Dr. Strangelove: Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

PETER GEORGE

The right of Peter George to be identified as the

Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance

with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Copyright © Peter George 1963

Copyright © David George 2015

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Candy Jar Books

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Cardiff, CF24 1DJ

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Cover illustration: Terry Cooper

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Peter George

Born: Treorchy 26th March 1924

Died: Hastings 1st June 1966

CONTENTS

RELATING TO PETER GEORGE

DR STRANGELOVE

EPILOGUE

STRANGELOVE'S THEORY

RELATING TO PETER GEORGE

World Cup Final

Saturday 30th July 1966. Wembley Stadium, London.

Here I am sitting in easy pipping distance of Her Majesty the Queen and Prime Minister Harold Wilson. I’m in the best grandstand seats Wembley Stadium has to offer, right behind the Royal Box.

Ted Heath to the rear of me, Joe Grimond to the left of me – Her Majesty’s opposition don’t get in the actual box – important suits and dresses are all around, chattering away. There are some I recognise from newspapers or TV, others are subtly pointed out for me.

But what matters is that I am here with a clear view of the pitch on the day of this historic post-war hangover match. Today England are playing West Germany in what will be the greatest football World Cup final ever.

Wembley is bigger, noisier and more alive than anything I’ve ever seen: the bright sunlit colours and flags – Union Jacks outnumbering those of the English flag of Saint George or those of West Germany. The noise of the massive crowd vibrating the stadium’s structure and atmosphere, deep reverberation that stirs memories of jets firing up and roaring into the air at Coltishall.

From behind me Heath complains at regular intervals, telling me to get my flag out of the way. My parent encourages me to carry on waving it despite him. Admirable, but I need little persuasion. The flag is homemade – half a toy fishing rod and a Union Jack not even the size of a bath towel somehow attached – not exactly large.

Too many round me don’t seem to be paying attention to the game. It’s not just any old match. But they’re not joining in. A bit of chattering and jollity. They cheer some football, maybe even clap once or twice when it becomes obvious they should. The posh bit of the ground doesn’t seem to appreciate flags, children, maybe even football itself. Whereas the rest of the stadium…

I am content to keep my attention on the tension of the game. There’s a murmuring lull in noise as the knackered-looking players rest on the pitch in the short break before extra time. The crowd are soon back cheering and waving as my team – the West Ham trio – finally win the World Cup for England.

At the end of the match, when he finally gets what’s going on, Heath tells me to ‘wave your flag, boy’. Patronising and pompous.

I’m learning. Eight years old.

The parent is my mother, not my dad. My dad couldn’t be there. He’d gone away. But that was fine, he’d be back. He’d been away before. And he always came back, again and again.

Despite the fact he’d died eight weeks earlier.

Names, Titles and Dates

Hard and confusing times. But I was distracted into short-term forgetfulness of my family life’s new reality by that dream ticket to the World Cup final. It was a magic ticket for a West Ham supporting football-mad eight year old. And it wasn’t hard to be with my ever-elegant, bright and supportive mother that day. It just wasn’t my dad as planned.

But now it is time to look at Peter George, the author. You’re probably wondering about his life and writing and, of course, Dr Strangelove.

It seems sensible to begin by addressing Peter George’s sometime use of pseudonyms. So to start, the most accurate name and dates of them all:

Peter Bryan George

26 March 1924 – 1 June 1966

I’ve often been asked why Peter George (PG as I will refer to him from here) used pseudonyms for some of his novels. Simply put, he liked not only to play around with names, on the inside and outside of his books, but also with dates and places.

But by taking a more analytical approach, by categorising his books according to their subject matter, and considering them in relation to when they were published and what sort of detail they contain, PG’s reasoning can perhaps be understood.

Below is a list of his books classified by their subjects.

