* John Ryle, ‘Zero Grazing’, London Review of Books, 5 November 1992, p. 13.
THE AGE OF THE MACHINE: TECHNOLOGY UNLEASHED
In 1958 American author Peter George wrote a bestselling novel called Red Alert, concerning a mentally unbalanced and paranoid US general called Quinten who launches a nuclear attack on the USSR. Both American and Soviet governments struggle to call off the attack, but then Quinten, the only man who knows the recall codes, kills himself. Eventually all but one of the bombers are recalled, but the destruction of a Soviet city is set to provoke global war. In a desperate attempt to avert such disaster, the US president offers the Soviet premier the opportunity to destroy Atlantic City, as compensation.
It is hardly surprising following the dropping of atomic bombs, and the development of the Cold War with its arms race between the USA and USSR, that the fear of nuclear apocalypse was weighing on people’s minds. It illustrates the clear possibility that humans may well be the cause of our own demise; that we can’t be trusted not to use technology, however destructive it might be.
The success of Red Alert led to various imitators, including one by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler called Fail-Safe (1962), in which a nuclear attack is launched on the Soviet Union when a civilian airliner is misidentified as an enemy plane. The US bombers cannot be recalled and although most are shot down one gets through and is set to destroy Moscow. The US president phones the Russians and promises to destroy New York City with US weapons to balance out the destruction and avert total war.
Both books also inspired film deals: Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, based on Red Alert, and Fail Safe, directed by Sidney Lumet. Strangelove is now an acknowledged classic, while Fail Safe is forgotten. This may have something to do with the fact that, due to various reasons, Strangelove came out in January 1964 to widespread acclaim, while Fail Safe came out eight months later to a lukewarm reception, having missed the hype. But it might also be because it is po-faced and period-specific, while in Strangelove the use of comedy in portraying the world’s end keeps the material fresh, even though the film’s details are just as period-specific as Fail Safe.
In Kubrick’s rewrite of the Red Alert storyline, the insane Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper rants about how communists are polluting his ‘precious bodily fluids’ as justification for his nuclear attack. Peter Sellers plays three roles: the US president Merkin Muffley, an upper-class British air force officer, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, who remains agonisingly polite despite being kidnapped at gunpoint by Ripper, and Dr Strangelove himself. The latter is a creepy ex-Nazi scientist, modelled in part on the real-life rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. The action is divided between the British airbase from which the attack has been launched and which the US are attempting to recapture, and the US war room, from where the president and his advisors are attempting to stave off disaster. Strangelove, confined to a wheelchair, has what appears to be an artificial hand that is prone to making inappropriate Nazi salutes* and even attempts to throttle its owner. He believes that nuclear war might be winnable, with senior US figures hiding in bunkers until the radioactivity diminishes. In order to repopulate the human race, says Strangelove, these survivors will ‘regrettably’ have to abandon ‘the so-called monogamous sexual relationship’. It will be ten women for every man, he insists: ‘a sacrifice required for the future of the human race’.
The darkly hilarious thrust of Kubrick’s satire is that the people attracted to attempt the prevention of the apocalypse are precisely the kind of people who are aroused by its prospect. Sellers was contracted to play a fourth role, the pilot of the one B-52 that is not recalled when the attack is finally called off (on account of its radio being broken), and which drops its bomb. However, he was unable to master the Texas accent required for the role, and the part was played by US actor Slim Pickens instead – Pickens rides his bomb to its target like a rodeo horse, whooping with delight. The film ends with shots of mushroom clouds sprouting all around the world, as Vera Lynn sings ‘We’ll Meet Again’.
The humour certainly works; jokes, after all, emphasise the things that people try to hide away, pointing out the absurdities of our habits and hypocrisies and upending our expectations. And what could be more absurd than nuclear apocalypse; humans unable to stop themselves from bringing about the end of the world? We have good reason to fear what is – perhaps – our natural inclination towards destruction.
Assuming we don’t intentionally use our own technology to destroy ourselves, the machines may come after us on their own. Science fiction is brimming with tales of caution around losing control of our creations, of artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence and deciding we are superfluous. This is nothing new: right back at the beginning of science fiction, Shelley’s Frankenstein is a tale of a man losing control of his creation, with terrible consequences. But in an age of constant technological advances and increasingly sophisticated AI, combined with our reliance on technology and machines for the way we live our lives, these stories express our fears that in our arrogant quest for advancement we may be the architects of our own destruction.
Take The Terminator (directed by James Cameron in 1984), which styles the end of the world as a direct result of human hubris. Humanity has constructed ‘Skynet’, an adaptive and intelligent worldwide neural network that resolves to eliminate all life on earth. Scenes in the movie alternate between a future of colossal destruction, in which gigantic death machines roll across landscapes littered with human skulls beneath a dark and foreboding sky, and present-day scenes, before the
