In Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, you can repeatedly see billboards on the premises of the Air Base from which Ripper launched his attack on Russia. The slogan on these billboards says, “Peace is our profession.” This is very ironic in the context of the film, but then again, given 1950s cold war rhetorics, it doesn’t seem to be too far-fetched to me. Has this ever been a slogan used by the U.S. Air Force? This website claims it is the official motto of the Strategic Air Command, and also mentions details about the genesis of the slogan, but given that it’s one of these “fun trivia” sites, it doesn’t look very trustworthy to me. Does anyone have the Straight Dope?
That is SAC’s motto, not the Air Force as a whole’s.
From Wiki:
Under LeMay’s command, SAC became the cornerstone of American national strategic policy during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. This policy was based primarily on nuclear deterrence. In 1962, there were 282,723 USAF personnel assigned to SAC (217,650 airmen, 28,531 civilians and 38,542 officers). SAC’s motto became “Peace is Our Profession,” symbolizing the intention to maintain peace through the threat of overwhelming force.
The slogan isn’t the only thing in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb that was drawn straight from reality. Many of the strategic concepts, including the use of a failsafe deterrent as described by “Plan R” and the “Doomsday Device” were drawn essentially from the writings and lectures of Herman Kahn, a RAND Corporation and Hudson Institute theoriest on nuclear strategy. Kahn is also alleged to be one of the inspirations for the titular character, though in appearance and manner the two could hardly be different; Kahn was an obese, jovial, approachable man who loved to talk, and was once described (by Time Magazine, IIRC) as the only nuclear strategist who could have a moonlighting career as a stand-up comic. The most direct influence on the character was probably Edward Teller and the photographer Weegee.
General Buck Turgidson, on the other hand, is a transparent stand-in for General Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay, who was at least as outrageous as anything depecited by George C. Scott. Some of Turgidson’s lines–specifically the, “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed…but I do say no more than ten to twenty million tops. Depending on the breaks, of course,”–were essentially the same in content and manner as statements made by LeMay. LeMay also used to speak of efficacy in terms of thousands or millions of deaths per bomb load; if you notice, Scott is carrying around a binder with the title “Megadeaths in Megatons” (which can be clearly seen at the bottom of the screen when he is fuming over being told off by President Muffley).
Anyway, “Peace Is Our Profession” was indeed an official motto. Hey, it might be a little ironic but it isn’t nearly as stupid as “I am an Army of One.” Who the frack let that one out of semantic purgatory?
Stranger
[nitpick]The binder is titled “World Targets In Megadeaths”. But you get the idea…[/nitpick]
I was also under the impression that Strangelove was based on von Braun.
FWIW,
Rob
Von Braun wasn’t really a vocal hawk like Teller was, was he?
Von Braun was an engineer not a political advisor like Strangelove. The only inspiration that may have come from Von Braun (or Reinhard Gehlen) was Strangelove’s Nazi past.
Who was Col. “Bat” Guano/shit based upon?
He strikes me as a take on the generic “More enthusiasm than intelligence” career military man.
Here’s a page that details who Strangelove might have been based off of. Kissinger is mentioned:
But Kahn is the favorite:
I stand corrected.
Hardly. He worked for the Nazi regime during WWII only reluctantly, and was at one point arrested for expressing discouragement about the progress of the war and the wish to work on space launchers. (There was also an element of political infighting among the Waffen-SS and the Luftwaffe which contributed to this.) Domberger and Speer got Von Braun provisionally released, and he continued work on the A-4 and derivatives of it through the end of the war and his personal surrender to the U.S. Army. After that, Von Braun and most of the engineering crew still at the Mittelwerk came over to the United States with most of the intact V2/A-4 hardware and tooling under Operation Paperclip.
In the U.S. Von Braun and crew worked for a while on Project Hermes, essentially refurbishing, instrumenting, and sometimes modifying recovered A-4 rockets for testing; however, the funding of the project was low level as military interest in ballistic missiles was marginal. (It was thought that the payload capacity and accuracy of such missiles would be too poor to make them of use over strategic ranges, and the cost and reliability of operating a mobile system in the field would be prohibitive–all good arguments at the time.) After that, Von Braun worked on the Redstone and Jupiter-C rockets (which became medium range ballistic missiles and satellite launchers) but wrote and dreamed of manned space exploration, drafting elaborate technical plants for space habitation and journeys to the Moon, Mars, Venus, and Jupiter. After the successful launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, the United States had a renewed interest in both ballistic missiles and space launch boosters. In 1960 Von Braun transfered over to the nascent National Aeronautics and Space Administration with the sine qua non that the focal program of NASA would be the development of the Saturn rocket system with the goal of putting men on the Moon and then Mars. Von Braun’s formal involvement with ballistic missile systems ended at that point, although his involvement with Atlas, Titan, and Vanguard development was not much more than oversight anyway, and he had no involvement with the solid fuel Minuteman or Polaris rockets.