American Crime:

Come Blonde, Came Murder – Peter George (1952)

Cool Murder – Peter George (1958)

The Final Steal – Peter George (1961)

Cold War Intelligence Agents:

Pattern of Death – Peter George (1954)

Hong Kong Kill – Bryan Peters (1958)

The Big H – Bryan Peters (1961)

Nuclear Fiction:

Two Hours to Doom – Peter Bryant (1958)

Dr Strangelove – Peter George (1963) Commander-1 – Peter George (1965)

As can be seen, there are three books published in 1958 under three different names.

Take Two Hours to Doom – known as Red Alert in the USA, and the basis of the film Dr Strangelove. The book was published in Britain and America in 1958 under the name of Peter Bryant.

At that time PG was serving in the RAF at Pucklechurch, near Bristol, in the west of England. Because of the book’s closely observed details regarding nuclear procedure, and the theme of military fallibility that the plot develops, putting his own name to such a technically and strategically accurate piece of writing at that time would have been ill-advised at best.

The same reasoning applies to Hong Kong Kill, written as Bryan Peters and published in 1958. This is the first of two Tony Brandon intelligence agent books and closely echoes PG’s time in Hong Kong in the mid-fifties. Again the insider knowledge is evident, and certain of PG’s biographical details jump out. So maybe best not to use your real name.

Then there is Cool Murder, by Peter George, published that year as well. It’s one of his American crime novels, a follow on from Come Blonde, Came Murder, featuring Steve Bryant, Private Investigator in Pacific City. No obvious connection to his RAF work from these books, so Peter George it was.

So far, so straightforward. PG used pseudonyms to allow himself to present in his writing details of the secretive worlds in which he worked. OK, but if this is the case, why then does it seem that this was something of an open secret?

It is important to remember that by 1958 PG had already had books published under the name of Peter George. On top of this there is a PG handwritten inscription to an RAF friend and colleague in a 1958 hardback copy of Two Hours to Doom that says:

For Joe—with all good wishes on your birthday. Peter Bryant. (And you know who he is!)

The inscription seems to support the idea of the open secret of the changed name. Peter Bryant is simply his first two names with a ‘t’ added. Not the hardest code to crack.

I’ll leave the sleuths to work out how he got to Bryan Peters.

PG’s main publisher at that time, Boardman of London, were famous for their Bloodhound Mystery series. The three books described above, all first published in 1958, comprised one British Bloodhound Mystery (Hong Kong Kill), one American Bloodhound Mystery (Cool Murder) and one published for the widest possible audience (Two Hours to Doom).

So PG has three books published in 1958, under three different names, by the same publisher. He obviously had a backlog of work to get out that year, built up over and since his time in Hong Kong.

Would the Boardman readership have viewed the release of three different types of book within the same year, by the same writer, as a positive or negative? Would they have preferred their authors to play it safe, sticking to their niches, producing dependable writing with reliable and relevant covers by Denis McLoughlin. Would they have doubted the ability of one author, working so prolifically, to produce quality work over such a range of styles? I’ll let the publishers chew on that. Perhaps the use of pseudonyms allowed PG the licence to engage with a variety of genres and audiences that otherwise would have been unfeasible?

I can add that the 1958 hardback cover of Two Hours to Doom was not by McLoughlin, as is widely thought, but by Blane Ford, as far as I can read it. The dominant red and yellow nuclear explosion with bending fir trees and frozen ground to the fore clearly illustrates the denouement of Two Hours to Doom.

But however you look at it, PG’s reasons for using different names at that time looks sensible. He’s playing his hand of cards, gently bluffing those around him.

As the decade ticked over to the sixties, PG was already a successful writer, out of the RAF and relocating himself and family to Hastings, close enough to London and branches of his wife’s family in Essex.

As such, Dr Strangelove and his final novel, Commander-1, didn’t need any further authorial subterfuge.

If PG had carried on with the Tony Brandon series, perhaps he would have kept the name Bryan Peters in use. I imagine though they would have become Peter George writing as…

But as it was, he was very soon to be starting work on a quite different project. Some more of which later.

