GROUP CAPTAIN LIONEL MANDRAKE, RAF (Peter Sellers), in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, served as executive officer of the 843rd Bombardment Wing, United States Strategic Aerospace Command, headquartered at Burppelson AFB. He came to that position through an Anglo-American officer-exchange program between the Royal and United States Air Forces. Such were his service rank, position, and duty assignment on the day that forever after changed the meaning of the term D-Day. For him, D-Day began with Operation Dropkick. Under that exercise, the thirty-four B52 Stratofortresses of the wing flew to Fail-Safe, the point beyond which they would need no further orders to proceed to target, if they received such orders. After all the pilots confirmed arriving at Fail-Safe, Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper USAF, the CO of the 843rd, called him. The formalities were dire enough: Do you recognize my voice, Group Captain Mandrake? Worse than that were his orders:1. Set Condition Red throughout the base, thus sealing it off from the outside world and shutting down all lines of communication. (Only one public pay-telephone line remained open, but Grp. Capt. Mandrake wouldn't think of that until far too late.)2. Transmit a coded message to the wing over the CRM-114 channel: Wing Attack Plan R. That order implied something particularly bad: a wing commander could order Plan R if he felt the normal chain of command had broken.3. Impound all radio sets that any base personnel privately owned.Mandrake carried out his orders--up to the point at which he idly found a transistor radio hidden in a lineprinter in the base data center. Idly he switched it on. Imagine his surprise when he heard civilian-style music blaring forth from it! How could this be, if the United States were now in a nuclear shooting war, and Gen. Ripper had felt the need to call a full-scale airstrike against Russia under Plan R?He rushed to the general's office and played the radio before him. Whereupon the general locked the door to his office (locking himself and Mandrake both in), ordered Mandrake to sit down and turn that [radio] off, then calmly announced he would not recall the wing. He even went so far as to threaten a brother officer with a gun!Then he gave his reason for so acting: he would not allow a Communist plot to go forward to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. Not long after that, the shooting began, as a regiment of the 23rd Airborne Division, under the command of Colonel Bat Guano USA, tried to gain ingress to the base, and the base security force started a gun battle to try to repel them. Mandrake could only sit helplessly as Ripper ranted on and on about the importance of water as the source of life, the refusal of commies to drink any beverage other than vodka, and about fluoridation of water. (Biographer's note: the various fluorides--tin (II) fluoride, sodium fluoride, sodium monofluorophosphate, etc.--are known neurotoxins. The difference between therapeutic and toxic doses of the fluorides are a matter of intense dispute among dentists and their patients.) Mandrake further observed that all of General Ripper's foibles came to the fore--including latent homosexuality (Ripper came close to making an advance on Mandrake, and all but confessed impotency with women) and his fondness for machine guns (Ripper unpacked one and used it himself to return the gunfire that riddled his office).Eventually the base security personnel surrendered. To the last, Mandrake begged Ripper to give him the recall code. Instead, Ripper locked himself in his private bathroom and shot himself in the head with his service pistol.Mandrake, with nothing else to do, found doodles by Ripper, in the form of a crossword repeating phrases like Peace On Earth and Purity Of Essence. From that he deduced the recall code, either POE or OPE.Two shots rang out, and Colonel Guano walked in. What followed was a largely fruitless argument, made worse because no one ever told Col. Guano that Gen. Ripper had gone as mad as a bloody March Hare and sent the whole wing to attack the Soviets. Finally he managed to convince Guano to help him get change to use the public pay telephone to call the President of the United States.He transmitted the two recall code choices.And learned only later that he had still been too late. For out of thirty-four planes, thirty did turn back, the Soviets shot down three--but the Soviets only damaged one. That one continued to bomb the nearest target of opportunity. And that triggered the Doomsday Machine, a set of one-hundred-megaton bombs jacketed with a cobalt-thorium alloy that now bade fair to poison the atmosphere for the next ninety-three years.Group Captain Mandrake now commands a deep-mine shelter, perhaps in recognition of his at least having made an effort to stop the cataclysm, and his excellent abilities at both task leadership and emotional leadership, a vital leadership balance in a prolonged fallout-shelter situation. Show less «