Whatever You Do, Don’t Push the Red Button

BRIAN: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh, and I’m here with Ed Ayers.

ED: Hey.

BRIAN: And Peter Onuf’s with us.

PETER: Hey, hey, hey. Yeah. All right.

BRIAN: Well today, in honor of what might be the end of the world on December 21st, we’re looking at past visions of doomsday in America. So, guys, what I love about the 20th century is the pace of change. And in the course of 20 years we moved through several apocalyptic visions.

The first one that we all remember is nuclear Armageddon. And that looks like perhaps bombers coming over and dropping nuclear bombs, or maybe someone’s going to bring a suitcase with an atomic device. But by the 1960s, machines are beginning to combine with atomic bombs, to create the ultimate apocalyptic vision.

And, of course, the classic caricature of that kind of machine was in Doctor Strangelove. I think that’s 1964. Peter Sellers, one push of button, in fact, no push of the button.

PETER: No push of the button, Brian.

BRIAN: Computers would set it off. What did that look like?

PETER: What it is, is a machine that is going to be set off without any pushing of buttons. Imagine the ultimate machine, a machine with a mind of its own, or no mind of its own.

DOCTOR STRANGELOVE: That is the whole idea of this machine, you know.

PETER: All you have to do is threaten it. If one side threatens the other, this bank of computers whirs into action and sets it off.

DOCTOR STRANGELOVE: A specific and clearly defined set of circumstances, under which the bombs are to be exploded, is programmed into a tape memory bank.

PETER: So here we have the ultimate end of the world scenario, mediated by machines and devices. And it’s all humans who have done this to themselves.

BRIAN: Ed, I’d be curious if you have a favorite doomsday device from these days?

ED: Well, I’m afraid I’m a more contemporary sort of guy. I like the film from the ’90s. Austin Powers, The Spy Who Shagged Me. And in that–

[LAUGHING]

ED: Yes, it was a classic. And in that, Mike Myers portrays the imaginatively named Doctor Evil, who has the idea of the laser. And every time he says laser he has to air quotes, as if he had invented the laser.

BRIAN: Which are hard to do on radio.

ED: Yeah, exactly. People have to imagine the air quotes.

DOCTOR EVIL: This is the phase in which we put a giant “laser” on the moon. When the moon reaches its appropriate lunar alignment, it will destroy Washington DC. You see, I’ve turned the moon into what I like to call a Death Star.

ED: So he wanted $100 billion or it’s doomsday. Now what’s interesting about Austin Powers is that the movie begins in the ’90s, but they go through a time machine that takes them back to the ’60s. And so that’s significant in and of itself. Back to a time when they could imagine the end of the world.

But what Austin Powers, ironically, helps us remember, what Doctor Strangelove helps us remember, is that the very thing that seemed like such an innovation at the time, the pushbutton, which was a ubiquitous symbol of the ’60s,

I had a pushbutton transmission in my car. You buy a new appliance, it advertises it’s a blender or a dishwasher, whatever, it’s kind of pushbutton. When you combine the symbol to pushbutton, the very symbol of modern convenience, with the image and language of nuclear holocaust, which we’d actually glimpsed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we can see how it is that you can have this connection between modern convenience, modern technology, modern advance, and the very end of the world.

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