(Don't) Blame Reagan

1983: The Brink of Apocalypse chronicles the story of what is considered to have nearly become a full-out nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States. It lays the blame for the near-war at the feet of Ronald Reagan, the Strategic Defense Initiative and NATO's operation Able Archer (a war game exercise involving signal squads in West Germany).

The time has long come for contemporary liberals to stop letting the Soviet Union off of the hook for incidents such as the one chronicled in the film.

First off, if the Soviet Union really had enjoyed the kind of advantage described in the film -- it didn't, as the Soviet defense sector quickly proved to be unsustainable -- then the development of the SDI was actually entirely justified.

Soviet fears about a decapitation attack be damned. The United States had -- and still has -- every right to take any means necessary to protect themselves from nuclear weapons.

The nuclear threat once posed by the Soviet Union no longer exists, and so SDI is no longer justified -- which is why George W Bush's decision to resume development of the missile shield was actually unjustified.

Moreover, one should remember that while the United States maintained a policy of first use of nuclear weapons, they did not maintain a policy of first strike. Conversely, the Soviet Union maintained a policy of first strike, if not first use of nuclear weapons.

Moreover, the ancient complaint about Reagan's "evil empire" speech has become entirely passe. 80s-era Soviet officials may be as outraged about the speeches as they like, but they should have long ago been called to account for the oppressive nature of the USSR, and they'd have difficulty convincing anyone from then-Czechoslovakia or Hungary that the Soviet Union's foreign policy was not aggressive.

Moreover, the Soviet gunning down of a Korean airliner (ironically, flight 007) demonstrated a certain recklessness in Soviet defense policy.

It's time for the soft-on-communism portion of the left to stop offering the same old weak excuses for Soviet Communism, and stop casting the figer of blame at Ronald Reagan for cold war near-misses.

Uncovering the Fingerprint of Communism on the British Coalminers' Strike

British coalminers' union accepted communist funds

A dirty secret of the cold war has come to light recently, as a study by Dr Norman LaPorte and Stefan Berger have revealled that Britain's National Union of Mineworkers accepted funds from East Germany in the midst of its 1984-85 coalminer's strike.

The revelation casts further light on a key page of cold war history.

The strike was considered a key ideological confrontation of the cold war. The British coal industry had been nationalized since 1946, when the Labour Party government of Clement Attlee passed the Coal Industry Nationalization Act. Coal mining in Britain would henceforth be managed by the National Coal Board until its privatization by the Thatcher government in 1987.

The strike began when the Thatcher government moved to close coal pits that were unprofitable, and had become a liability to the government. (The Tories had already attempted once to do this in 1981, but abandoned these plans in the face of a strike.)

The government's plan to close 20 pits -- at the cost of 20,000 jobs -- spurned the NUM to begin strike action.

But the Thatcher government was prepared for the strike. The conversion of many British power plants to oil, as well as pre-strike stockpiling of coal, allowed the government to ride the strike out and outlast NUM strikers.

If not for the financial intervention of the communist German Democratic Republic, one wonders how long the NUM could have held out.

The ferrying of these funds to NUM was seemingly an international affair.

"The documents talk about the possibility of using a 'go-between' from the French communist union CGT [General Confederation of Labour] who would deliver the money straight from Eastern Europe to representatives of the NUM," Berger explains. "They also allege that the East German FDGB union {Free German Trade Union Federation) helped the miners by providing free holidays for the families and children of British miners in the German Democratic Republic."

"The FDGB, the documents say, also co-ordinated the shipping of food parcels, clothing and so on to British miners," Berger continues.

The East German communists saw the coalminers' strike as a choice opportunity in the ideological struggle between communism and capitalism.

"The communists perceived the NUM as an ally in the international class struggle against capitalism - hence the close interest in the strike," Berger added.

Nor was the coalminers' strike the only time NUM associated with east European communists.

"Relations between the NUM and east European communism had been good since the 1960s," Berger explains. "It was among the first major trade union federations to call for the recognition of the GDR."

