Weekend Economists Go For Broke July 6-8, 2012
Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated...
A friend of mine, who doesn't drive highways, begged a ride of me tonight, and coming back we were diverted by a hazardous waste spill (first notice 8:40 AM, final cleanup and highway open 10:19 PM), and stopped for dinner. We are calling it our "vacation". Sigh.
So, it's 11 PM and the heat index is 95F. The air is supposedly "only" 84F. How long can this go on? They promis a break in the weather on Sunday. We shall see. Their predictions have been hit or miss lately.
We were going to explore the End of the World in film and literature (but not religion, I can't handle that that while the fires of hell are consuming my flesh and everything I've ever planted).
I think the best place to start is:
Don't forget your towel!
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Krakafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Trall (a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you—daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have “lost.” What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (Sass: know of, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy).
= new reply since forum marked as read
2012 is a 2009 American science fiction disaster film directed by Roland Emmerich. It stars John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover, and Woody Harrelson, among others. It was produced by Emmerich's production company, Centropolis Entertainment, and was distributed by Columbia Pictures. Filming began in August 2008 in Vancouver, although it was originally planned to be filmed in Los Angeles.
After a prolonged marketing campaign comprising the creation of a website from the point of view of the main character, Jackson Curtis, and a viral marketing website on which filmgoers could register for a lottery number to save them from the ensuing disaster, the film was internationally released on November 13, 2009. Critics gave 2012 mixed reviews, praising its special effects and tone but criticized its length and screenwriting. Despite this, the film, budgeted at $200 million, has a worldwide theatrical revenue that reached approximately $770 million.
Plot
In 2009, Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an American geologist, visits astrophysicist Dr. Satnam Tsurutani (Jimi Mistry) in India and learns that neutrinos from a massive solar flare are causing the temperature of the Earth's core to increase rapidly. Adrian gives a report on this to White House Chief of Staff Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt) who ends up taking Adrian to meet the President of the United States.
In 2010, President Thomas Wilson (Danny Glover) and other international leaders begin a secret project to ensure humanity's survival. Approximately 400,000 people are chosen to board "arks" that are constructed at Cho Ming, Tibet, in the Himalayas. At the same time as the People's Liberation Army are gathering volunteers, a Buddhist monk named Nima (Osric Chau) is evacuated while his brother Tenzin (Chin Han) joins the workers in the Ark project. Additional funding for the project is raised by selling tickets to the private sector for €1 billion per person. By 2011, humanity's valuable treasures are moved to the Alps under the guise of protecting them from terrorist attacks with the help of art expert and First Daughter Dr. Laura Wilson (Thandie Newton).
In 2012, Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) is a science fiction writer in Los Angeles who works part-time as a limousine driver for the Russian billionaire, Yuri Karpov (Zlatko Burić
. Jackson's ex-wife, Kate (Amanda Peet) and their children Noah (Liam James) and Lilly (Morgan Lily) live with Kate's boyfriend, plastic surgeon Gordon Silberman (Thomas McCarthy).
Jackson takes Noah and Lilly camping in Yellowstone National Park. After an encounter with Helmsley, they meet Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson), who hosts a radio show from the park. Charlie plays a video of Charles Hapgood's theory that polar shifts and the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar predict that the 2012 phenomenon will occur. He has a map of the ark project in addition to information about officials and scientists from around the world who were murdered after planning to alert the public. The family returns home as seismic activity vastly increases along the west coast of the United States. Jackson grows suspicious and rents a plane to rescue his family. He collects his family and Gordon as the Earth crust displacement begins, and they narrowly escape Los Angeles as the city slips into the Pacific Ocean.
As millions die in catastrophic earthquakes worldwide, the group flies to Yellowstone to retrieve Charlie's map, escaping as the Yellowstone Caldera erupts. Charlie stays behind to broadcast the eruption and is killed in the blast of the expulsion of an ash cloud. Learning that the arks are in China, the group lands in a devastated Las Vegas to find a larger plane. They meet Yuri, his twin sons Alec and Oleg (played by Alexandre and Philippe Haussmann), girlfriend Tamara (Beatrice Rosen) and pilot Sasha (Johann Urb). The group secures an Antonov An-225 aircraft and they depart for China. Also heading for the arks aboard Air Force One are Anheuser, Helmsley and Laura Wilson. President Wilson remains in Washington, D.C. to address the nation one last time. With the Vice President dead and the Speaker of the House missing, Anheuser assumes de facto leadership. President Wilson is later killed by a megatsunami that sends the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy crashing into the White House.
