THE PORKCHOP INDETERMINACY AND ROCKET SCIENCE

In “The Porkchop Indeterminacy,” Season 1, Episode 15, Sheldon is humiliated by being called a rocket scientist.

“We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.”

—Wernher von Braun, press statement after surrendering to US Forces (May 1945)

“If our intention had been merely to bring back a handful of soil and rocks from the lunar gravel pit and then forget the whole thing, we would certainly be history’s biggest fools. But that is not our intention now—it never will be. What we are seeking in tomorrow’s trip is indeed that key to our future on earth. We are expanding the mind of man. We are extending this God-given brain and these God-given hands to their outermost limits and in so doing all mankind will benefit. All mankind will reap the harvest. . . . What we will have attained when Neil Armstrong steps down upon the moon is a completely new step in the evolution of man.”

—Wernher von Braun, banquet speech on the eve of the Apollo 11 launch (July 1969)

What Lurks behind Sheldon’s Snobbery?

When Sheldon’s attractive sister Missy comes to town in “The Porkchop Indeterminacy,” Sheldon is mortified that she describes him as a rocket scientist. Most people would be rather pleased at such an assumed job title, of course, but Sheldon’s reaction is typical of the response many theoretical physicists would give.

Through many periods in the past, science was separated from technique. Traditionally, what we now call science was meant to be based on solving technical challenges, or easing administrative tasks. But the Greek “scientists” whom Sheldon most admires, we assume, were very theory based, and very much removed from practice and technique. The mathematics and astronomy valued so highly by Sheldon and the Greeks is based on deduction and proof. And the immense prestige of these disciplines rests on scholarly thought, with little concern for the grunt work of observation. For academic snobs such as Sheldon and most ancient Greek aristocratic scholars, hand-workers such as modern rocket scientists are considered inferior to brain-workers or contemplative thinkers. This social class division was greatly reinforced by the association of hand-work with slavery, particularly in Greek society. Free men may choose to practice technique, of course, such as fashioning mere rockets out of constituent parts, but they would be nonetheless degraded by comparison with slaves, and their work described as base or servile. Yet perhaps Sheldon’s revulsion at rocket scientists also has a more modern political dynamic. And maybe Sheldon’s disquiet has the same root as the incredible story about rocket science that led to one of the greatest American movies of the twentieth century.

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t the only destructive marvels of practical science developed during the Second World War. In the days and weeks after the surrender of Germany, US troops scoured the blasted European landscape in search of hidden treasure: caches of secretly developed weaponry. They came across aspects of the Nazi war machine that even the top military brass were shocked to see, such as the fact that Hitler was working on a bubonic plague weapon, for Nazi scientists worked on an “impressive” arsenal of other projects, from disease and nerve agents to the dreaded yet coveted V-1 and V-2 rockets. So, when the war came to a close in 1945, the United States decided they needed such weapons for themselves and warmly welcomed many Nazi scientists onto Uncle Sam’s payroll, rather than that of Adolf Hitler.

The secret program to bring in more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians after the end of World War II was known as Operation Paperclip. The program belonged to the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) and was largely carried out by Special Agents of Army CIC. The program ran primarily between 1945 and 1959, taking many Germans into US government employment. Many were former members, and some former leaders, of the Nazi Party.

Naturally, the top ranks of the military did what they could to whitewash the pasts of the so-called “prisoners of peace,” a name chosen by the Nazis themselves. And yet, many had serious problems with skeletons in their closets. Take Wernher von Braun, for example. Old Wernher was not only the brains behind the V-2 rocket program, he also had an intimate knowledge of the atrocities happening in the Nazi concentration camps and personally hand-picked people from places such as the Buchenwald concentration camp, whom he then worked to the bone in the push to build his rockets.

Operation Paperclip was top secret at the time. Hardly surprising, as the devices developed and designed by the program’s recruits terrified and killed many thousands of people throughout Europe, and their government was responsible for many millions of deaths on the battlefield and in the concentration camps. Indeed, the Daily Telegraph reported in 2010 that a 600-page report, written in 2006, detailed how the US Justice Department has tried ever since to keep secret what it calls Washington’s “collaboration with persecutors.” Agents from the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations (OSI) found that war criminals were knowingly granted entry to the US, even though government officials were aware of their pasts.

