Seminar Reflection

There were many points brought up in this seminar talking about the movie “Dr. Strangelove,” “Fail-Safe,” and the reading “Fat Man.” The main points that we discussed in this seminar related around the topics of Deterrence, Fear vs. Paranoia, Thought of what Russia had vs. what they actually did have, and actors in the movies.
The opening question to this seminar was posed by peter and it was basically “Do you have any small questions about the text “Fat Man” or “Dr. Strangelove.” And Lola responded with the question “Is Kahn for or against Nuclear War?” And I was one of the people that responded to the this question and said that I don’t believe that he has to pick sides, because since he works for RAND he has to think about the worst possible situation, which would be nuclear destruction. This relates directly to the thought of deterrence, which is to install fear to prevent the other side from attacking. In the movie the Doomsday Machine is U.S.S.R.’s deterrence mechanism. And then again this also ties into the idea of Fear and Paranoia comes into play. Or at least I think it does, because why else would U.S.S.R. need that big of a device that would destroy the whole world if they weren’t paranoid. In a way I think it could be warranted but a little over exaggerated. This is what I mostly learned about in this seminar. But this is mostly what we talked about too. Overall I liked this seminar a lot and this is a very philosophical topic so we really had a lot to talk about, unfortunately we ran out of time.