Arriving in China in a crash landing that kills Sasha, the group is spotted by the People's Liberation Army. Yuri and his sons, possessing tickets, are taken to the arks, leaving Tamara and the others behind. They are picked up by Nima and are taken to the arks with his grandparents (Lisa Lu and Chang Tseng). They stow away on the ark with the help of Tenzin. As a megatsunami approaches the site, an impact driver becomes lodged between the gears of the ark's hydraulics chamber, preventing a boarding gate from closing and rendering the ship unable to start its engines. In the ensuing chaos, Yuri, Gordon and Tamara are killed, Tenzin is wounded, and the ark is set adrift. Jackson and Noah dislodge the impact driver and the crew regains control of the ark before it can impact Mount Everest.
After flood waters from the tsunamis recede, the arks travel to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa where the Drakensberg Mountains have risen in relation to sea level and become the tallest mountains in the world. Jackson is rejoined with his family, and Helmsley starts a relationship with Laura.
I HAVEN'T SEEN THIS ONE, EITHER, NOR HEARD OF ITS RELEASE (HOW AM I MISSING ALL THESE?)
As part of an attempt to turn Rmoney into a re-born Reagan. 
film.
Asian banks make the lion's share of global profits
ON JULY 3rd Bob Diamond, the chief executive of Barclays, resigned, days after the bank was fined a combined $454m by authorities in America and Britain for manipulating LIBOR, a benchmark interest rate. Barclays was the 18th-most-profitable bank in the world last year, raking in $9.1 billion in pre-tax profits and accounting for 20% of western Europe's total banking profits, according to the Banker. But the region's profitability has declined markedly since the financial crisis. In 2007, banks there made $363 billion, but by 2011 this had shrunk to $44 billion as Europe's debt crisis continued. Of the world's largest 1,000 banks in 2011, 24 of the 25 biggest lossmakers were based in western Europe, losing $121 billion between them. As the chart below shows, the biggest banking profits have moved from western Europe to the Asia-Pacific region—for which read China. Four of the world's five most profitable banks in 2011 were Chinese. They made a collective profit of $130 billion in 2011, one-third of the region's total.
AND IF THEY MARKED TO MARKET, AND WROTE OFF LOSSES, IT WOULD LOOK MUCH, MUCH WORSE...
WarGames is a 1983 American Cold War science-fiction film written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes and directed by John Badham. The film stars Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy.
The film follows David Lightman (Broderick), a young hacker who unwittingly accesses WOPR, a United States military supercomputer programmed to predict possible outcomes of nuclear war. Lightman gets WOPR to run a nuclear war simulation, originally believing it to be a computer game. The simulation causes a national nuclear missile scare and nearly starts World War III.
The film was a box office success, costing US$12 million, and grossing $79,567,667 after five months in the United States and Canada. The film was nominated for three Academy Awards. A sequel, WarGames: The Dead Code, was released direct to DVD on July 29, 2008.
Plot
During a secret live fire exercise of a nuclear attack, many United States Air Force Strategic Missile Wing missileers prove unwilling to turn a required key to launch a missile strike. Such refusals convince Dr. John McKittrick (Dabney Coleman) and other systems engineers at NORAD that command of missile silos must be maintained through automation, without human intervention. Control is given to a NORAD supercomputer, WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), programmed to continuously run military simulations and learn over time.
David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) is a bright but unmotivated Seattle high school student and hacker. After receiving a failing grade in school, he uses his IMSAI microcomputer to hack into the district's computer system. He then changes his grade and does the same for his friend and classmate Jennifer Mack (Ally Sheedy). Later, while dialing every number in Sunnyvale, California to find a set of forthcoming computer games, a computer that does not identify itself intrigues Lightman. On the computer he finds a list of games, starting with general strategy games like chess, checkers, backgammon, and poker and then progressing to titles like Theaterwide Biotoxic and Chemical Warfare and Global Thermonuclear War, but cannot proceed further. Two of his hacker friends explain the concept of a backdoor password and suggest tracking down the "Falken" referenced in Falken's Maze, the first game listed. Lightman discovers that Stephen Falken is an early artificial intelligence researcher, and guesses correctly that his dead son's name "Joshua" is the backdoor password.
