THE PRODUCERS OF THIS FILM
WISH TO STRESS THAT IT IS
THE STATED POSITION OF
THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
AND
THE UNITED STATES AIR FORCE
THAT A RIGIDLY ENFORCED
SYSTEM OF SAFEGUARDS AND
CONTROLS INSURE THAT
OCCURRENCES SUCH AS THOSE
DEPICTED IN THIS STORY
CANNOT HAPPEN
Accidents happen. Even the most carefully-constructed machine is capable of failure. The mark of a good system is the ability to account for both the human element and systemic failures. When that system is set up to trigger a nuclear strike in case of certain conditions, you really, really want to make sure you've got all kinds of redundancies just to make sure nobody gets blown up prematurely. They didn't do that in Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe; supposedly, according to the Pentagon, the resulting nightmare is impossible in a real-world scenario.
So they say.
Fail Safe is not as well known as Dr. Strangelove. Despite coming out the same year, having almost the same plot, and getting sued by Stanley Kubrick over it, it's a very different movie, tonally, from the Kubrick film. Whereas Dr. Strangelove was a pitch-black comedy, Fail Safe is serious as a heart attack, a high-tension nightmare scenario in which a computer short sends a bomber flight to Moscow with no way to recall it. The American president (played masterfully by Henry Fonda) gets on the phone with his Soviet counterpart to warn him. Nobody actually wants a war; nobody, that is, except maybe Professor Groeteschele (Walter Matthau), a political advisor with some rather ghoulish (he might prefer the term realistic) views on nuclear war. His surname is the closest the film gets to any sort of satire; he, like the titular Dr. Strangelove, was based heavily on Herman Kahn, a real-life comic book supervillain who wrote a whole book about how to plan, execute and justify nuclear Armageddon.
Sidney Lumet was a visionary in the film world; while Fail Safe flew under the radar, his name is stamped to several films you've probably heard of: 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Murder on the Orient Express, and Network. His directorial style is pretty consistent across his career, and it's quite prominent here: he likes big dramas in little rooms, claustrophobic camera-work, sweating middle-aged men making life-and-death decisions under pressure. Fail Safe predominantly focuses on the president and his interpreter in a little room with a direct line to Moscow, and the inside of a nuclear war room near Omaha, Nebraska, where paranoia and mutiny threaten to dash all attempts to avoid a nuclear holocaust.
Fail Safe is not a fun movie. Dr. Strangelove is a jape; it points to the absurdity of Cold War nuclear calculus and laughs. Fail Safe is a reminder that that absurdity was still more than capable of killing us all. In Dr. Strangelove, a mad Air Force general triggers World War III over fluoridated water; in Fail Safe, the whole thing was an accident; for modern viewers, it may call to mind Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet officer who took a chance that a missile launch warning was a computer glitch. Or how about WarGames, the 1980s classic where a computer nearly kills us all because it can't tell the difference between a computer simulation and the very real nukes it controls. And that makes me think of some of the stuff about "artificial intelligence" that's been in the news lately. If we're lucky, Claude just deletes a crucial corporate database here or there. But if we're profoundly unlucky and stupid — and I have little faith in the decision-making of American leadership — Claude gets the nuclear codes and kills us all while trying to find a recipe for sourdough. Seem far-fetched? I'm no longer sure.
The Pentagon says this movie can't happen in real life. Maybe not; it's a movie about 1960s technology, and 1960s geopolitics. But accidents can and do still happen. Are you prepared?
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