Dr. Strangelove or Why We Should Stop Worrying and Let God Handle Things

Another school paper article.

Once for an Honors final I was asked if I thought the American Governmental system was doomed to go the same way as the Roman one. I said that, while the American system is fundamentally stronger, ‘humans always find a way to screw things up.’
That, in a nutshell, is the thesis of Stanley Kubrick’s classic satire, Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. One of the greatest of comedies, it has for its subject matter the distinctly unfunny subject of nuclear holocaust. The film tells of an insane air-force commander who manages to launch an all-out attack on the Soviet Union and the scrambling of the U.S. Government to stop him. The funny part is that the skill and professionalism of the pilots and the safeguards against a nuclear disaster are the exact things that make it so difficult to recall the bombers heading to Russia…where a new Russian ‘Doomsday Machine’ is all set to go off and end life on Earth if they drop their bombs.
The thing that sets this film apart from almost every other military/political satire ever made is that it is largely populated with intelligent, professional individuals…and it is because they are so intelligent and professional that they are in the mess they’re in. For example, when the President finds out they have no hope of figuring out the recall code to abort the mission he takes the logical step of helping the Soviets shoot the planes down. This works fine…except one of the planes is only damaged. The leaves it without a radio and forces it to divert from the expected targets where the Soviets have concentrated their defenses. Thus ensuring it will drop its payload.
This whole ridiculous situation calls to mind a passage in ‘The Screwtape Letters’ where Screwtape laughs at men’s tendency to try to plan for every contingency and panic when these fail. It’s the same situation; the world has set up all these elaborate safeguards to prevent ‘the worst coming to the worst,’ but, of course, it’s impossible to foresee every contingency, and it just takes a “small slip-up” to allow the worst to come to the worst.
How many times do we try to control our lives like this? We try to foresee and prepare for every possible contingency, trusting our own cleverness to see us through. The only trouble is, no matter how clever we are, we can’t foresee everything…or even most things. All it takes is someone responding in an unexpected way, or not paying attention, or going insane over the fluoride in his water to render all our elaborate planning moot. Then, most of the time, we try to recover by making even more elaborate plans, which tend to create an entirely new problem.
But that is not the end of the story. Dr. Strangelove ends with mankind’s elaborate safety measures resulting in the apocalypse, but even then the film seems confident that man will weasel his way out of this mess and into another one. Despite ending in a nuclear holocaust the film is not gloomy about our future and neither should we be. Generally things are not the end of the world, and even if they are, we usually can muddle through. We simply need to take things as they come and trust in God…and the purity of our bodily fluids.