"However it was by no means the only union with a cosy relationship with East European communism," Berger continues. "By the late 1970s, 24 of 44 members of the general council of the Trades Union Congress represented unions which had 'fraternal relations' with East European communist unions."

"It was, above all, the anti-capitalism of left-of-centre British trade unionists which made them believe that East European communism was on the right path," Berger concludes. "The British Left ignored massive human rights abuses and the lack of basic freedoms behind the Iron Curtain because they believed that the basic development in the direction of socialism was right."

It was this same willful ignorance of the atrocities of communism that had turned George Orwell -- who helped popularize coalminers as a left-wing political cause celibre with The Road to Wigan Pier -- away from his admiration for socialism and led to the clear anti-communist attitude expressed in Animal Farm.

(Orwell, it could be said, may have been history's first neo-conservative.)

The revelations regarding the 1984-85 coalminers' strike could, in time, lead to deeper investigation of the 1974 coalminers' strike, in which NUM managed to bring down the Conservative government of sir Edward Heath.

With intrepid historians such as Stefan Berger and Dr Norman LaPorte exploring these issues, one can only wonder how many more such episodes could be revealled.

Wolverines!!!

For many people in the late '90s, watching Red Dawn on the TBS Superstation (back when there was a TBS Superstation) became something of a Saturday afternoon tradition.

It seemed like it was on every other Saturday.



Produced at the tail end of the Cold War, Red Dawn is a film about what was probably the more likely scenario of conflict. While the notion of nuclear war kept people around the world awake many a night -- and for good reason, as the United States and the Soviet Union alone had enough nuclear weapons to extinguish all life on Earth, before one even gets around to considering Britain, France, China and (eventually) Israel -- the more likely scenario was that of a ground invasion of one country or the other.



Red Dawn is despised by the left-wing for its hyperbolic treatment of the Cold War. There is some grounds for this. The film was released in 1984, and portrayed the ground invasion of the United States by the Soviet Union as a horrific affair in which Soviet soldiers open fire on a school with no amount of provocation.

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev would take over as General Secretary of the USSR. His reforms of Glasnost and Perestroika would, in the end, spell the end of the Soviet Union.



Far from being in any condition to launch a ground invasion of the United States, the Soviet Union was at this time actually deeply embroiled in their disastrous invasion of Afghanistan, attempting to prop up the Najibullah regime.



Many conservatives love Red Dawn even knowing how unlikely the scenario portrayed in the film actually was. Many love it for its camp value alone.

Some others may love it simply because the left dis likes it so much. While this alone doesn't justify an appreciation of anything (it would, in fact, be ad hominem reasoning -- assuming something is good just because the political opposition dislikes it), it does remind one of the fickleness of the left wing.



In particular, one is reminded of the left's simmering hatred for neoconservatives, and their insistence on treating them as a grave threat.

But then, one must ask themselves: what is neoconservatism, really?



Unless one were to read some of the literature on the topic produced by conservatives -- those nearest to this particular sub-category -- one may never know what neoconservatism actually is. The left tends to label small government conservatives neoconservatives. Yet, when one reads what actual small government conservatives have to say about neoconservatives, it becomes clear that small government conservatives may love neoconservatives even less than the political left.



As it turns out, the original neoconservatives -- those with whom the movement originated -- were, in fact anti-communist liberals who reocognized the oppressiveness that was so commonplace in communist countries, and were disgusted with what they perceived as the political left's softness on communism.

In response, they shifted right and joined the conservative movement. Small government conservatives became -- and remain -- wary of the big government conservatism offered by neoconservatives. Fairly recently, Michael Tanner referred to it as "leviathan on the right" (in the book of the same title).



Individuals like Adam Curtis have argued that, after the dissolution of the USSR, neoconservatives turned their focus on international terrorism out of need for another external enemy to focus their project of global dominance.

The truth is actually very different. Having once belonged to a movement that proved soft on one particular threat, they became determined to never be soft on another. And while neoconservatives recognized the threat of international terrorism, some of those who came to power by assembling an electoral coalition between small market conservatives, neoconservatives and religious conservatives -- speaking, of course, of George W Bush -- didn't recognize the danger until it was too late, even despite being amply warned.