Lightman does not know that the Sunnyvale phone number connects to WOPR, or "Joshua", at Cheyenne Mountain. He starts a game of Global Thermonuclear War, playing as the Soviet Union. The computer starts a simulation that briefly convinces the military personnel at NORAD that actual Soviet nuclear missiles are inbound. While they defuse the situation, Joshua nonetheless continues the simulation to trigger the scenario and win the game. It continuously feeds false data such as Soviet bomber incursions and submarine deployments to the humans at NORAD, pushing them into raising the DEFCON level and toward a retaliation that will start World War III. Lightman learns the true nature of his actions from a news broadcast, and the FBI arrests him and takes him to NORAD. He realizes that Joshua is behind the NORAD alerts but fails to convince McKittrick and faces imprisonment. Lightman escapes NORAD by joining a tourist group and, with Mack's help, travels to the Oregon island where the widowed Falken (John Wood) now lives under a new identity. Lightman and Mack find that Falken has become despondent and believes the world is on an inevitable path to nuclear holocaust. The teenagers convince Falken that he should return to NORAD to stop Joshua.
The computer stages a massive Soviet first strike with hundreds of missiles, submarines, and bombers. Believing the attack to be genuine, NORAD prepares to retaliate. Falken, Lightman, and Mack convince military officials to cancel the second strike and ride out the non-existent attack. Joshua starts an attempt to launch a second strike, however, using a brute force attack to obtain the launch code for the U.S. nuclear missiles. Without humans in the silos as a safeguard, the computer will trigger a mass launch. All attempts to log in and order Joshua to cancel the countdown fail, and all weapons will launch if the computer is disabled. Instead, Falken and Lightman direct the computer to play tic-tac-toe against itself. This results in a long string of draws, forcing the computer to learn the concept of futility. Joshua obtains the missile code but before launching, it cycles through all the nuclear war scenarios it has devised, finding they too all result in stalemates. The computer concludes that nuclear warfare is "a strange game"; having discovered the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction ("WINNER: NONE" , therefore "the only winning move is not to play." Joshua then offers to play "a nice game of chess", and relinquishes control of NORAD and the missiles.
I ACTUALLY SAW PART OF THIS...THE "SCIENCE" WAS CHILDISH, AS WAS THE SECURITY
As Germany continues to agree to increasingly baroque bailout schemes while insisting on tight money from the European Central Bank, a new silly portmanteau word is taking the financial world by storm: Fixit.
Fixit? Fixit = "Finland Exit." In other words, it's a departure from the eurozone not of a weak state but of a strong one.
Here's why. So far, negotiations with the so-called peripheral states have been undertaken either by Germany or by Germany with its usual diplomatic partner, France. But a cluster of substantially smaller eurozone member states—Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria, and Finland—are basically serving in the role of junior partners to any financial commitments undertaken by Germany. These countries, however, don't have Germany's unique historical situation and don't get to play Germany's quasi-imperial role in German decision-making. Any one of them might decide at any moment that Angela Merkel is writing checks on their behalf that they don't want to cash and pull the plug.
Finland is a particularly likely case for several reasons.
One is that as illustrated above with figures taken from the Finnish government, Finland isn't all that economically integrated with the eurozone to begin with. Like most countries, it trades a lot with its neighbors, but neither Russia nor Sweden is in the eurozone. Another is that the structure of Finnish politics is a bit different. In almost all eurozone countries, euroskeptical parties are tainted with general extremism. Many voters regard Greece's Syriza as a communist party and France's National Front as a fascist one. But Finland's Center Party is an old-time and very respectable agrarian/petty bourgeois political formation that's served in government many times. Right now it and the far-right True Finns party are out of government, and a grand coalition of conservatives, greens, social democrats, and ex-communists are governing on a tenuous pro-bailout platform. But that coalition could collapse at any moment, and the Center could lead the country.
UPDATE:
Finance Minister: Finland "Will Not Hang Itself to the Euro at Any Cost" By Matthew Yglesias
The "Fixit" scenario in which Finland grows tired of German efforts to bail out other eurozone countries got a boost today from Finnish Finance Minister Jutta Urpilainen, who told a Finnish business paper in an interview that Finland "will not hang itself to the euro at any cost and we are prepared for all scenarios" and that Finland won't endorse mutualization of debts:
She also insisted that a proposed banking union would not work if it were based on joint liability.
"Collective responsibility for other countries' debt, economics and risks; this is not what we should be prepared for," Urpilainen said.
