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Comment by filereaper | Hacker News Reader

The character Dr. Strangelove is itself worth an entire movie, he was supposed to be the combination of the following:

- Edward Teller (Father of Hydrogen Bomb "the super")

- John von Neumann (legendary mathematician and computer scientist)

- Werner von Braun (designer of V2, and later on Saturn V5 for NASA)

the 1900's to 1960's was an amazing time to be in a STEM field, hell being a Physicist was so freaking cool. Now everything's about Finance and Wall Street...

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My Dad worked with Edward Teller, and Teller was often at our house while I was growing up. The Peter Sellers character was totally different than Teller in real life. Teller was a refined gentleman. Peter Seller's character was funny, and not at all like Teller.

BTW, I think that we are fortunate to have all survived the cold war!

The book "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" doesn't present Teller in a particularly favorable light - he is presented as being very political, scheming and rather two faced (i.e. being perfectly civilized directly to Oppenheimer while working closely with those people who undermine Oppenheimer).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Prometheus

"Teller was one of the strongest and best-known advocates for investigating non-military uses of nuclear explosives, which the United States explored under Operation Plowshare.

One of the most controversial projects he proposed was a plan to use a multi-megaton hydrogen bomb to dig a deep-water harbor more than a mile long and half a mile wide to use for shipment of resources from coal and oil fields through Point Hope, Alaska...

A related experiment which also had Teller's endorsement was a plan to extract oil from the tar sands in northern Alberta with nuclear explosions, titled Project Oilsands."[1]

Truth is stranger than fiction.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Teller

Arthur C. Clarke, who knew both Stanley Kubrick and Wernher von Braun, reported in his autobiography, Astounding Days, that Kubrick once asked him to "tell Wernher I wasn't getting at him." Clarke added that "I never did, because firstly, I didn't believe him, and secondly, even if Stanley wasn't, Peter Sellers certainly was."

I agree Dr. Strangelove is a great character, but I don't know if my takeaway from this is that the 60s were "an amazing time to be in a STEM field". My takeaway would be "STEM in the 60s had some brilliant but also cruel, paranoid and just plain deranged individuals that nearly destroyed the world"...

And also Herman Kahn, RAND Corporation nuclear strategist.

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