A friend recently acquired a stack of pulp fiction paperbacks: those slender relics from the 1950s with salacious covers and come‑on titles like Keyhole Peeper, The Cut of the Whip, and Too Hot for Hell. One particular volume in the stash caught my eye. In place of a titillating cover image, it pictures a pair of simply drawn B‑52 bombers with orange flames shooting out of their engines. The title is Red Alert. A banner blurb reads: “A Novel of the First Two Hours of World War III.” It was published in 1958.
I borrowed the book and read it in one sitting. The writing is remarkably polished, and there’s an uncommon attention to detail. The plot involves a delusional U.S. Air Force general who tricks the bombers under his command into launching a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union to save the world from Communism. Diplomatic efforts and military action prevent most of the planes from reaching their targets. But one heavily damaged Stratofortress manages to get through.
Sound familiar? It didn’t take much digging to learn that Red Alert was the template for Stanley Kubrick’s classic Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, from 1964. The author was a Royal Air Force officer named Peter George, moonlighting under the alias Peter Bryant. Kubrick read the book while sailing from England to the United States, bought the rights, and hired George to work on the screenplay with the satirist Terry Southern.
Kubrick’s film is darkly funny. Red Alert is just plain dark. Its original British title, Two Hours to Doom, more aptly evokes the mounting desperation of American and Soviet officials as they scramble to avert a conflagration. George’s familiarity with deterrence theory and the intricacies of nuclear conflict helps the novel read like a doomsday procedural. Evidently it made the rounds of senior Pentagon officials, who took seriously George’s warning that an accidental war “could happen”— that it “may even be happening as you read these words.”
Readers today might find the alarmist tone a bit passé, even amusing. For better or for worse, we really have learned to stop worrying and live with, if not love, the Bomb. I’m just as likely as the next person to dismiss it with a shrug.
At least I was. Red Alert hit a nerve I barely knew I had, triggering memories of trauma I’d parked safely out of sight and mind. It wasn’t the particulars of the plot that got to me but rather the undercurrent of fear coursing through the 192 pages. I recognized it as the same fear that had gripped the small Ontario city where I grew up during the hottest years of the Cold War.
Looking back, I now conclude that my eighth birthday, coinciding with the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, was the last of my childhood. Until then, my world had been an idyll of quiet, leafy streets where I ran feral with my friends. Then overnight it changed. The ghastly howl of siren tests, the duck-and-cover drills at school, the emergency broadcast bulletins that interrupted Saturday morning cartoons . . . Suddenly everything screamed danger. I began having a recurring nightmare about bombs raining down as my father assembled a swing set in our backyard.
Fear crept into our house and down the stairs to the basement. In the wake of the missile crisis, my parents decided to build a bomb shelter. I can still smell the new concrete. Shelves were stocked with supplies prescribed in government-issued survival pamphlets. As the oldest of four kids, it fell to me to learn how to mark off the days after an attack on a calendar and how to mix formula for my baby sister —“in case Mommy and Daddy are hurt.”
Ours was the only shelter on the street. No doubt some of the neighbours thought my folks had overreacted: Galt (now Cambridge) was hardly in Moscow’s crosshairs. Maybe they did overreact, but I can’t blame them. The Second World War was still fresh in their memory. The prospect of a third terrified them.
This they had in common with Peter George. Several of his other novels also dealt, in varying degrees, with the atomic threat. A year after he completed the last of them, a thriller set after an all‑out war, he was found dead, a discharged shotgun between his knees. He was forty-two and had a drinking problem. Those who knew him said it got worse the more he was tormented by the spectre of a nuclear apocalypse.
I wonder what George would make of our perilous times today. Alliances that secured the peace are crumbling, arms control treaties are in tatters, and a madman is a twitch away from the launch codes. I suspect that’s why Red Alert got under my skin the way it did. It felt like fiction colliding with fact. The moral of the story still rings frightfully true: it could happen.
David Wilson edited The United Church Observer from 2006 to 2017.