I recently watched one of my favorite Cold War thrillers, Fail Safe. Along with The Hunt for Red October and The Bedford Incident, I think they are the best of the lot in that genre.
But only one problem. The film got everything wrong. I have some insight into this, serving for two years on the intelligence staff of a battalion in the Pershing Nuclear Brigade.
The movie postulates that a mechanical failure could mistakenly send bombers against the Soviet Union. Impossible due to security features in our nuclear program. It never happened.
But the film not only theorized it was a probability, but that a general nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviets was inevitable. It was the same idiotic argument we hear from today’s gun control fanatics, that the weapons somehow have an independent mind of their own and could launch nuclear missiles or bombers.
Obviously, we never traded nuke strikes with the Russians. The peace at any price types, Hollywood, and various left wing hangers on who predicted we surely would were completely and utterly out to lunch. Armageddon did not come. The doom was avoided. Hollywood never saw that coming because it drank leftist kool-aid.
Because arts and entertainment poodles have little knowledge of the military or national security matters either from study or personal experience, they tend to make stuff up as they go along.
One of the unintentionally funny examples of this is the movie Annapolis. In this supposed tale of a plebe year at the US Naval Academy, freshman make out with superior rank females, act sullen to upperclassmen, and physically assault other Academy officers. What happens? Nothing. Colleagues of mine who are grads of the Academy scoff at the film. It’s not even filmed on location, as the Navy refused to have anything to do with it. Thus, we get a New York/Hollywood view of military service with the usual bizarre notions attached.
We got the same studious absurdity with Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. This doomsday scenario goes back to the late 60s and early 70s, as cretins like Paul Ehrlich, an Al Gore level climate hysteric before Gore, predicted all sorts of ecological calamities that were supposed to happen post haste. Over population, lack of water, famine in the West, melting ice caps (he got there before Gore), and a plethora of other climate disasters were inevitable, we were told, unless we mended out evil capitalist ways. Did any of Ehrlich’s prognostications come true? No. Gore’s? Nope.
The failed doomsayers are consistently wrong, just as the climate agitators today, because they fail to factor in technological and free market innovation. Also, they just lie to increase the drama, focus the attention, and leverage their access to government power. So before we listen to current day leftist climate doomsayers, we need to remember their track record when it comes to that matter and other issues. When we objectively do, we will find them totally lacking in even the slightest credibility.
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In the original film, as I recall, a disclaimer at the end proclaimed that such incidents “cannot possibly happen.” That was true because the “fail-safe” term was misrepresented as some magic technology that couldn’t fail. In reality a bomber holding at its “fail-safe” point could not mistakenly advance, as it had not yet been assigned its target.
As an author and writer, I can share this: There is no surer avenue to cashing in than to pen sensationalist drivel. In a nutcase shell: It sells. People like it as much as they hope it isn’t possible. If you’re a writer and you want to make buck, you take the easy way out: Write a doomsayer novel. Because this path has become so well trodden, writers began looking for a “novel twist” on the same theme: Dystopia. They play the part of a modern day prophet predicting what the world will look like in 5, 10, 20 years, or so. And Hollywood (we know who runs Hwood, don’t we?) jumps on anything promising to make a buck. That shouldn’t surprise you. As for Gore, he saw the profits of being a prophet. Only thing is, he’s not Nostradamus. Just a loser hack.
Nice anti-Semitic dog whistle there…
How so, JC?
The Bedford Incident is possible really now add Chinese sub to mix & update USS Bedford class DD
See movie Twilights Last Gleaming
I saw this movie while in the Air Force, and was surprised at its accuracy.