As I mentioned above, PG didn’t just enjoy playing with the names on the outside of his books. Reading PG’s work with some inside knowledge can often raise a wry smile.

In Commander-1 (1965) for example, there are characters called Sara, Helen and David – the names of me and my two older sisters. Four-year-old David, and Sara – unborn inside their pregnant mother Myra – are nuked by the end of the first chapter. The Helen character survives until the end of the book, but no further.

A man of wit.

Also in Commander-1, the main character, Geraghty, keeps a journal. His entry for January 4th begins: ‘This should be a happy day for me, because it is my mother’s birthday.’

Which is odd, because January 4th was my mother’s birthday – PG’s wife, Margaret. Analysts can make of that what they like.

They might also want to look further at Geraghty’s Journal – a first-person mad comic-monologue that the second part of Commander–1 is built around. It is easy to hear the droll, dry humour of PG himself in Geraghty’s warped ideas.

While we are on the subject of Commander-1, allow me to clear up a common misconception. As PG wrote the book it had the working title of Nucleus of Survivors, as seen in the first drafts of the manuscript. A mock-up of the book with that title also appears in early promotional photos taken at his American publisher’s office, where it can be seen in the background.

I can safely put to rest any ideas that Nucleus of Survivors was an unfinished or unpublished book by PG. It was Commander-1.

The book was dedicated to Stanley Kubrick, who acknowledged the dedication in a letter to PG dated April 7, 1965:

I am also delighted with the dedication of your new novel.

The Books and the Film

Peter George wrote the book that the film Dr Strangelove was so closely based on: Two Hours to Doom / Red Alert. He then, alongside Stanley Kubrick, wrote the screenplay for Strangelove, adapting the story into a black comedy, and continuing to work alongside the director on into the filming itself.

I will now attempt to put in brief context the transition from Two Hours to Doom / Red Alert to Dr Strangelove. Starting with some quotes:

Thomas C. Schelling:

I genuinely considered George’s book to be enormously valuable… a large number of professionally responsible people shared that evaluation of it.

Schelling, a Harvard professor who had worked on nuclear war policy for the US Defense Department, is also reported as saying he credited Red Alert with making governments more aware of the benefit of direct communication between the superpowers.

Praise due to Peter George, then, for the idea that led to the Hotline that has connected the leaders of the USA to their Soviet and Russian counterparts from 1963 to this day. He made the world that bit safer.

As his work with Stanley Kubrick put PG further into the public eye, he met and remained in contact with people such as Schelling.

However, in a letter to PG dated March 2, 1964, signing himself ‘Tom’, Schelling seemed to have some reservations about the recently released film, although he was yet to see it:

I have heard a number of people assert that your movie can do only harm… From the reviews I’ve read and from all I know of you and Kubrick, I should guess it is not a movie that one can confidently evaluate on the basis of title and cast alone… I shall reserve judgement until I’ve actually seen the film.

Herman Kahn, he of the RAND Corporation, discussed Red Alert in his depressing but influential 1960 book On Thermonuclear War, and was in contact and discussions with my father in the United States for some time after. Kahn is reported as saying:

Almost every American strategist I knew had read George’s book… and most of us handed out copies to people.

During their exchanges Kahn gave PG a copy of his On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios, published by the Hudson Institute in 1965 with the following inscription written in the front:

To Peter, who doesn’t need any plot generators but might still be interested in how others do it. Herman.

Well I’m glad they were still getting on!

But it was Stanley Kubrick (Stan to PG as they went along) who saw the filmic potential nascent in Red Alert / Two Hours to Doom. He is quoted as saying:

It was in 1961 that I was recommended the book [Red Alert]. For some time I had been keen on the theme of a nuclear war being started either by accident or madness and I was told this was just the story I was looking for.

Stanley Kubrick’s initial contact