The left's deep hatred for neoconservatives seems easily explained in one of two ways: either the left is ignorant about the true nature of neoconservatism, or they are well aware of it, and simply resent neoconservatives for recognizing at least elements of the left that were soft on communist tyranny.

Perhaps some of those on the left who seem to despise neoconservatives most -- Murray Dobbin comes to mind -- merely despise them so much because they remind them of the extent to which some elements of the instutionalized left were actually rather sympathetic to communism, perhaps even hoping that foreign communism could help them advance at least portions of their own agenda.



Ruminations on neoconservatism aside, what makes this particular version of Red Dawn so priceless is that it treats the film with the seriousness it deserves, particularly when Russian, Cuban, and Nicaraguan soldiers happen to be speaking over subtitles.

Lines such as "homey don't PLAY this shit" and "we got some haters up in here now" make this version of the film worth watching the first time, but also for the second, third, or (possibly) thirty-third time.

Cold War Mentalities Demand Weapons That Can be Watched

As tends to be the trend more than ever, the Watchmen director's cut incorporates additional footage into the film.

While the bulk of the new scenes actually deal with the character of Rorschach, the additional scenes also expand greatly on the character of Dr Manhattan, and shed interesting light on his relationship with the Comedian.

The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Dr Manhattan (Billy Crudup) form something of an odd couple in the Watchmen. The Comedian is nihilistic and sociopathic, while Manhattan seems largely indifferent to the plight of humanity. In their own way, each is fundamentally disconnected from their central humanity.

The two are shown together fighting in Vietnam, a conflict won in the alternate timeline of the film because of Manhattan's involvement. Yet it quickly becomes apparent that Manhattan has no idea why he's exploding Viet Cong guerillas so effortlessly. He could just as easily be exploding Muslim mujahideen on behalf of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, the Comedian is skullduggery embodied. In the film's opening credits he's even depicted assassinating John F Kennedy.

While Dr Manhattan clearly represents the sheer mass intimidation of the nuclear deterrent, the Comedian represents the activities of the world's intelligence services, spy agencies, and covert "black ops" forces.

In time, Dr Manhattan becomes a figure greater than the United States' entire nuclear arsenal, and in time greater than the United States itself. Meanwhile, the Comedian slips into obscurity, his exploits the subject of state secrets.

Dr Manhattan, in the eyes of the US government, is a weapon too overwhelming to be kept secret, and controlling him is considered to be of paramount importance. The government even attempts to force Laurie Jupiter, aka the Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) to devote hersef to keeping him satisfied and compliant with the government's wishes.

The far-less-powerful Comedian, meanwhile, is effectively discarded after use, and slips into the kind of obscurity that powerful states reserve for their ugliest secrets.

This has become the state of affairs in the post-Cold War world: with the exception the ongoing tensions between India and Pakistan, nuclear weapons are being sought not as a means of protecting themselves against an imminent threat, but as a means of keeping one's enemies in line.

Iran, for example, is seeking nuclear weapons not as a means of defending itself against an imminent threat -- as the United States' and Israel's primary antagonisms with Iran revolve around the country's nuclear weapons program -- but rather as a means of intimidating the world into giving in to its demands.

With an individual like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad holding the Presidency of Iran, Iran is as likely to use nuclear weapons to intimidate the world's smaller states than they are to reserve them as a defensive weapon against the US or Israel.

Just like the fictional United States of The Watchmen, they won't keep those weapons secret. It's what they do in the dark -- often to their own people -- that they'll keep secret.

This Day in Canadian History

September 17, 1974 - Puck drops for Summit Series II

When Canada defeated the Soviet Union in the 1972 Summit Series, some notable Canadian players were missing from the lineup.

Team Canada 1972 was iced without Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull. Both were playing in the fledgling World Hockey Association. WHA players had been refused the opportunity to participate in the series.

