And there is General Warren Black, a reflective warrior tormented by a recurring nightmare of brutality in which the perpetrator's identity is elusive, who worries about the implications of conflict in the age of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), and is also an old college friend of the president. He is ultimately (and ironically) tasked with an unimaginable responsibility.
Perhaps the most disturbing difference between 1962 -- when Fail-Safe was first published, with the Cuban Missile Crisis fresh on everyone's mind -- and today is that a book like this could be an instant bestseller, with the film version released two years later in competition with Dr. Strangelove. Unlike Dr. Strangelove, Fail-Safe makes a serious and unflinching examination of the insanity of confrontation between two nuclear superpowers, with the psychological, ideological and technological factors that can still converge in Armageddon more easily than many care to realize.
Unlike half a century ago, we are now bombarded with a popular culture that often seeks to normalize torture, never-ending warfare and militarization of society, rather than provide a space for thoughtful reflection or questioning of these phenomena in its story-telling. It is difficult to imagine Hollywood coming out with a film like Fail-Safe today or a show like the original Twilight Zone, tackling similar issues every week in a thoughtful way that didn't rely on gratuitous sex and violence to titillate and attract viewers.
As for the subject matter of Fail-Safe, in reading it today, one can't help but feel this all sounds too eerily familiar to today's renewed tensions between Washington and Moscow and the escalations in Eastern Europe with all they could portend. Both nations still have a ridiculous number of nuclear weapons, with many on hair-trigger alert and fewer lines of communication open as during the original Cold War.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. Many rejoiced when the Cold War ended and hoped for a more cooperative approach to international relations and a peace dividend at home. Indeed it sometimes feels as though the fates of the US and Russia are bound together in a strange never-ending dance of fear, fascination, competition and contempt. Whether that fate is inevitable or is being intentionally driven by ideological madmen, drunk on power and messianic visions, holding the fate of humanity in their hands is a matter I have discussed in other articles.
But, unlike articles, which attempt to marshal facts and logic, story-telling is what tends to move people. Our need and capacity for story-telling is perhaps one of the most essential aspects of being human. A film, book or other work of story-telling art for a contemporary mass audience that can convey, like Fail-Safe, on such a visceral level, what is at stake in terms of the continuing dangers of geo-politics in the nuclear age is desperately needed.
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