Did Dr. Strangelove help shape policy? Not really. The development project for the SLAM was ended before any were fully produced because they were deemed too expensive, to difficult to test safely (and without extensive testing would not be trustworthy), and obsolete with the advancement of ICBMs.

From Wikipedia (Supersonic_Low_Altitude_Missile):

“The SLAM program was scrapped on July 1, 1964. By this time serious questions about its safety had been raised (how does one test a device that spews radioactive fumes from its totally unshielded reactor core as it flies and turns its landing area into a radioactive contamination zone?), as well as its efficacy and cost. ICBMs promised swifter delivery to targets, and because of their speed (the Thor traveled at roughly Mach 12) and trajectory were considered virtually unstoppable. The SLAM was also being outpaced by advances in defensive ground radar, which threatened to render its stratagem of low-altitude evasion ineffective.”

Is the man with the biggest guns the one who always wins, or simply the one who can keep fighting the longest?

As my grandfather always used to say…

Grandfather: “Remember, the man with the biggest guns is always the last man standing!”