Seminar Reflection

In this seminar we discussed many things. A few of the more important things we discussed were what deterrence is and how do fear and paranoia play a role in the films and in the articles.

We determined that deterrence is "the policy of preventing an attack, because if the enemy attacks we will attack back and destroy them." I think that this is an important factor in the possibility of the nuclear war because its saying that if you attack us, you're basically going to be blown off the map. We discussed the fact that this is basically just used as a way to scare the other people from attacking you out of fear of death. It related to the movie Fail Safe because when the president of the United States "accidentally" attacked Moskow but then in order to not get a worse strike he bombed New York.

We also talked about fear and paranoia and how they relate in the movies. In Dr. Strangelove, the general thought that Russia was poisoning his water and so he bombed Russia. This seems more like paranoia because he wasn't certain that they were poisoning him. Both movies show more paranoia to justify their ideas than fear because it seems like there is never a rational think to support their ideas.

I am still wondering why people would come up with nuclear wars, when it is just going to kill millions if not billions of people. Is getting rid of communism really worth killing half the population over?