“Gentleman! You can’t fight in here, this is the war room!”

By: Joshelin Horn

Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb is my favourite movie of all time. Seriously. So, when I saw on the syllabus that this week we would be reading an article by Fred Kaplan entitled “Truth Stranger Than ‘Strangelove’” the huge nerd in me was very excited. I decided to justify my blog-writing procrastination by watching scenes from the movie on YouTube.

The “War Room” scene from Dr. Strangelove, mentioned by Kaplan in his piece for the New York Times, reminded me of the other Kaplan article we read for this week, “The Wizards of Armageddon.”  Kaplan helps explain the game theory which postulates that “it was irrational behaviour for one to take a leap, do what is best for both parties and trust that one’s opponent might do the same.” General Buck Turgidson, by game theory standards then, exemplifies a rational being in this scene (which I find extremely unsettling).

We watch as Turgidson lists the reasons why the US should attack the USSR with H-Bombs. He states, “If…we were to immediately launch an all-out and coordinated attack on all their airfields and missile bases we’d stand a damn good chance of catching them with their pants down.” This evaluation of what to do in their very precarious situation rests on the assumption, as Turgidson points out, that when “the Ruskies” make radar contact with the US planes “they are going to go absolutely ape and they are going to strike back with everything they got.” He is assuming that after radar contact has been made the USSR will “play their best move” – retaliating by firing all of their nuclear weapons. Turgidson ultimately opts for the “minimax solution” – that is, he states, to drop the bombs because “we would destroy 90% of their nuclear capabilities. We would therefore prevail and suffer only modest and acceptable civilian casualties from their remaining force which would be badly damaged and uncoordinated.” Turgidson cites both the lowest maximum and the highest minimum in the minimax solution: “no more than 10-20 million killed, tops.” (Cleverly, the film also picks up on the rhetoric of ‘lives saved’ by the bomb. It’s such a smart film. If you haven’t already: watch it.)

I don’t know how much of a stretch it is for Kaplan to make direct connections between characters in the film and military leaders in the United States (I wouldn’t know how to prove these connections existed even if I tried), and I certainly hope that there isn’t a real-life counterpart to Dr. Strangelove himself. Having said that, I don’t think that it is a stretch to say that the film itself is well-versed in real, tangible wartime reasoning and rationale like Von Neumann’s game theory.