Following the success of the '72 Series, WHA founder "Wild" Bill Hunter went to work on organizing a WHA version of the series. According to his autobiography, the '72 Series was originally his idea, but he was unable to organize the event until 1974.

In the meantime Alan Eagleson took the idea -- stole it, by Hunter's account -- and organized the '72 Series. Hunter would view Eagleson's refusal -- to the extent of denying Bobby Hull the opportunity to participate despite having been named to the team by Harry Sinden -- as a slap in the face not only to himself, but to his league.

By 1974, '72 series veterans Frank Mahovolich, Paul Henderson, and Pat Stapleton had also joined WHA teams -- Henderson and Mahovolich played with the Toronto Toros, and Stapleton represented Chicago Cougars.

The '72 edition of Team Canada was also the only version to unite Gordie Howe with his sons, Marty and Mark.

The series began inauspiciously for Canada, as they split their home games with the Soviets. They won a single game, lost one, and tied two.

The Soviets had proven to be less gracious guests than they were in 1972, as they raised a litany of complaints about their treatment at the hands of the Canadians -- including insisting their bus had "square wheels".

Upon returning to the Soviet Union the Soviets further ratcheted the psychological tactics against their Canadian opponents. Late-night phone calls were answered only to hear the sound of silence on the other end.

A game in Moscow nearly led to an international incident, as Bobby Hull signed autographs for Russian children. When a Soviet guard struck one of the children with the stock of his rifle, Hull lifted the guard off the ground by the neck. Only the soothing of Bill Hunter was able to stop Hull from harming the guard.

The Canadians also fell victim to extremely partisan officiating by the Soviet officials, as the Soviet Union won three of the games in Russia, winning the series decisively 4-1-3.

As far as a propaganda tool went, the Russians must have been disappointed with their win over a team scraped together from a few NHL stars, a group of seasoned WHA pros, and a collection of players who otherwise would be plying their trade in minor leagues.

In 1972, the Soviets had lost to a team that was not even Canada's best. In 1974, they defeated a team that was even further short of Canada's best.

The series, however, had greater implications than merely its potential to be used as propaganda. After their defeat at the hands of the Soviet Union, the WHA decided to embrace the European brand of hockey.

European players who would play in the WHA included Peter Stastny, Anders Hedberg and Ulf Nilsson. A European-styled player by the name of Wayne Gretzky would suit up for the Indianapolis Pacers and Edmonton Oilers of the WHA.

When the Oilers, Winnipeg Jets, and Quebec Nordiques of the WHA were absorbed into the NHL they revolutionized the stubborn, linear NHL style of play.

In the pages of hockey history, the 1974 Series may not stand as the touchstone the '72 triumph has become, but it was certainly more influential over the development of Canada's game, even if it would be fortunate play second fiddle in the hearts of Canadians.

History Repeated, History Repeating?

Gary Kasparov defeats Karpov -- can he defeat Putin?

For reasons that often seen entirely obvious, the world of professional Chess doesn't attract the same devotion that other sports do.

There are no raucus chants like in soccer, no big hits or long-bomb passes like in football, and no swift transition game like in hockey.

The failure of the United States to develop a competitive chess program was a concern for many Americans during the Cold War. With the world's two nuclear superpowers glaring standoffishly across the North Pole at one another a great deal of rhetorical primacy rested on the World Chess Championship.

Whichever country possessed the championship within its grasp held a key propaganda point. After all, when the world is continually sitting on the brink of nuclear annhiliation the idea that either country possessed the world's best strategic and tactical minds could help give the population of either country the notion -- however hollow -- that they could win a nuclear exchange with their rivals.

The Soviet Union held the advantage in this particular category hands-down. The only American to win the World Chess Championship was Bobby Fischer, who defeated Boris Spassky for the championship in 1972.

He would disappoint his country by refusing to defend his championship, and eventually emerged as a very public conspiracy theorist and anti-Semite.

But the Soviet Union would have a disappointing World Chess Champion of its own: Gary Kasparov.

