[net.sf-lovers] Dr. Strangelove and "The Doomsday Machine"

SASW%MIT-MC@sri-unix.UUCP (07/02/83)

From:  Steven A. Swernofsky <SASW @ MIT-MC>

    From: Newman.ES at PARC-MAXC.ARPA
         Actually, the "Doomsday Machine" portrayed in this movie was a
    quite serious proposal made by Herman Kahn of the RAND Corporation in
    the early 1960's.  The title character is a parody of Kahn, and the
    movie satirizes, among many other things, the type of "thinking about
    the unthinkable" made infamous by Kahn and other RANDites.

I was told instead that the title character was a parody of Kubrick's
government professor at Harvard.  Guess who that is?  (Hint -- he later
became a key adviser to a Republican President.)

-- Steve