Part Two of Two Parts (Please read Part One first)
Stanley Kubrick, the famous movie director, wanted to make a serious movie about the dangers of nuclear war. After reading Kahn's book and interviewing him, Kubrick realized just how horribly absurd the whole concept was and instead of a serious movie, he made the black comedy movie, "Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." The character of the mad scientist Dr. Strangelove was said to have been inspired by Henry Kissinger.
Some historians believed that the U.S. doctrine nuclear superiority partially inspired and fueled by the books of Kissinger and Kahn and the suggested willingness to consider nuclear war as winnable were of strategic value to the U.S. foreign policy of that era. They suggest that various international crises such as the Berlin crisis, the Austrian crisis and the Taiwan Straits crisis were ultimately resolved to the advantage of the U.S. because of the new nuclear doctrine.
By the 1970s, the Soviet Union had built up its nuclear arsenal to the point where the U.S. was no longer superior in nuclear capability. Kissinger and Kahn and their followers were forced by hard reality to tone down their rhetoric about a winnable nuclear war. They realized that the age of mutually assured destruction (MAD) had arrived and that there could be no winner in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, no matter who struck first. It is assumed that the MAD doctrine that arrived with nuclear parity saved the world from nuclear war.
In the early 1980s, there was a serious scientific discussion of an idea first broached in science fiction in the 1940s. This was the concept of "nuclear winter." It was theorized that even a small exchange of over a hundred nuclear warheads anywhere in the world could throw so much smoke and dust into the atmosphere that sunlight would be diminished and crops would fail, bringing on massive starvation and the end of human civilization.
With a series of nuclear disarmament treaties, the serious reduction of nuclear warheads by the U.S. and the Soviets and efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons it was hoped that perhaps the world could escape the nightmare of the threat of nuclear war. The fall of the Soviet Union around 1990 brought the hope that money being spent on nuclear weapons could be diverted to domestic needs in the U.S. and Russia.
Unfortunately, with the rise of belligerence in Russia and the threat of use of nuclear weapons against other nations, these hopes diminished. Other nations have nuclear arsenals, the U.S. and Russia are modernizing their nuclear arsenals and other nations are struggling to build nuclear weapons in spite of intense international pressure to prevent that. The nuclear nightmare is not over. The United Nations is working hard trying to remove this threat hanging over us. Australia and one hundred and fifty other nations just called for the total elimination of nuclear weapons. We can only hope that policy makers in nuclear armed nations listen.
Dr. Strangelove poster:
