It went on for days, a life and death struggle, and I drifted in and out of consciousness, and whenever I was awake, I heard people in the ward discussing doomsday.
“If they don’t back down by tomorrow, Kennedy’ll zap ‘em.”
“Bloody Catholics. Bloodthirsty swine.”
In my hazy mind there were the images of their side and ours. Ours was of two handsome young men in silhouetted earnest conference, theirs was a nasty gnome who thumped tabletops with his shoe.

 

... At that moment in Machine No. 6 a small condenser blew. It was a soundless event. There was a puff of smoke no larger than a walnut that was gone instantly...
So it begins, so simply. But the blown condenser accidentally dispatches the nuclear armed bombers on their way to Moscow, and to their horror the Pentagon finds there is no way to call them back, in Eugene Burdick and Harry Wheeler’s Fail Safe.
   With an amazingly serendipitous timing that sometimes happens in America, the book was published just before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and therefore succeeded admirably in scaring the living daylights out of everybody, despite the Pentagon’s assurances that it couldn’t happen (did they really imagine anyone would believe them?). Australian publishers were slower to respond (naturally) but the book was promptly serialised in a glossy magazine—I forget which—I bought it to read the serial, ignored the rest and never bought that magazine again as far as I remember.
   Despite the general terror evoked by the potential nuclear destruction of us all, the book wasn’t filmed until two years later, in 1964, with Henry Fonda as the US President who must make a terrible decision, while a year earlier, the same concept would inspire Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy Dr Strangelove, (subtitled: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb). Despite both being made in black & white (as if colour would have been too unbearable—On the Beach and The Day the Earth Caught Fire also avoided using it) Fail Safe and Dr Strangelove have the same storyline. They differ in the means by which the unrecallable bombers are despatched (FS by electrical malfunction, DS by mad general) and the outcome,

the serious drama FS being kinder to humanity than the comedy DS. Oddly, Dr Strangelove claims to have been based on a different book (I wonder what that book was based on?)
But Fail Safe (the book) put an indelible idea in all of our minds. And it’s outcome is stunning…
...”Gentlemen, we can assume that Moscow has been destroyed,” the President said. He paused, looked at Buck, seemed to be waiting for a miracle, unable to talk. Then he spoke. “I will contact General Buck, who is now orbiting over New York City.”
The only way to appease the Russians over the loss of Moscow and prevent the world-wide nuclear holocaust is for the Americans to make a similar attack on New York. But somehow, Kubrick’s comedy version seemed more horrifying, because we were better able to believe that the Pentagon was entirely inhabited by complete idiots. Fail Safe’s suggestion—that sane, sensible, competent, good-hearted men might do exactly the same thing as Kubrick’s pack of yahoos—truly left us all with nowhere to hide.