Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was True by Eric Schlosser. (New Yorker, January 17, 2014)
From the post:
This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy about nuclear weapons, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” Released on January 29, 1964, the film caused a good deal of controversy. Its plot suggested that a mentally deranged American general could order a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, without consulting the President. One reviewer described the film as “dangerous … an evil thing about an evil thing.” Another compared it to Soviet propaganda. Although “Strangelove” was clearly a farce, with the comedian Peter Sellers playing three roles, it was criticized for being implausible. An expert at the Institute for Strategic Studies called the events in the film “impossible on a dozen counts.” A former Deputy Secretary of Defense dismissed the idea that someone could authorize the use of a nuclear weapon without the President’s approval: “Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.” (See a compendium of clips from the film.) When “Fail-Safe”—a Hollywood thriller with a similar plot, directed by Sidney Lumet—opened, later that year, it was criticized in much the same way. “The incidents in ‘Fail-Safe’ are deliberate lies!” General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, said. “Nothing like that could happen.” The first casualty of every war is the truth—and the Cold War was no exception to that dictum. Half a century after Kubrick’s mad general, Jack D. Ripper, launched a nuclear strike on the Soviets to defend the purity of “our precious bodily fluids” from Communist subversion, we now know that American officers did indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own. And despite the introduction of rigorous safeguards in the years since then, the risk of an accidental or unauthorized nuclear detonation hasn’t been completely eliminated.
…
Grim reading for good password advocates when they learn that all the Minuteman launch sites shared a common launch code: 00000000.
The type of command and control issues discussed for nuclear weapons are the same issues that should be debated now for government surveillance. Which aren’t being debated I should say because of the curtain of secrecy that surrounds government surveillance operations.
A curtain of secrecy that has the same justifications, “we are defending the public interest,” “there is an implacable foe at the ramparts,” etc.
The question you have to ask for many government offices and agencies isn’t are they lying but why?
The government of my youth lied, the government for every year thereafter has lied.
On what basis should I trust the government to not be lying today and in the future?
PS: How do you draft privacy controls with a known liar as the enforcing party?