Anatoly Karpov had won the tournament that decided the challenger to the championship, but won the title by forfeit after Fischer and the International Chess Federation couldn't agree on the rules for the match. Karpov (who didn't actually expect to defeat Fischer in 1975) would hold onto the title until 1985, when Kasparov defeated him.

The first Kasparov-Karpov encounter ran an astounding 48 games, and was called over without result with Karpov leading 5-3 in a match in which the first player to win six games would be victorious.

A rematch was scheduled for 1985. It would be a best of 24. There would be no draws this time (there were an incredible 50 draws in their 1984 encounter), as Kasparov claimed the championship with a 13-11 win.

The two faced each other in a contractually-stipulated rematch in 1986 (Kasparov won narrlowly, 12.5 to 11.5) and again in 1986 (this time they drew, 12-12).

The most ingriguing encounter between Kasparov and Karpov was the fifth confrontation, in 1990. History marks this as a time of great change within the USSR, and nowhere did the conflicts raging within the Soviet Union seem as apparent as in the World Championship match.

Karpov was widely known as a favourite of the Communist party elite. Like many Soviet competitors who were elevated to top-level competition, Karpov showed all the appropriate loyalties to the Communist regime.

Kasparov was an entirely different matter. While he had once been a member of the Communist party, he left it in 1990 and was involved in organizing the Democratic Party of Russia, even as he defended the World Championship against Karpov. It was widely known that Kasparov distrusted and opposed Mikhail Gorbachev.

For a World Chess Champion representing (on paper at least) the Soviet Union -- Kasparov had, in 1990, requested to represent Russia under its pre-Soviet flag -- to so resoundingly oppose the Communist regime was dispiriting to many Communist party members. It earned Kasparov many enemies in the Soviet Union.

Then again, Kasparov was accustomed to having enemies. His contemporaries in professional Chess were known to widely fear and dislike Kasparov. Often, they would cheer when he lost, even in minor tournaments.

Although Boris Yeltsin would eventually disappoint Kasparov, the World Chess Champion's opposition to Gorbachev was seen as a factor in his political downfall.

More recently, Kasparov has been involved in organizing broader opposition to Russian Prime Minister (some say shadow President, despite recent dissent by Dmitri Medvedev). Most recently Kasparov has been a key figure in the organizing of Solidarnost, the opposition's alternative to Putin's United Russia party.

In 1990, Gary Kasparov became a key figure in the eventual downfall of Mikhail Gorbachev, the end of Communism in the Soviet Union, and the eventual dissolution of the regime.

Nearly 20 years later, Gary Kasparov has played a high-profile chess match against Anatoly Karpov once again. As in 1990, he's also organizing against an entrenched political regime.

In Kasparov's defeat of Karpov, history has repeated. As the world looks ahead to what lies in the future for Russia, many can only wonder: can Gary Kasparov finally help engineer the defeat of Vladimir Putin and bring a second round of democratic reform to Russia?

Only time will tell.


From the archives:

May 23, 2009 - "Fighting the Cold War Over a Chess Board"

Fighting the Cold War Over a Chessboard

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the western bloc countries never tested each other in a shooting war. They did, however, often contest their differences over sporting events.

One of those was the Bobby Fischer vs Boris Spassky world chess championship match played in 1972 -- the same year that Canada confronted the Soviet Union in the famed Summit Series.



In the Soviet Union, the Bolshevik party embraced chess as a matter of public policy.

As with most forms of competition -- athletic, intellectual or otherwise -- the Soviet Union sought to mobilize dominance at chess for maximum propaganda value. But chess had particular appeal.

With its overwhelming focus on strategy and not-so-subtle overtones of militarism, dominance at a game like chess could offer comfort to any members of the Soviet populace who worried about open warfare between the USA and the USSR.

Likewise, Americans who were worried about a military conflict between the USA and USSR -- and who wouldn't have been, considering that such a conflict would inevitably involve nuclear weapons -- must have been very distressed by Soviet dominance of the sport of chess. At one point, the Americans had only one Grand Master. The Soviets had numerous, a benefit of their Chess school.

