Opinion: Fact & Fiction

The year is 1967. On U.S. air defense screens, an Unidentified Flying Object is spotted near Greenland. Is this a Russian attack? Against that possibility, U.S. bombers speed to various "fail-safe" points. If the Soviet Union has really started war, the bombers will rain nuclear death on Russia; if it is a false alarm, the bombers will turn back. It turns out that the UFO is only a commercial airliner that has gone off course. Most of the Strategic Air Command bombers return to their bases. But wait! One six-bomber squadron is heading past its fail-safe point toward Moscow! Something horrible has gone wrong! A little electronic device in one of the U.S.'s billion-dollar, foolproof, fail-safe machines is on the fritz. Thermonuclear war is about to start by mistake. The President of the U.S. calls Khrushchev on the hot line to Moscow. To convince Khrush that the U.S. intended no aggressive action, he promises to order New York City obliterated, tit for tat. Khrush is agreeable. Moscow goes boom. New York goes boom—and with it the President's lovely wife, who happens to be visiting there. But peace—such as it is—is preserved.

This is the plot of Fail-Safe, a novel that has sold 280,000 copies, stands near the top of all bestseller lists and last week was sold to the movies for a cool $500,000. It was written by two political science professors: the University of California's Eugene Burdick, who also co-authored The Ugly American, and Washington and Lee's Harvey Wheeler. One reason for Fail-Safe's great success is found in the authors' introduction. "There is." they say. "substantial agreement among experts that an accidental war is possible and that its probability increases with the increasing complexity of the man-machine components which make up our defense system . . . This is, unfortunately, a 'true' story. The accident may not occur in the way we describe, but the laws of probability assure us that ultimately it will occur."

By purporting to be knowledgeable, Fail-Safe thus plays on the deepest fears of humanity in the age of the atom; it is deliberately calculated to send distraught mothers to the picket lines with their Ban-the-Bomb signs. There is only one trouble: Fail-Safe is filled with falsities and distortions, and as such is not only a poor book but a cruel one. Among the major conflicts of fact and fiction:

FICTION: In Fail-Safe, when that UFO is sighted on the screens, the U.S. bombers head in squadrons toward their fail-safe rendezvous points, and arrive at those points simultaneously.

FACT: Under the system actually in operation, if SAC bombers ever got as far as their fail-safe points, they would fly singly to separate points and arrive at different times.

FICTION: All the trouble is caused because one of six "fail-safe machines" in SAC's Omaha headquarters has blown a condenser.

FACT : SAC has no such machines.

FICTION : The condenser's failure actuates a red light on a fail-safe "black box" in the errant squadron commander's cockpit. The code numbers that show up in the box jibe with the secret code packets held by pilot and copilot, authenticating the "go" signal.

FACT: There is no such black box.