This is the fifth letter in a reading series on books adapted by Stanley Kubrick, while also reading along with a new biography of the filmmaker by Kolker and Abrams called KUBRICK: An Odyssey. This week’s subject is Peter George’s Two Hours to Doom, which became the source for Dr. Strangelove.
Peter Bryant: Red Alert. New York: RosettaBooks, 2000 [1958].
Given the cast of characters of Red Alert and their counterparts in Dr. Strangelove (and they’re almost identical, except for the bomber crew), if I had to pick the one that most resembled the author, it’d have to be the character Mandrake, played by Peter Sellers in what some say is the best comic performance out of his triple-play in the film.
Like that goofster, Peter George served in the RAF as a navigator. He first published this war thriller as Two Hours to Doom under the pen name Bryant. Not exactly a world of difference, but he was still a commissioned officer when he published it; he didn’t retire to write fiction full time until 1961.
(Come to think of it, there’s a funny subtext to this thriller’s narrative of clear English heads prevailing over red-blooded American folly.)
The American edition of Red Alert was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post. Kubrick and Harris read it in October 1961 and were immediately interested in adapting it. (Around this same time, Kubrick encountered Arthur Schnitzler, whose fiction would be the source for Eyes Wide Shut — this according to Tom Cruise in the biography.)
Two Hours to Doom is a great title as well, since that way the book does what it says on the tin. It really is a two-hour operation, divided into five to fifteen-minute chunks. The chapter headings display the time in Washington, Moscow, and the GMT.
Brown glanced at his watch. Before take-off he had set it to Greenwich Mean Time. When you can travel one way about as fast as the world can rotate the other, time becomes confusing. Greenwich Mean Time, besides being vital for navigational purposes, gave an established central reference point against which you could deduct or add hours to give you local time.
An important aspect of these technothrillers is to give the reader the impression that they are learning something.
The book’s equivalent of Sterling Hayden’s character is Brigadier General Quinten. He pulls on a cigarette here instead of chomping a cigar in the movie. He’s still in compensation mode, but for a terminal illness rather than sexual impotency.
One of his lines made it into the movie untouched, when Quinten admits what he’s done to SAC Headquarters: “They’re on their way in, and I advise you to get the rest of SAC in after them. My boys will give you the best kind of start. And you sure as hell won’t stop them now.”
This madman general has pulled the trigger on ordering his bomber wing to attack Russia — something he’s only authorized to do if the US state had been decapitated. But he is certain that Russia doesn’t have the capability to respond after a first strike.
Quinten had long ago reached the conclusion that the Russian plan was entirely feasible. He considered there was only way to defeat it, and that was to beat the Russians to the punch, and catch them with their guard down. It was his belief that the 843rd Wing on its own could destroy the Russian capacity to wage a global war. It was not a wild belief, but the carefully considered conclusion of a man with a lifetime’s experience of bomber operations.
Everything was on the American side. The Russian defences would not be at immediate readiness. There was no reason for it. Their part in a global war had already been defined for them by the rulers of Russia as immediate readiness to deal with the counter-blow that would follow the Russian attack. They were no doubt highly competent in that role. But the whole theory of Russian military preparedness was predicated on the assumption that the West would not launch a thermo-nuclear war until after massive aggression by themselves. It gave them great advantages as long as the assumption was true.
Over at the Pentagon, we see that the origin of this plan that allows initiative from the generals, Plan R, came out of the security commitment to no first strike. Says SAC Commander Franklin,
“Funnily enough, because we are dedicated to the principle of retaliation rather than original aggression. We accept that we will receive the first blow. Naturally, we hope our defences will be tight enough so that blow doesn’t knock us right out of the ring. But to be completely realistic our plans had to take into account the possibility that first blow might be really devastating. You’ll concede there is that possibility, General?
