It's no surprise, then, that when the film was released, both The Chron and The Times claimed that Kahn was the prototype for Strangelove. But the Spectator dismissed the idea: “If Dr. Strangelove is the type of inhuman technician completely indifferent to the consequences of exploiting his discoveries, Dr. Not only is Kahn not the prototype of Dr. Strangelove. He is almost the exact opposite of him. The difference, in short, is that Dr. Strangelove crazy and Dr. Kahn is healthy. Certainly Kahn's gregarious energy had nothing to do with the cold intensity of Strangelove. “How could my son Dr. Strangelove?” protested Kahn's own father in 1968. “He's so warm and considerate.”
In fact, Kahn was definitely the basis for nuclear strategist Dr. Groeteschele in Fail Safe, Sidney Lumet's much more serious 1964 film about a nuclear attack triggered by a computer error. But the media only cared about Strangelove. “Kubrick is a friend of mine,” Kahn told Newsweek. “He told me that Dr. Strangelove wasn't supposed to be me.” But three years later he changed his story and claimed that the character was actually a mixture of Kissinger, Von Braun and himself. Unlike Teller, he did not feel offended by the gossip. It increased his fame and income.
As for the other candidates, Peter Goodchild writes, the Strangelove connection “was a stigma…reinforcing their ties to the nuclear nightmare.” Despite the subtitle of his biography, Goodchild argues that Strangelove is “clearly a composite” rather than a caricature of an individual. In fact, the hunt for the “real” Strangelove blurs Kubrick’s satirical point of view.
While researching the film, Kubrick was shocked at how the experts' professional pride “seemed to completely overcome any personal involvement in the potential destruction of their world.” Strangelove is the demonic embodiment of a way of thinking about war – highly intelligent yet bloodlessly abstracted from the reality of human suffering – that infected many scientists, strategists and politicians during the Cold War and has not gone away. He is not a man but an attitude, and attitudes are immortal.
Dorian Lynskey is the author of Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (April 2024).
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