This is a film-studies/cultural-history concept centered on the 1964 film Fail Safe as an artifact of Cold War political cinema, examining how dramatic narrative encodes the theory of accidental nuclear war and technological determinism. The core abstract idea is that autonomous fail-safe command-and-control systems, once triggered by mechanical error, can propagate an irreversible catastrophe beyond human intent, dramatizing the tension between deterrence doctrine and human agency. It belongs to the broader discipline of media studies as applied to the rhetoric of the nuclear age, situating the work against contemporaneous phenomena such as McCarthyism, the blacklist, deterrence theory, and its satirical counterpart Dr. Strangelove.
This is a film-studies/cultural-history concept centered on the 1964 film Fail Safe as an artifact of Cold War political cinema, examining how dramatic narrative encodes the theory of accidental nucl…