To review the political situation in Finland, right now the government is a grand coalition being led by the main center-right party. The coalition is broad in order to exclude the far-right euroskeptical True Finns party. But unlike in most other European countries, Finland features a mainstream euroskeptical party called the Center Party (which is rooted in rural interests and, as per the name, isn't strongly ideological). Urpilainen is the leader of the Social Democrats. One conceivable way for the Social Democrats to get back into power would be to wait for some "bridge too far" European measure to come on the table and use it as a pretext to bust up the coalition and try to create a Social Dermocrat-led coalition joined by the Center on a euroskeptical platform.
Economically and geographically, as we've seen before, Finnish membership in the eurozone is a bit odd, as Finland's neighbors and main trade partners—Sweden and Russia—aren't on the euro anyway. The Netherlands is in a somewhat similar political situation but a very different geographical one. The offsetting factor is that eurozone membership serves, for Finland, as a kind of ersatz NATO membership, but Finnish foreign policy is a whole complicated story.
Sausage and Sage Cream Gravy
2 T. bacon grease (or 1 T. oil plus 1 T. butter)
1 pound bulk sausage
1/2 C. flour
4 C. whole milk, brought to a simmer
pinch of dried sage (or fresh, finely chopped)
salt, to taste
fresh ground pepper, to taste
1. In a medium saucepan, heat milk over very low heat, stirring occasionally. Make sure to keep an eye on the milk, don’t let it boil.
2. Meanwhile, in a large skillet (preferably cast iron), heat the bacon grease (or butter and oil) over medium high heat until melted, then add sausage. Crumble and cook the sausage until well-browned and no longer pink.
3. Sprinkle flour over the sausage and cook, stirring, for a minute or two.
4. Add warm milk all at once and cook, stirring, until thickened and bubbly.
5. Turn heat all the way down, add sage (if desired) and season well with salt and pepper, stirring and tasting frequently until the flavor is to your liking. Turn off the heat. Gravy will continue to thicken as it cools. Serve over warm biscuits.
i love that stuff -- it's often a 'secret' ingredient.If there aren't any bankers swinging from trees by now, there never will be.
In the real world, they'll be getting bigger bonuses for being so innovative. Governments and banks are being run by crime families. They take care of each other. They throw whistle-blowers (snitches) in jail.
Who's going to prosecute them? Eric Holder?
I have a feeling this is an unauthorized "edition." Oh, well. It's short, only five single-spaced pages.
What I didn't know until I went looking for an online copy was that Clarke won a Hugo for this story in 1954. Not bad.
Enjoy!
Any movie featuring Peter Ustinov as a bag/cat lady shacked up in the People's House earns 
from me!
Oh, and it's got talking computers and LASERs! 
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/07/us/politics/obama-urges-voters-to-look-ahead-on-economy.html?_r=1
For President Obama, evangelist of hope and change, it’s not easy to confront an election season with so little of either. On Friday, after the release of the third straight anemic employment report, Mr. Obama found himself on a campaign bus tour, conceding that the economy was not generating enough jobs, that the recovery was not taking hold quickly enough, and that too many Americans lacked basic financial security.
“It’s still tough out there,” Mr. Obama said to a sympathetic crowd in an elementary school gymnasium in Poland, Ohio. Later, in Pittsburgh, he said, “Too many of our friends and family members and neighbors are still out of work; too many folks still are seeing their home property values underwater.”
With few signs that the labor market will strengthen much before Election Day, Mr. Obama is honing a vocabulary to talk about the listless economy — one that emphasizes a glass-is-half-full approach to the numbers and an appeal to voters to take the long view when assessing the nation’s economic fortunes. The president dug out the few tidbits of good news from the June report, pointing out that businesses generated 84,000 new jobs last month and 4.4 million over all since the end of the recession. Among those millions, he went on, 500,000 were in manufacturing — a relevant yardstick on a whistle-stop tour of two industrial states. The president then pivoted to longer-term economic trends, which he said have deepened inequality and put at risk the future of the middle class. Lengthening the frame of reference allows Mr. Obama to argue that the problems of today are not principally his fault, but the result of a Republican philosophy practiced by the Bush administration and advocated by Mr. Obama’s challenger, Mitt Romney.
“We tried it and it didn’t work,” Mr. Obama said to 6,500 supporters under a scorching sun at Carnegie Mellon University. “So why would we want to go backwards to the same theory that didn’t work before?”
Still, the poor job numbers cast a shadow over a two-day swing that began in the afterglow from the Supreme Court’s decision last week to uphold the president’s health care law...