Canadians were distressed by Soviet dominance of hockey during the 1960s and 1970s, but Canadians didn't have to worry about having to directly play nuclear hockey with the Soviets from across the globe.



It was against this fearful cold war backdrop that Bobby Fischer, considered to be the great American hope, failed to show up at the appointed time for his world championship match. Of all things, Fischer was repeatedly holding out for more money.

Fischer was anything but patriotic in his motives. He remarked that he intended to play a chess match against a lesser opponent every month. Instead, his handlers wanted a system for the fair selection of contenders for the world chess championship.



After significant political wranglings -- not surprising considering the environment surrounding sport at the time -- the match finally got underway.

Once the match began, Fischer very nearly quit. He lost the first game, then forfeit the second. But eventually personal pride prompted him to continue the matches under better conditions -- he insisted that television cameras were too loud, and had been distracting him.



Fischer would game three, and go on to dominate the match. The Soviets would claim that Fischer was using some sort of mind control device against Spassky -- an ironic claim considering that it was the Soviets themselves who were experimenting with techniques such as remote viewing.

Eventually, Spassky was so overwhelmed he had little choice but to concede defeat.

But Fischer would refuse to defend his championship. By 1975, Fischer was forced to forfeit the world championship to Anatoli Karpov, Spassky's Kremlin-chosen successor. Spassky would eventually be exiled from the country.

Defeat was something that Soviet sporting officials never tolerated. Just as the American Olympic hockey victory over the Soviets at the 1980 Lake Placid games led to the political disfavour of phenomenal Soviet goalie Vladimir Tretiak, and the Soviet loss in the 1988 Canada Cup eventually led to the Soviet Union turning its best players loose for the professional game, Spassky's defeat prompted an effective exile to Paris.

Just as the days when Canadian hockey players grinded out international ideological conflicts against their Soviet counterparts will likely never return, nor will chess ever see another contest as ideologically contested as the 72 Spassky-Fischer match.

A Dr Strangelove For All Times

Stanley Kubrick laughs in the face of nuclear war

For nearly 50 years after the conclusion of World War II, the world lived in fear of nuclear holocaust.

It was at the very height of this fear -- in 1964 -- that Stanley Kubrick produced Dr Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

In this classic film, Kubrick made the case that the terrors inspired by nuclear weapons were minor compared to the fear that should have been inspired by the human frailty, stupidity and greed of those in control of the world's nuclear arsenals.

The film begins auspiciously, as orders to attack the Soviet Union are issued to American bombers circling at their advance staging points.

When told to issue attack orders Captain Lionel Mandrake (played by the incomparable Peter Sellers) is immediately skeptical. When he's told orders to go to condition red are not an exercise, he seems perplexed by the very idea. Later in the film he insists that the orders simply must be an exercise.

His suspicions that General Ripper (Sterling Hayden) isn't on the level eventually lead him to confront him. When he deduces that Ripper is acting under his own prerogative Mandrake insists on calling the bombers back under his own authority.

Ripper has prevented this, but Mandrake displays what may -- in its own way -- be the only sane response to the prospect of nuclear war. Disbelief is the only sane response to the prospect of initiating nuclear warfare with its inevitable promise of mutual annhiliation.

There's certainly something both unsettling and contradictory about the notion of "nuclear combat", as expressed by Major TJ "King" Kong (Slim Pickens).

Nuclear war promised little resembling combat, instead merely offering a mutual exchange of overwhelming firepower.

In the situation room at the Pentagon, General "Buck" Turgidson (George C Scott) seems to buckle under the weight of the stupidity inherent in the system's design. In an effort to take human judgement out of the realm of decision making in regards to nuclear war the chiefs of staff have left themselves entirely unable to recall the bombers. Having sacrificed command in control ironically in the name of command and control, they've rendered themselves almost entirely impotent in the face of impending disaster.

The idea that a pair of doomsday weapons could actually be less destabilizing than common human frailty and stupidity is an unsettling (if amusing) idea, but that is precisely the idea Kubrick puts forth with Dr Strangelove.

