Command-control systems, which integrate massively distributed and largely independent data collection and processing systems with a more traditional military chain of command, were a new development when Dr. Strangelove was made. Throughout the film, Kubrick whipsaws back and forth between hyper-realistic exploration of these command-control systems and pratfalling ridicule of the people who designed them. At times it’s difficult to find the line between reality and satire. To my knowledge, the RAND corporation (lampooned as “BLAND”) never published a study called “World Targets in Megadeaths,” while the Strategic Air Command motto really was “Peace is Our Profession,” despite its primary responsibility for the deadliest weapons in the history of the world. The tension between sanitized euphemism (“Peace”) and unfeeling analysis of explicit horror (“Megadeaths”) is both the sharpest critique in the film and its best representation of the era. When the federal government pivoted from total war in the 1940s to massive investment in Cold War research and development, technocrats in the US strove to rationalize and “systematize” everything from military administration to universities and municipal governments. Choices became simultaneously more evidence-based as funding poured into new disciplines like systems engineering and increasingly disconnected from reality as the people generating the evidence were compartmentalized into ever more labyrinthine organizations.
Multiple studies of the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, the United States’s command and control system for missile defense between the 1950s and the 1980s, have shown that Kubrick’s film is arguably more accurate than a documentary using public information could have been at the time. Rather than producing the kind of perfectly functioning technocratic decision machines (the stuff of administrators’ imagination), we now know that these systems are managerial behemoths as much as they are technological ones. Large technical systems do not become less dependent on human agents as they become more complex. Instead, human operators and maintenance workers become much more critical and more tightly integrated into the system as the demand for telecommunications, computing, and data collection infrastructure grows. Cutting-edge technologies like automatic radar tracking systems render more commonplace systems invisible but not irrelevant; it becomes easier to imagine a world in which commanders rule combat operations from a bunker in Virginia than a world in which they cannot rely on their telephones or toilets. It takes a farce like Dr. Strangelove to point out how fragile these systems of control really are.