ABSTRACT
The image was powerful and quickly infamous: Slim Pickens, rodeo performer and star of numerous film and television Westerns, straddles a giant H-Bomb and, with Stetson in hand, rides it to earth and to doomsday. Here was the essence of Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove (1964), a dark satire on the insanity of a world that could produce a doctrine of Armageddon and, without irony, reduce it to the acronym “MAD” (Mutually Assured Destruction). While provocative, Kubrick’s film was merely the “most notorious chapter in this period’s assault on the image of air power.” 1 With origins in the era of interwar isolationism, and expressed via print media as well as early cinema, this image asserted that American air power provided protection, deterred potential aggressors, and if necessary would deliver victory when war came. In the eyes of many strategists, this image was affirmed by the events and experiences of World War II, a conflict that saw American Air Force commanders loudly proclaim faith in the bomber’s ability to secure victory through the precise delivery of destruction. These were the ideas celebrated in wartime propaganda and, with some subtle revisions and refinements, postwar cinema, from Air Force (1943) to A Gathering of Eagles (1963).