When confronted over the United States' own doomsday device by Soviet Ambassador Alexi de Sadesky (Peter Bull), President Muffley seems to legitimately believe there is no such device. Hilariously, Sadesky says his source was the New York Times.

Then again, after the long and arduous ordeal that was the George W Bush Presidency, it seems far less than implausible that a newspaper would know more about that's going on in the United States than the President.

More humourously yet, the Soviet doomsday weapon is designed to detonate not if anyone activates it, but if someone attempts to deactivate it. The idea seems rather simple -- that, left unimpeded, doomsday devices would provide a stabilizing influence over nuclear affairs. In fact, the attempts to contravene nuclear holocaust lead instead to an increasing threat level.

As Freeman Dyson has noted, efforts to contravene nuclear holocaust through projects such as the Strategic Defense Initiative had not the stabilizing influence its designers would have hoped, but rather a destabilizing influence -- leaving Soviet leaders with few viable alternatives other than to build enough missiles to overwhelm SDI in order to eliminate the possibility of a retaliation-proof American attack.

(It's important to remember that American nuclear doctrine allowed for first use of nuclear weapons, while Soviet doctrine did not.)

SDI clearly wasn't a doomsday weapon. However, like a doomsday machine, SDI reveals the shortcomings of the notion of deterrence. Deterrence, as described by Dr Strangelove (Sellers again) is the production of fear in the minds of the enemy -- making them too afraid of retaliation to even dare a first strike.

Making the enemy too fearful only spurs them to create new weapons in order to reestablish a balance of power -- or even to re-tip the balance of power in their favour.

In the end, this kind of fear leads to a state of affairs in which annhiliation is nearly inevitable.

The same vein of thinking applied to the construction of nuclear arsenals can also be applied to the post-war environment, just as Dr Strangelove does when he dreams up a plan in which survivors of a nuclear war would take refuge in mineshafts, under conditions in which women would drastically outnumber men, and be encouraged to breed vigorously.

In the end, President Muffey and his administration simply allow the weapon to detonate, revealing another factor that led to a destabilization of the global nuclear order -- the belief that one could establish a favourable post-holocaust order, even one beneficial to oneself.

In Dr Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick reminds us that the only thing more terrifying than nuclear weapons are the people who were given control of them.

A Dr Strangelove For Our Times

Warning: the following post contains significant spoilers about the film The Watchmen. Those still interested in seeing this film should consider themselves forewarned.


Threat of nuclear holocaust looms over Watchmen

As time passes since the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons have drifted further and further from the human imagination.

Since the prospect of nuclear holocaust has become a thing of the past the perceived relevance of nuclear weapons to international affairs has diminished.

The recent release of The Watchmen -- originally written by Alan Moore during the Cold War -- may inspire the reemergence of nuclear weapons back into the human imagination.

The ticking of the doomsday clock hangs heavily over The Watchmen. Woven immaculately in with the film's plot against the hunt for a hero killer is a plot about an alternate history Cold War in which the fate of the world hangs over jockeying between the United States and the Soviet Union over Afghanistan.

In this history, Richard Nixon has been elected President for three consecutive terms -- despite the unconstitutionality of the proposition -- the United States won the war in Vietnam, and Dr Manhattan (Billy Crudup) keeps a protective vigil over the world, wielding powers that conceivably allow him to avert a nuclear war.

Dr Manhattan essentially represents the ultimate Doomsday weapon. Throughout the film, he is credited with preventing the Soviet Union from carrying out the full extent of its ambitions for fear of the United States launching a nuclear reprisal with near impunity.

To emulate the language used in Dr Strangelove -- and reiterated by Freeman Dyson in Weapons and Hope -- Dr Manhattan presents both a doomsday gap and a superhuman gap which the Soviet Union cannot fill. The United States even uses him to win the Vietnam war -- many of the Viet Cong insist on surrendering to him personally, believing him to be a god.

