Prescient artists

Colonel Turgidson (reading):
"...My boys will give you the best kind of start, fourteen hundred megatons worth, and you sure as hell won't stop them now. So let's get going. There's no other choice. God willing, we will prevail in peace and freedom from fear and in true health through the purity and essence of our natural fluids. God bless you all." Then he hung up. We're still trying to figure out the meaning of that last phrase, sir.

Muffley:
There's nothing to figure out, General Turgidson. This man is obviously a psychotic.

Turgidson:
Well, I'd like to hold off judgment on a thing like that, sir, until all the facts are in.

The above is one of many brilliant snatches of dialogue from Stanley Kubrick's black humor masterpiece, "Dr. Strangelove." Till the very end, Kubrick indulges our hope the world can be saved from nuclear annihilation. The foolproof safety features of mutually assured destruction, however, are undone by one crazy commanding officer in the state of Washington, who is motivated to start World War III by a single incident of sexual impotence, which he attributes to a Commie plot to poison the water supply with flouride. He games the system, initiating "Plan R," which permits a lower echelon officer to give the go-code on nuclear retaliation. It looks hopeless until Captain Mandrake, the British adjutant to the mad General Jack Ripper, deciphers the recall code and the B-52s are turned back. Except for one, piloted by the dedicated and extremely competent Major Kong, who gets through and delivers his fatal payload. The world ends to the strains of "We'll Meet Again."

"Dr. Strangelove" was set in the most frigid period of the Cold War. The plot devices are simple, in a way; General Ripper's scheme is based upon a thorough understanding of Air Force procedures. He figures out a loophole, Plan R, that will allow him to seize the initiative from the civilians who have neither "the time, nor the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought."

The peculiar dynamics of the USA-USSR standoff do not exist in their original form today. The nuclear threat, however, is more dangerous than ever because the variables have been multiplied, and unlike the clash of secular ideologies involved in the old Cold War, the conflicts today are fueled by the inherent irrationality of religious zealotry. When I heard George Bush liken the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to a new "crusade," I thought we had entered a new phase of world history that would make the mad logic of Dr. Strangelove look simple by comparison. Like General Ripper's explanation for ending the world, George Bush's rationale for invading Iraq, at bottom, is that it was "the right thing to do." When he has been pressed in the few lengthy interviews he has ever given on the subject, that is where he returns. He isn't going to explain it because he doesn't think he needs to. He becomes agitated and impatient with anyone who could think otherwise. He shares General Ripper's complacent self-satisfaction. With just the right arrangement of power, we're always at the mercy of such people.

Thus, we have stirred up regional instability and antagonism in the most unstable and antagonistic region in the world today. Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and is willing to share, and has shared, nuclear technology with countries such as Iran and North Korea. Iran is embarked on a program to enrich uranium to 97% U-235 with "thousands of centrifuges" (or so its demented, Holocaust-denying leader claims). Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Egypt want the bomb. Israel is armed to the teeth with hundreds of atom bombs and probably thermonuclear bombs. Israel has the missiles, land- and submarine-based, to deliver them to Damascus, Cairo, Riyadh and Tehran. Also to Natanz, where Iran is enriching uranium. Iran wants to enrich uranium to a weapons-grade isotope because U-235, unlike plutonium, can be used to build "gun-type" A-bombs, the Little Man model used on Hiroshima. It's the simplest design, far less complicated than the Fat Man implosion device dropped on Nagasaki. Little Boy was so reliable it was never tested before deployment.

By invading Iraq, Bush both empowered and atagonized Iran. He encouraged Iran to become bellicose and to accelerate its "self-defensive" nuclear program, just as Bush did with North Korea. One of the great ironies is that to the extent the invasion of Iraq was designed to protect Israel, to "pacify" the region by democratizing it, the invasion has had more the effect of swatting a hornets' nest with a Louisville Slugger.

I think ultimately Israel will "pacify" the region along lines General Ripper would have approved. But let us not forget that General Ripper's scheme was finally undone because of an X-factor he knew nothing about: the Soviet Doomsday Machine, which kicked into retaliation automatically, and inexorably, upon the American attack. And Bush's strategy was undone by the simpler fact that he had no idea what the hell he was doing.