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Example research essay topic: Nuclear Arms Race World War Ii - 1,876 words

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Dr. Strangelove vs. WWII The truth is bad enough - but nowhere near as bad as you probably think. The truth will do away with a lot of silly ideas, a lot of completely wrong notions, which millions of people now believe about the atomic bomb. These ideas could easily cause great panic. And right now the possibility of panic is one of the best weapons any enemy could use against us. " (Gerstell, How to Survive an Atomic Bomb, p. 1) The World War II has taken lives of millions of people.

It produced a great effect on humanity. Thousands of books have been written, hundreds of movies have been filmed. Some of these movies were true-to-life, some were documentaries and some were just for entertainment. Stanley Kubrick made a movie which combined all these features it is true-to-life, almost documentary and still entertaining black comedy.

The movie Dr. Strangelove or How I Stopped Worrying and Love a Bomb laughs at something which has not been laughed at before the nuclear, atomic hydrogen bomb and the threat of total destruction. However, how much truth is depicted in this movie? Can we believe everything we see in this movie? What is historical accuracy and what is just Kubrick's imagination? How far from the real events is this movie?

In order to answer all these questions, we are going to analyze Stanley Kubrick's movie Dr. Strangelove or How I Stopped Worrying and Love a Bomb. In the third decade of the Cold War, less than two years after the United States population had been scared half-way to death by Cube invaded, the nation's movie theatres showed the country the end of the world. Touted by critics then and now as the film of the decade, Dr. Strangelove savagely mocked the President, the entire military defense establishment, and the rhetoric of the Cold War. To a nation that was living through the stress of the nuclear arms race and had faced the real prospect of nuclear war, the satiric treatment of the nation's leaders was a release from deep fears and tensions.

Its detractors argued that the film was juvenile, offensive, and inaccurate. Viewed, however, in its context of the Cold War and nuclear proliferation, Dr. Strangelove represents to the United States a purging of Cold War rhetoric and anxiety and the beginning of the wave of political and cultural dissent that would climax in the late 1960 s. Dr.

Strangelove opened in January 1964, denouncing the nuclear arms race and its players only a few months after American President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev signed a treaty banning the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. More importantly, these same two leaders had been on the verge of taking their countries to war only two years before in a showdown over Cuba, so the American people were well aware of how it felt to be on the edge of nuclear disaster. In October 1962 President Kennedy threatened Soviet Premier Khrushchev with war if Soviet missile bases on Cuba were not dismantled and shipments of arms bound for the island were not aborted. The country waited for one tense week for the nuclear bombing to begin - but it never happened.

Khrushchev blinked and prevented the end of civilization (Hoberman 18 - 20). Dr. Strangelove did not. Rather, Dr. Strangelove created a nightmarish scenario of atomic annihilation in which the mad Strategic Air Force (SAC) general Jack D. Ripper seals off his base and orders his bombers to attack their Russian targets.

He acts under the provisions of "Plan R, " a contingency plan that authorizes lower-level military officers to launch a nuclear strike in the event that the President is unable to do so himself. The men who must deal with this rogue general and his threat to civilization are satirically portrayed: the head of Joint-Chiefs-of-Staff, General Buck Turgid son, is a gum-chewing, childishly aggressive lover of military might; Dr. Strangelove, the brains of the American weapons program, is an ex-Nazi scientist whose right hand alternates between trying to choke its owner and snapping out in a fascist salute. Higher up in power, the President seems sadly overwhelmed by events and comes across as an effeminate ineffectual ist while his Soviet counterpart, Premier Kiss, is a drunken womanizer. In the end none of them can prevent a lone American bomber from penetrating Russian defense and dropping its load to trigger the Soviet Doomsday Device, which releases enough radiation over the world to make it uninhabitable for ninety-nine years. From the end of World War II until the 1960 s, national sentiment vigorously supported both the government's animosity toward Soviet Russia and its accompanying military nuclear development program.

Joyce Nelson argues in The Perfect Machine that the American government followed a strategy of censorship and compartmentalization of knowledge to manipulate the media and the public in the late 1940 s and 1950 s into accepting this policy of anti-communism and nuclear arms stockpiling, which was used to maintain the war economy that the U. S. had enjoyed during World War II. From the earliest stages of its development, secrecy veiled the nuclear bomb.

Nelson explains that the U. S. Manhattan Project was hidden from the public, and its goal of producing a nuclear weapon was hidden even from most of the project's thousands of employees. When the bomb was dropped on Japan, information about its effects on human beings was censored by the U.