The Operation certainly left a questionable legacy, and yet many of those men brought to the US under the program, who were supportive and responsible for the horrors experienced by victims of the Holocaust, were also undoubtedly instrumental in American scientific advancements, such as the Apollo program. But how did this shocking story about Nazi rocket science lead to one of the great US movies of the twentieth century?

Dr. Strangelove

After the Russians had launched the first-ever space satellite in Sputnik, Cold War tensions hit their peak. Amid heated debates on the allegedly widening “missile gap” between the US and the Soviet Union came the Cuban Missile Crisis. For a couple of weeks in October 1962, the two superpowers stood on the brink of war. The rest of the world looked on, horrified and helpless. It was the most dangerous fortnight in human history. With both sides stunned in the aftermath of the crisis, Kennedy initiated the hotline communication that still sits between Washington and Moscow. Mutually assured destruction was a wake-up call for the world. And yet, not for everyone, it seems.

A renegade band of physicists went looking for a quick nuclear fix. The sensible consensus that a nuclear war was inherently unwinnable was illogical to these scientists-turned-strategists. With the cold logic associated with Nazis, the physicists estimated how many lives the US could lose, yet still rebuild. RAND Corporation theorist Herman Kahn was one of those who argued “the unthinkable,” a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. To Kahn, it was all play. The strategic academic method for his madness was known as game theory. Kahn’s plan rested upon two highly contentious ideas. First, that nuclear war was likely. Second, that like any other war, it was winnable.

The fragile nature of the Cold War conflict and the doctrine of mutual assured destruction were ripe for satire. In 1964, such satire was raised to an art form by Stanley Kubrick’s dark comic masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove (subtitled or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb). The world premiere was scheduled for late 1963 but delayed until January 1964 in light of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The Cuban Missile Crisis was still fresh in the public psyche, but it was the movie’s undoubted brilliance that led to its huge impact.

Dr. Strangelove won four Academy Award nominations, including best picture, director, and screenplay for Kubrick, and best actor for Peter Sellers. Famous American film critic Roger Ebert suggested that Strangelove remains the best political satire of the century. The film was listed at number twenty-six on the American Film Institute’s 100 Years, 100 Movies and at number three on the AFI’s 100 Years, 100 Laughs. After all, what could be more absurd than the very idea of two megapowers willing to wipe out all human life on the planet?

Kubrick had waged cinematic war once before. His 1957 humanitarian classic, Paths of Glory, was an antiwar movie. Staged on the Great War battlefields of France, it featured clashes between rulers and the ruled. Kubrick was now rapt by the notion of nuclear blunder. He felt personally vulnerable.

His motivation was the 1958 Cold War thriller Red Alert by Welsh author Peter George. The book was a grim warning. Its caveat was the absurd ease with which nuclear apocalypse may be accidentally triggered. Red Alert was serious melodrama, and George a rather somber ex-RAF navigator who had recently joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Kubrick viewed George’s idea of chance catastrophe as too farcical for drama. It was a killing joke. In Kubrick’s words, “How the hell could the president ever tell the Russian Premier to shoot down American planes? Good Lord, it sounds ridiculous.”

So Red Alert repeated itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. Dr. Strangelove was born. The story became a high-powered political lampoon. The movie has three basic backdrops: an airbase, the cockpit of a B-52, and a War Room beneath the Pentagon. The grotesque cartoon characters that inhabit these settings become more frenzied as the crisis spirals. Jack D. Ripper is the rabidly paranoid and maverick Strategic Air Command General at the airbase who believes the communists have fluoridated the US water supply to make him impotent. He orders an attack on the Soviets that cannot be recalled. Air Force Major “King” Kong is the cowboy captain of the rogue B-52 bomber, the lone plane that gets through Soviet defenses. General Buck Turgidson, a strategic bombing enthusiast, and the bald President Merkin Muffley are among the grotesques who desperately try to salvage peace in the claustrophobic War Room. Then, of course, there is Strangelove himself.

