Fail-Safe

THE ECCO PRESS

Written by Eugene Burdick + Harvey Wheeler

Copyright © 1962 by Eugene Burdick and John Harvey Wheeler, Jr.

All rights reserved



In Fail-Safe, during a routine strategic airborne incident deployment from the Strategic Air Command on an unknown airline, one group of American nuclear strike bombers accidentally gets a "go" code from their Fail-Safe box to complete their mission - to bomb Moscow.

I remember watching the 1964 movie Fail-Safe with Henry Fonda, which was based on the book, in junior high school and how suspenseful the movie was - and the awful executive decision the President was forced to make here at home. The movie was so suspenseful that all the students in my class were interested in the movie, which is hard to do to interest a rowdy junior high class. This was still during the height of the Cold War, so the relevance of the movie particulary hit home with us. I am not sure if it was the politics or the hardware that my class liked. I think the guys were interested in the planes and hardware, like I was. Watching a primitive, when compared to today, computerized tracking system as the high-speed, high-altitude planes head deeper into Russia - and the Russians response - was both cool and terrifying at the same time.

All of the above from the movie is in marked contrast to the book, which has the first half of the book dealing with all the politics. The bombers do not really get the orders to head for Moscow until halfway through the book, which I was a scene that I was waiting for. Reading through all the politics was boring when compared to the suspense of the movie. There was one entire chapter on the background of one character, but the character's background had no real bearing on the story except for the character's academic achievements. When I was reading this chapter, I was going - "Get on with the story!" Even the 2000 live-event TV movie Fail-Safe was more suspenseful than the book, of which I believe is mainly due to the quality of the acting and the compact pacing of telling a story in a two hour time-block. The cover of the book that I had read had a sticker on it, Soon to be a CBS-TV Live Movie Event Starring George Clooney.

You can see how trusting all of our military strength to such fail-safe machines like this, especially with such awesome power of the Strategic Air Command, is a precursor to such things as the Terminator movies - like Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. It is interesting that the term "fail-safe" just really means that if a failure happens, the failure should happen in the safest fashion.

Pancho
All people smile in the same language.