Stranger
While Kahn/Teller/Kissenger/Von Braun seems distinctly tangential to the OP’s rather specific question …
Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi has a rather provocative take on Kahn’s relation to Dr. Strangelove in her recommendable recent The Worlds of Hermann Kahn (Harvard, 2005). Exploring the stand-up comic comparison in detail, she looks at the satirical aspects of Kahn’s writing and, more importantly, his famous presentations. And notes that when Kahn and Kubrick met during the latter’s research, they seem to have hit it off. She thus suggests that, yes, Kahn was a major inspiration for the film. But as the fellow satirist who agreed that the only possible response to the situation was humour, rather than as the intended subject of the satire. Not entirely convincing, though I’d agree that Kahn probably found the film just as hilarious as anyone else, nor - more unusually - saw any reason to rethink his views as a result.
Ultimately, I suspect that the periennial search for “the real” Dr. Strangelove is bound to be frustrating. Kahn is obviously part of the mix in some way. Kubrick did say that, while Sellars wasn’t doing an impersonation of him, the idea of the thick foreign accent came from Teller. It’s known that Kubrick was reading Kissenger as (a no doubt typically small) part of his research. And the Peter George novel explicitly mentions the detail that he worked on V2s during the war, thereby implicating Von Braun.
No, surely part of the film’s greatness is that Strangelove - or Turgidson, or anyone else - can’t be reduced to a specific characature, yet still works as an identifiable type.
Hey, this is a rather fun game!
President Muffley obviously was based on Adlai Stevenson.
I’d guess that Gen. Jack D. Ripper was based on Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker.
(And Maj. Kong is obviously Slim Pickins. 
)
To clarify, Kahn did not advocate the use of a “Doomsday Device” as a viable strategy; it was rather an illustration of what he felt was the obviously absurd extension of the policy of (Mutually) Assured Destruction, of which he was not an adherent. Kahn felt that the business of building up a massive arsenal in the hope of deterring your opponent from attacking (and resulting in the opponent responding by achieving an arms parity) was an unstable strategy, essentially a mutual suicide pact; so the message of Kubrick’s film–that the strategy responding to an escalating conflict by increasing the arms to bear to an absurd level–is entirely in accordance with Kahn’s position on the matter, and quite in line with his brand of apocalyptic black humor. Where Kahn goes wacky and offends people is where he suggests that a nuclear exchange could be survivable (albeit at great economic and personal cost) and that planning for a nuclear exchange should not assume deterrence as an effective strategy by default (with failure resulting in catastrophic destruction of all parties) but instead should take into account survivability and recovery, in effect, accepting the reality that such weapons might actually be used in a military context rather than as a purely political negotiating chip. Kahn’s position and Kubrick’s film argues that if you have nuclear weapons, you have to consider that they might actually be used, beyond the control of any single person or group of people who would otherwise agree that it is irrational and immoral (hence, the Doomsday Device that "works automatically) whether that use is rational in the holistic context or not. Assuming that deterrence works (or doesn’t) by default removes volition from the equation.
Well, the film does reduce to archetypes–the gung-ho military leader, the fanatical and unhinged general whose personality disorders slips through the crack, the homily-mouthing pilot dedicated to his pointless (and in this case, accidentally catastropic) mission, the executive depowered (shown as demasculinated) by events and persons beyond his control, the paranoid conflict over meaningless information (the Big Board), and of course, in the eponymous character, the strawman parody of the ultimate realist who takes strategic thinking to extremes without consideration for the implications on real people. The film characterizes the abstractions of nuclear strategy, and the characters come off as being completely absurd simply by stating in dialogue many of the exact concepts found in nuclear strategy. Most of the humor comes from the context, i.e. giving the characters bizarre, sexually-referential names and having them advance the extreme but plausible ramifications of a failure of strategic policy as a matter of course.
It is a great film and a surprisingly perceptive study of nuclear strategy in the guise of satire. I bet Kahn loved the film.
Stranger