S. government, which concentrated its publicity campaign on the bomb as a "technological spectacle" Television emerged at the same time as the bomb and, Nelson argues, helped to direct attention away from fears about nuclear radiation to the threat of communism by transmitting the communist witch-hunts of the House Committee of Un-American Activities. Moreover, companies such as General Electric, Westinghouse, and Du Pont had defense contracts with the government while they also provided major sponsorship for television. They "were just a few of the corporations likely to gain from a political climate that was simultaneously hunting down the major enemy in communism and building up 'the sunny side of the atom'" (37). Television, Nelson explains, broadcast live nuclear test explosions to dispel fears about radiation and display the awesome power which the U.

S. had at its command (34 - 35). Thus, government control of knowledge and television's portrayals of communism and the bomb aroused support for the funding of the military's nuclear program. However, let us find out what is truth and what is fiction in Kubricks movie.

Time Magazine's cover story on their August 10, 1992 issue talked about newly released data of the US Military's "Doomsday Plan, " developed in the 1950 s in the event of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. It seems that last-case scenario plans dealing with nuclear war were not only designed: several times, the White House came dangerously close to giving the "go" to activate them. The Soviets had a similar plan, of course. In the movie, the nuclear survival plan made sure to include the top military and political leaders of the country - after all, they certainly didn't want to suffer the consequences of their own mistake. In real life, a huge "Underground Pentagon" was built to shelter the members of Congress and the top military leaders of the armed forces too. In Dr.

Strangelove, the disaster comes through implementation of an insane idea called "Plan R. " Well, it turned out that the real-life Underground Pentagon was called "Site R!" In the movie, the generals talk about running the country even though the world is coming to an end. In real life, every federal agency was given a plan on how to survive even after a nuclear attack. In the movie, there was the Big Board that monitored the entire country and the Soviet Union too. In real life, there was the Bomb Alarm board, dotted with hundreds of lights that would flash on to indicate the sites of nuclear explosions. However, the most interesting and mysterious character in the movie is Dr. Strangelove himself.

There are several major guesses as to who provided the basis for Strangelove. The favorite seems to be Henry Kissinger, a former Harvard professor who served as Secretary of State for Presidents Nixon and Ford. At the time of Strangelove's production, Kissinger was at Harvard, and had written at least two books on nuclear war by 1960. The case for Kissinger: he's German by birth, and the accent is very similar, which seems to be the main reason for linking Kissinger with Strangelove.

The case against Kissinger: frankly, he was far too obscure a figure to be "parodied. " One would want to parody a widely-known personage, and at the time, Kissinger was one of many theorists of the unthinkable. The second favorite is clearly Werner von Braun, the former Nazi rocket scientist who quickly turned his services (and those of his underlings) to the U. S. after the war.

In the Cold War, von Braun's expertise in rocketry was more important to the U. S. than prosecuting him for administrating slave labor at Peenemunde and Nordhausen. The case for Von Braun: he was famous. He was German. He had been a faithful Nazi.

He promoted a self-image of coldly rational theor ization of pragmatic scientific realities, intemperate by such human issues as compassion, morals, or values. The case against Von Braun: very little, apart from the fact that he wasn't a nuclear scientist, nor a theorist of nuclear deterrence. The best case can be made that Herman Kahn was the best source for Strangelove. Kahn was one of the earliest employees at the RAND Corporation, which had been set by by Gen.

Indeed, his book On Thermonuclear War (1960), reviewed it as "a moral tract on mass murder; how to plan it, how to commit it, how to get away with it, how to justify it. " Finally, is there any message in Kubrick's movie? Dr. Strangelove, then, effectively addressed the rational and irrational fears of the American public concerning the hydrogen bomb and marked the beginning of the anti-military movement of the 1960 s. It was a milestone. It promised a beginning to large-scale consideration of the folly of American and Soviet nuclear policy. Kubrick, dipping into the reservoir of icons and rhetoric of the Cold War, exorcised the demons of nuclear culture from the nation's collective unconscious and encouraged dissent.

Just as the right hand of Dr. Strangelove had the capacity to salute a totalitarian regime or to bring sexual release to its owner, the United States of the mid- 1960 s was caught between right-wing militarism and the emerging generation of pacifists, whose slogan of "Make love, not war" would make the decade a turning point in American culture. Works Cited Gerstell, Richard. How to Survive and Atomic Bomb. Washington D. C. : Combat Forces Press, 1950.

Gup, Ted, The Doomsday Blueprints, Time, 10 August 1992: 32 - 39. Hoberman, J. "When Dr. No met Dr. Strangelove. " Sight and Sound Dec. 1993: 16 - 21.

Joyce Nelson, The Perfect Machine: Television and the Bomb. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1992. Kahn, H. , On Thermonuclear War, Free Press, New York, 1960


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Research essay sample on Nuclear Arms Race World War Ii

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