“Mr. President, we got to nuke ’em, we got to nuke ’em, we got to nuke ’em now!” General Deckers (played by Rod Steiger) frenzy appeal to the President to counter the Martian invasion with the nuclear armada was futile in the Movie “Mars Attacks“. Seeking the ultimative solution with all weapon power available was a behaviourial pattern aligned with the character of General „Buck“ Turgidson (George C. Scott). This cowboy would engage into war the sooner the better in Stanley Kubricks greatest satire of the cold war: “Dr. Strangelove or how I stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb“: “Gee, I wish we had one of them doomsday machines.” What both have in common is that these characters are based on a real life person that was a real threat to life on planet earth: General Curtis LeMay.
The general is perhaps most famous for suggesting in a 1965 book that the United States should escalate its bombing of North Vietnam: “My solution to the problem would be to tell them frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.” LeMay reached top ranks while commanding bomber forces over Germany and Japan in WorldWar II. Being an explicit advocate of war and a blistering anticommunist, he proposed a signle strategic war plan against the Sowjet Unio in 1949. That plan contained a single, massive nuclear strike with all existing 133 war heads against 70 sowjet cities within 30 days. He believed this to be successful as the sowjets did not have a nuclear arsenal that could guarantee armageddon in the US at that point in time. That plan is used in Dr. Strangelove again: “Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless *distinguishable*, postwar environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed. “During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, LeMay clashed once again with President John F. Kennedy and Defense Secretary McNamara, arguing that he should be allowed to bomb nuclear sites in Cuba, even though he himself estimated that his planes could take out only about 90 percent of these sites (post-crisis analysis hypothesized that such attacks would have missed significantly more missiles than that). He opposed the naval blockade, and after the end of the crisis, suggested that Cuba be invaded anyway, even after the Russians agreed to withdraw. Among the greatest tragedies that were inflicted on his war leadership was the bombing raids on Tokio. Following British bombing practice, they marked the target area with a flaming ‘X.’ In a three-hour period, the main bombing force dropped 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs, killing more than 100,000 civilians, destroying 250,000 buildings and incinerating 16 square miles of the city. More were killed in these bombings than in the nuclear strike aginst Hiroshima. Aircrews at the tail end of the bomber stream reported that the stench of burned human flesh permeated the aircraft over the target. The New York Times reported at the time, “Maj. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, commander of the B-29s of the entire Marianas area, declared that if the war is shortened by a single day, the attack will have served its purpose.”He later reorganized the Strategic Air Command into an effective means of conducting nuclear war. His aggressiveness threatened to inflame tense Cold War situations (such as the Cuban Missile Crisis) into open war between the United States and the Soviet Union. In his life he heavily supported the art of Judo, became an aspriant for Vice-President of the United States and a sports car enthusiast. How would he view the world today, how would he “kick the crap out of the Aytollahs”? Let’s finally quote General Decker again from the movie Mars Attacks: ” We have to strike now, sir! Annihilate! Kill! Kill! Kill!”(…) “We should nuke these assholes with everything we got, sir. “(…) “Liberals! Intellectuals! Peacemongers! IDIOTS! “