This sentiment is echoed by a nuclear scientist in the film who insists that "...'God exists and he's American'."

However, he takes that sentiment to a logical conclusion when he adds, "If that statement starts to chill you after a couple of moments' consideration, then don't be alarmed. A feeling of intense and crushing religious terror at the concept indicates only that you are still sane."

In many ways, the existence of an interventionist God could -- and maybe even should -- terrify even the most faithful religious believer. The notion of God as a citizen or even partisan of any particular country should be considered even more terrifying.

The film presents Dr Manhattan as humanity's only hope -- the one thing that prevents the two most powerful forces on the planet from unleashing nuclear armageddon upon the planet. Dr Manhattan replaces the doctrine of MAD -- Mutually Assured Destruction -- with a doctrine of Unilaterally Assured Protection.

Yet the principle of Unilaterally Assured Protection does nothing to avert nuclear proliferation. If anything, UAP encourages further proliferation. As a fictional version of Eleanor Clift notes at the start of the film the idea that Dr Manhattan will prevent nuclear holocaust provides both Cold War beligerents with the motivation to make an open-ended commitment to nuclear proliferation.

The United States can do so secure in the notion that, if a nuclear war were to occur, they could expect Dr Manhattan to protect them first. The Soviet Union can be expected to do so out of fear -- hoping that they can build enough bombs to overwhelm Manhattan and the United States in a preemptive strike and destroy the entire American nuclear arsenal before it can be launched in retaliation.

(Although it's imporant to note that the nuclear doctrine of each country -- Soviet doctrine allowing for first strike but not first use of nuclear weapons and American doctrine allowing for first use of nuclear weapons but not first strike -- could have been expected to prevent such an outcome, provided they do not change.)

Even under Manhattan's protection, as Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode) notes, there are no guarantees. Even if Dr Manhattan stops 99% of the bombs, the remaining 1% would still kill every living thing on Earth.

It's worth noting that Dr Manhattan's promise of Unilaterally Assured Protection renders him akin to the Strategic Defense Initative -- the United States' proposed anti-nuclear missile shield. Freeman Dyson noted that techologies such as SDI led to three possible futures: an arms control future, a technical follies future, and a "live and let live" future.

In the real world, American commitment to the SDI led to enhanced tensions between the United States and Soviet Union that led to renewed commitment to anti-proliferation and arms reduction treaties.

In Watchmen, however, Dr Manhattan -- the god-like missile shield in human form -- upsets the delicate balance of power maintained in the real-world Cold War. Yet what emerges isn't an arms control future, a technical follies future (the extent of Dr Manhattan's power renders him immune to technical folly) nor a "live and let live" future.

Instead, Dr Manhattan's existence leads to a desperate future in which each side measures their ability to sneak enough atom bombs through the protective shield to annhiliate the other side.

The existence of the ultimate deterrent -- Unilaterally Assured Protection -- does nothing to reduce tensions.

But protection which is unilaterally assured can also be unilaterally withdrawn. Resultingly, humanity would be faced by a continuing need to ensure that Dr Manhattan continues to care about humanity. But there is no guarantee that anything that powerful would continue to care. It most certainly wouldn't need to.

When Dr Manhattan and Silk Spectre (Malin Ackerman) split up, Manhattan retreats to Mars where he indulges himself in the watch building exploits of his past.

With his last human link to the world severed, Dr Manhattan seems to feel no more motivation to protect the world. The protection he once unilaterally assured is now unilaterally withdrawn.

In the absence of the ultimate deterrent, the Soviet Union makes their move on Afghanistan. In response Nixon sets a two-day deadline for Dr Manhattan's return -- something considered akin to setting a deadline for God's intervention -- after which Nixon will give the order to launch a nuclear barrage of the Soviet Union.

In the end, Adrian Veidt seems to conclude that the only way out of the dilemma is to convince both sides to become united in their terror of Dr Manhattan -- something akin to uniting rival believers in terror of God. Oddly enough, Dr Manhattan reaches agreement with him. One could only wonder if an interventionist God would be so generous.