It was the worst of all possible worst-case scenarios in the Cold War - an American general loses his reason and orders a full-scale nuclear attack on the U.S.S.R. From that premise, Peter George's 1958 novel Red Alert spins a grim tale of just how close to nuclear destruction the world can be. A dying man suffering from the paranoid delusion that he will make the world a better place, Air Force Brigadier General Quinten has set in motion a catastrophic air attack on the Soviet Union with Strategic Air Command bombers armed with nuclear weapons. The President of the United States and his advisors frantically try to stop the attack, once it is underway. They order the American bombers shot down, and they succeed -- with one frightening exception. A lone bomber called the "Alabama Angel" eludes destruction. Its crew ignores the President's new orders and proceeds with its deadly mission. Originally published in the U.K. as "Two Hours to Doom" -- with George using the nom de plume "Peter Bryant" -- this deliberate, precisely plotted novel conjures with the apocalyptic threat of nuclear war and the almost absurd ease with which it can be triggered. A virtual genre of such topical fiction sprang up in the late 1950s -- led by Nevil Shute's "On the Beach" -- of which "Red Alert" was among the earliest and finest examples. Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler's later bestseller "Fail Safe" so closely resembled "Red Alert" in its premise that George sued on the charge of plagiarism and won an out-of-court settlement. Both novels would inspire very different films that would both be released in 1964.

09.45 G.M.T. Moscow: 12.45 p.m.
Washington: 5.45 a.m.

The crew of Alabama Angel, fourteen hours out from a Strategic Air Command base just north of Sonora, Texas, were over the hump. They were approaching the last turning point, and the boring hours which had ground round the clock face with agonising slowness in the earlier stages of the mission, now seemed to be hurrying on, allowing them to anticipate hot food and a comfortable bed, at the British base where they would spend the next two months.
It had been a long flight, and a hard one. From Sonora they had struck due north, the hours and the miles slipping away from them until, over Baffin Island, they had made their first rendezvous with a tanker. Alabama Angel, a B-52 type inter-continental bomber, had drunk deeply from the tanker, then hastened on to a second rendezvous over the frozen wastes between the Northeast Foreland of Greenland, and Spitzbergen.
There again a KC-135 Stratotanker had been waiting patiently for them, ready to slake the thirst of the eight great engines. Now, as the bomber approached her final turning point, she was fully topped up with fuel. There was enough in the tanks to take her on to any target assigned to her inside Russia, and still leave enough to get back to a base in the States without further refuelling.
But that was on a war mission. Today was peace, and Alabama Angel would merely reach her final turning point-called in Strategic Air Command jargon the X point-and turn her sleek, arrow shape away from the vitals of Russia and towards the British base where the wing of which she formed a part was being rotated on normal overseas temporary duty.
In all, thirty-two bombers of the 843rd Wing had left Sonora fourteen hours before. Like Alabama Angel, all of them were now a hundred miles or so from their X points. In the case of Alabama Angel, the X point was Bear Island, a small dot in the Barents Sea roughly midway between the northern tip of Norway and Spitzbergen. The X points of the other bombers of the wing were as widely separated as Schmidt Island in the Arctic Sea, and Bahrein in the Persian Gulf. They had only one geographical factor in common. They were all approximately two hours flying time from a Russian target of prime importance.

 

This 1958 novel of atomic holocaust was the basis of Stanley Kubrick´s savage and unforgettable film Dr. Strangelove. A mad USA General declares war and dispatches a fleet, each armed with the A-bomb; one bomber evades the frantic recall. George, a British subject; committed suicide a year after the film´s release.

The reputation of Peter George (1925-1966) rests largely on his novel Red Alert and the screenplay of the film it inspired, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying, which George co-authored with Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern. A pessimistic Englishman deeply committed to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1950s, George had been a lieutenant in the Royal Air Force. He drew on first-hand knowledge of the new age of nuclear defense in writing the novel, which at first he felt compelled to publish under a pseudonym. With interest in such stories peaking around the release of Stanley Kramer's film version of On the Beach in 1959, the film rights to Red Alert were sold that year, only to be handed off from producer to producer until Stanley Kubrick bought them in 1962, reportedly for as little as $3,500.

In the beginning, George collaborated on the film's script with Kubrick; Southern's involvement and the satirical overhaul of the story came later. George disliked the ironic tone of Kubrick's film, though he wrote a new novelization of it that he dedicated to the director.
The threat of nuclear catastrophe continued to obsess him. He would later write a novel about life after nuclear war entitled Commander-I and was at work on a novel entitled Nuclear Survivors when he committed suicide in 1966.

 

Red Alert by Peter Bryant
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