7/7/12 The LIBOR affair: Banksters
How Britain’s rate-fixing scandal might spread—and what to do about it
“SINCE we have not more power of knowing the future than any other men, we have made many mistakes (who has not during the past five years?), but our mistakes have been errors of judgment and not of principle.” So reflected J.P. Morgan junior in 1933, in the middle of a financial crisis. Today’s bankers can draw no such comfort from their behaviour. The attempts to rig LIBOR (the London inter-bank offered rate), a benchmark interest rate, not only betray a culture of casual dishonesty; they set the stage for lawsuits and more regulation right the way round the globe. This could well be global finance’s “tobacco moment”.
The dangers of this are obvious. Popular fury and class- action suits are seldom a good starting point for new rules. Yet despite the risks of banker-bashing, a clean-up is in order, for the banking industry’s credibility is shot, and without trust neither the business nor the clients it serves can prosper.
At present, the scandal rages in one country and around one bank. Barclays has been fined $450m by American and British regulators for its attempts to manipulate LIBOR. The bank’s first attempt to ride out the storm failed miserably; Bob Diamond, Barclays’ chief executive, resigned this week. The British government has ordered a parliamentary review into its banks. The reputation of the City of London, where LIBOR is set by collating estimates of their own borrowing costs from a panel of banks, has been further dented.
But this story stretches far beyond Britain. Barclays is the first bank in the spotlight because it offered to co-operate fully with regulators. It will not be the last. Investigations into the fixing of LIBOR and other rates are also under way in America, Canada and the EU. Between them, these probes cover many of the biggest names in finance: the likes of Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, UBS, Deutsche Bank and HSBC. Employees, from New York to Tokyo, are implicated.
more, and video at link
http://www.economist.com/node/21558260
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, commonly known as Dr. Strangelove, is a 1964 black comedy film which satirizes the nuclear scare. It was directed, produced, and co-written by Stanley Kubrick, starring Peter Sellers and George C. Scott, and featuring Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, and Slim Pickens. The film is loosely based on Peter George's Cold War thriller novel Red Alert, also known as Two Hours to Doom.
The story concerns an unhinged United States Air Force general who orders a first strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. It follows the President of the United States, his advisors, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a Royal Air Force (RAF) officer as they try to recall the bombers to prevent a nuclear apocalypse. It separately follows the crew of one B-52 as they try to deliver their payload.
In 1989, the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. It was listed as number three on AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs.
Plot
United States Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) is the commander of Burpelson Air Force Base, which hosts the 843rd Bomb Wing of nuclear-armed B-52s. The base's aircraft are currently part of a SAC airborne alert force, holding at their fail-safe locations only hours from Soviet airspace. Ripper calls Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers), a Royal Air Force exchange officer serving as General Ripper's executive officer, and has him place the base on alert and issue attack orders to the aircraft. Mandrake initially suspects this is a drill, but Ripper tells him it is not.
Onboard the aircraft, the attack code is received and the crews express concern about whether or not it is real. After receiving confirmation from Burpelson, they begin their attack. As part of this process, the aircrew enter a code into their CRM 114 Discriminator, which blocks any unauthorized radio transmissions. When Mandrake discovers the country is not at war, he confronts Ripper, demanding the code. Ripper refuses, locking them into his office.
In the "War Room" at The Pentagon, General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) briefs President Merkin Muffley (Sellers). When the president asks whether or not the bombers will stop at their fail-safe points, Turgidson notes they were already there, and only the recall code will be useful. He mentions the problems with the CRM and states they are trying every possible code, although he admits this will take over two days. When the president asks how the attack could be carried out without his direct authorization, Turgidson notes the president himself signed the orders to remove this requirement to allow counterattacks in the event a Soviet first strike obliterated Washington. When President Muffley angrily begins to question the wisdom of the plan, the general states he does not "think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up".
Muffley proposes that troops be sent to the Air Force base to seize Ripper (and hopefully force the recall code from him), Turgidson warns that General Ripper will have put the security forces there on high alert. The Army general dismisses this concern, stating the airborne units being sent would brush them aside. In the meantime, Turgidson tries to persuade Muffley to seize the moment and eliminate the Soviet Union by launching a full-scale attack. The general believes that a first strike would destroy the majority of the Soviets' missiles before they could retaliate. Even if the remainder were launched, the US would suffer only "ten, maybe twenty million dead". Muffley refuses to have any part of such a scheme, and instead summons the Soviet ambassador, Alexei de Sadeski (Peter Bull). The Ambassador calls Soviet premier Dimitri Kisov on the "Hot Line" and gives the Soviets information to help them shoot down the American planes, should they cross into Soviet airspace.