More key and quotable lines from the film that came from the book: when the existence of the Doomsday Machine is revealed (only to us and some joint chiefs of staff; the President already knew about it), the President describes an ultimate deterrent, an array of H-bombs ready to go off at the moment of an attack, irradiating the northern hemisphere so that “within ten months from now our Earth will be as dead as the Moon,” which in the film is placed in the mouth of Russian Ambassador Alexei de Sadeski.
Also, Quinten/Ripper delivers a line that became memorable in Sterling Hayden’s reading. During a deterrence policy debate with Major Paul Howard (in the film he’s the goofy RAF man played by Sellers), Quinten touches on the shrinking response time with the development of nuclear missiles.
“Understand, I don’t think the margin of superiority will rest with them long. Maybe two or three months while their sites are operational and ours are not. The short period still to run before NORAD can effectively track their missiles coming in and give us time to fire off ours and get SAC off the ground. But that’s what they’ve planned for. Even a two week margin of superiority would be enough. Maybe two hours. That’s why war’s too important to be left to the politicians now.”
So it turns out Kubrick’s film is extremely faithful to the novel’s story beats. What truly surprised your host, however, was how good this Cold War thriller was: genuinely quite thrilling by the end. Since the film was a dark comedy, I ended up assuming a kind of contempt toward the source material on Kubrick’s and Terry Southern’s parts. But the biography confirms that they genuinely admired the source material as far as plotting was concerned.
Kubrick is quoted in Kolker and Abrams saying, “My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on the screenplay. I found that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving out of it things which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny; and these things seemed to be close to the heart of the scenes in question.”
The absurdity of how funny the sensible way to act in a thermonuclear apocalyptic scenario that many in the 60s found to be not only plausible but immanent — that pretty much dives to the heart of the matter. As Franklin reflects,
Somehow it did not make sense to forge a weapon of the finest metal, temper it to an infinite hardness, polish it to a dazzling perfection, only to find that it could not in any case be employed without destroying its wielder as surely as the enemy it struck down. Well, he thought, that was the twentieth century. They had to live with it. Or rather, he amended, to die with it.
They tell aspiring storytellers to write about what scares you, and it was probably inevitable that with all of the war going on in Kubrick’s filmography even now, he would end up confronting the unprecedented destructive power of hydrogen bombs. Kolker and Abrams write:
He was an avid observer of global geopolitics and would have remembered well the news reports of the two nuclear bombs being dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. He came to maturity in the post-war era — he turned nineteen as the Cold War began in 1947 — and was still photographing for Look, which ran a vast number of articles on the atomic age.
His reading included Herman Kahn’s systems theory-based writings on nuclear war. The absurdity of M.A.D. or Mutually-Assured Destruction, along with Kahn’s personal brand of gallows-humor may have left their own influences on Strangelove, as well as pulp science fiction.
The two chapters on Strangelove were admittedly a breeze. I suppose I’m too familiar with this film and its production already.
What I didn’t know was that, in addition to Peter George and Terry Southern, the great comic novelist Joseph Heller had a turn developing the script as well.
Another surprise was how pulpily sci-fi Kubrick’s vision for the film had been at one point. It was going to have a fake production logo (“a MACRO-GALAXY-METEOR PICTURE”) and present itself as an ethnographic documentary about Earthlings for aliens. A lot of this energy of course would be channeled into the next project, 2001. And the finished film still retains that mockumentary vibe, especially with the opening disclaimer and the third person narrator.
Some fun facts I’ve known and cherished are in here: George C. Scott getting tricked into hamming it up; the great War Room set by production designer Ken Adam, who had just come off of Dr. No (1962); and Slim Pickens being cast as the bomber pilot, sauntering into Pinewood Studios in a Stetson hat, making the British crewmembers think he was a method actor.
The director was heavily involved in post-production. “[Anthony] Harvey remembers that the editing suite became a kind of war room on of their own and they worked for three months to get the right rhythm.”
All in all, Peter George’s novel turned out to be a nice read. There are 50s and 60s high Cold War political thrillers that are way more boring than what he writes here. (I’m lookin’ at you, Fletcher Knebel.)