A Strange Love Revealed

Strangelove is a black comic amalgam of sinister science. He is one part Herman Kahn, one part Wernher von Braun, and one part Edward Teller. Kubrick had met Kahn and became engrossed in Kahn’s controversial book On Thermonuclear War, in which Kahn proposed the “logical” notion of winnable nuclear warfare. Kahn gave Kubrick the idea for a fictional Doomsday Machine, capable of wiping out the entire planet in the event of a nuclear attack. Wernher von Braun gave Strangelove that Teutonic touch. Peter George’s novel of the screenplay refers to Strangelove’s black-gloved hand, which was a memento of his time “working on the German V-2 rocket.”

Edward Teller was a true-life Strangelove. Father of the superbomb, and the classic scientist-turned-strategist, Teller was the apocalyptic nuclear “sage” of the Cold War. He was infamously obsessed with security. He was the only member of the scientific community to smear Oppenheimer as a security risk during Oppenheimer’s trial. Teller’s harebrained solutions invariably used hydrogen fusion weapons, and he held extreme opinions on the Red Menace of the Soviets. Teller even had a disability. His lower leg was severed in a Munich tram accident in his youth, requiring him to wear a prosthetic foot, leaving him with a lifelong limp.

Dr. Strangelove is one of the most influential archetypes of the scientist in cinema. He is mad, in the tradition of Victor Frankenstein; he is prosthetic, implying machine-like inhumanity; and he is corporate, detached from any personal responsibility through the collective cover of the “Bland Corporation,” an obvious reference to Kahn’s position at the RAND Corporation. His black-gloved arm is a living legacy of Operation Paperclip. It forever threatens to expose Strangelove’s mania for destruction, jerking into a “Sieg Heil” at the president with erratic and embarrassing zeal. As Peter Sellers put it, “the arm hated the rest of the body for having made a compromise—that arm was a Nazi.”

In the movie, Strangelove first enters the fray from the shadows. Kubrick’s parody reminds us of the Nazi past behind rocket science, as well as the scheming malevolence of Teller, and the unrelenting rationality behind Kahn’s military strategy. Cold, calculated reason ultimately ends in holocaust. As the president utters the illustrious line to the bickering General Turgidson and the Russian Ambassador, “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the War Room,” Strangelove prepares to deliver his master plan. With unerring logic, he talks of preserving a “nucleus of carefully selected specimens” of the human race at the bottom of America’s deeper mineshafts for a hundred years: “After all, the conditions would be far superior to those of the so-called concentration camps, where there is ample evidence most of the wretched creatures clung desperately to life.”

When a disbelieving president, the only wise man in the Pentagon in those bygone days, questions the immensity of the task, Strangelove’s plan is unveiled. Strangelove says, “It would not be difficult, Mein Führer. Nuclear reactors could—I’m sorry, Mr. President—nuclear reactors could provide power almost indefinitely; greenhouses could maintain plant life; animals could be bred and slaughtered . . .” To which the liberal and considerate president understandably replies, “I would hate to have to decide who stays up and who goes down.” But Strangelove was unrepentant: “That would not be necessary, Mr. President; it could easily be accomplished with a computer; and the computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross-section of necessary skills. Of course, it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included, to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition . . .” And on this technocratic thought, Strangelove’s spastic Nazi arm thrusts into another “Sieg Heil.”

The master plan of Strangelove is that of Nazi scientist-as-god, recolonizing the Earth in his own image. The Third Reich is taken to its farcical and fascist conclusion. Strangelove draws prodigious strength from the holocaust raging outside the War Room. As Major “King” Kong rides his nuclear charge like a phallic rodeo mount, and the mushrooming orgasm of global apocalypse begins, Strangelove rises out of his wheelchair and yells “Mein Führer—I can walk!” This outrageous parody of an erection reveals the motive for the movie’s title—the scientist’s strange erotic love of mass destruction.