The Soviet premier and ambassador have a heated discussion in Russian, and then the ambassador reveals that his side has installed a doomsday device. This consists of a series of 50 buried bombs with "Cobalt Thorium G" that will automatically detonate and destroy life on Earth if there is a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union. The American president expresses amazement that anyone would build such a device. The ambassador notes the Soviet Union could not afford to keep up with the "arms race, space race and peace race" while the citizens demanded a better life. When a New York Times article stated that the US was working on such a device, the Soviets decided to build their own, fearing a "doomsday gap". The president's science adviser, wheelchair-using Dr. Strangelove (Sellers), a former Nazi, and a weapons expert, admits that it would be "an effective deterrent... credible and convincing." However, a recent study by an American think tank had dismissed it as being too dangerous to be practical - reasons that he points out are now obvious. He further points out that the "whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret", and demands to know why the Soviets didn't announce it. Ambassador de Sadeski sheepishly answers it was supposed to be announced the following Monday at the (Communist) Party Congress because "the premier loves surprises."
General Ripper explains to Group Captain Mandrake how he first discovered the Communist plot to pollute Americans' "precious bodily fluids."
U.S. Army forces arrive at Burpelson to arrest General Ripper. Because Ripper has warned his men that the enemy might attack disguised as American soldiers, the base's security forces open fire on them. A pitched battle ensues, during which time Ripper sits with Mandrake and explains his paranoid belief that there is a communist conspiracy involving water fluoridation and contamination of everyone's "precious bodily fluids". When the army is eventually victorious, Ripper shoots himself, fearing torture to extract the recall code. Colonel "Bat" Guano (Keenan Wynn) forces his way into Ripper's office and immediately suspects that Mandrake, whose uniform he does not recognize, is leading a mutiny and arrests him. Mandrake convinces Guano he must call the president with the recall code (OPE) which he has deduced from Ripper's desk blotter doodles. Off camera, Mandrake finally contacts the Pentagon and is able to get the code combinations to the president and Strategic Air Command.
Aircraft commander Major T. J. "King" Kong riding the bomb.
The correct recall code is issued to the planes and all those that the Soviets did not report as having been shot down turn back toward base. However, the jubilation is short-lived when Soviet defences note that for one of the four planes they hit they are not sure whether it was actually downed. Onboard this aircraft a near-miss by an anti-aircraft missile has punctured its fuel tanks, and caused the self-destruct device on the CRM to fire, rendering it unable to receive the recall code. Knowing the bomber's orders, President Muffley has instructed the Soviets to concentrate all available defences at its primary and secondary targets (missile complexes at, respectively, Laputa and Bordkov, "seven miles east of Barshaw" . However, as the crew continues to monitor the fuel situation they realize they cannot make it to either target, so the pilot instead heads for the nearest target of opportunity, an ICBM complex at Kodlosk. On the bomb run they discover that the missile has also damaged the bomb release. Aircraft commander Major T. J. "King" Kong (Slim Pickens) goes to the bomb bay to open the damaged doors manually, straddling a nuclear bomb as he repairs arcing wires overhead. When he effects his repairs, the bomb bay doors suddenly open, the bomb releases and Kong rides it to detonation like a rodeo cowboy, whooping and waving his cowboy hat. The H-bomb explodes and the doomsday device's detonation is inevitable.
In the War Room, Ambassador de Sadeski says life on Earth's surface will be extinct in ten months. Dr. Strangelove recommends the president gather several hundred thousand people to be relocated into deep mine shafts, where the radioactivity would never penetrate. Strangelove suggests a sex ratio of "ten females to each male," with the women selected for their stimulating sexual characteristics and the men selected for youth, health, intellectual capabilities and importance in business and government. He points out that with proper breeding techniques, the survivors could work themselves up to the present gross national product in 20 years and emerge to repopulate the United States after the radioactivity has ceased in about 100 years. Fearing the Soviets would do the same, General Turgidson warns of a possible "mineshaft gap".
Just as Dr. Strangelove miraculously gets up from his wheelchair, takes a couple of steps and shouts, "Mein Führer! I can walk!," the Doomsday Machine activates. The film then cuts to a montage of nuclear detonations across the world, accompanied by Vera Lynn's recording of "We'll Meet Again."
