Fail Safe (PATREON PREVIEW)
Unclear and Present Danger
Jamelle Bouie
4.7 • 660 Ratings
🗓️ 15 March 2024
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this week’s episode of the Patreon we discussed Sidney Lumet’s heady Cold War thriller Fail Safe, based on a novel of the same name by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, published in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Fail Safe stars Henry Fonda, Dan O’Herlihy, Walter Matthau, Frank Overton and Larry Hagman with cinematography by Gerald Hirschfeld.
The story moves between three characters: U.S Air Force General Black who has been having a recurring dream in which a Spanish matador kills a bull before a cheering crowd, Dr. Groeteschele, a hard-line anti-communist and political scientist who believes it is possible to fight a limited nuclear war, and the President of the United States.
When a computer error causes a U.S. bomber group to erroneously receive valid orders for a nuclear strike on Moscow — and Soviet countermeasures jam U.S. radio communications, preventing Strategic Air Command from rescinding the command — General Black, the president, the Pentagon and eventually Soviet command scrambles to prevent a full scale nuclear exchange.
Working together, they manage to stop some of the bombers, but one fateful aircraft makes it through Soviet defenses to release its weapon. Faced with the unimaginable, the president and General Black decide to make a compensatory sacrifice, in the hopes of avoiding war.
The tagline for Fail Safe was “It will have you sitting on the brink of eternity!”
To listen to the whole episode, subscribe to the Patreon at patreon.com/unclearpod.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If used once can destroy an entire city. |
| 0:24.0 | If everyone uses them, would destroy the world, it's impossible to sort of say, like, you know, someone has the authority to use that. |
| 0:29.6 | And we can give that authority to them democratically. |
| 0:32.2 | But second, you know, because... |
| 0:33.6 | The whole authority to use nuclear weapons, I mean, I see it does rest with the president, thus giving the president this like real life or death power over the globe. |
| 0:43.0 | It does sort of, I think, fundamentally transform that office from executor of democratic decisions made by Congress to, you know, what we described as like, like, the imperial |
| 0:56.3 | presidency, like kind of this, the focal point of the U.S. government. And that's where, |
| 1:05.2 | that's where the conclusion of the movie, we're going to nuke New York, that's, that's, that's, |
| 1:09.9 | that's where it's, it's, it's a lot of, but it's interesting to me. |
| 1:12.5 | Because it's like, it's like, okay, in one hand, is that a legal order? |
| 1:16.2 | On the other hand, like, we have given the president this power to use these weapons. |
| 1:25.5 | Like, what are actually the limits to that? |
| 1:28.9 | Are there limits? |
| 1:30.0 | Right. |
| 1:30.5 | I don't know. |
| 1:31.0 | Yeah. |
| 1:31.4 | You're kind of selling me. |
| 1:32.6 | I mean, I think, like, in certain, I'm now seeing what you're saying. |
| 1:38.5 | First of all, I, you know, in terms of this, this idea about the national security state built around the bomb, |
| 1:45.5 | you know, so fundamentally changing the way constitutional rule moves and works in the United States, |
| 1:51.0 | I think is absolutely correct. And Gary Wills wrote a book about that bomb power, the modern |
| 1:58.1 | presidency. I should read that. Yeah, I think you would really dig it. |
... |
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