Fail Safe » (REPRINT)

Eugene Burdick (1918-1965) taught at the University of California at Berkely and was chairman of the World Affairs Council in San Francisco. Among his many books is The Ugly American, the internationally famous novel written with Bill Lederer.

Something has gone wrong. A group of American bombers armed with nuclear weapons is streaking past the fail-safe point, beyond recall, and no one knows why. Their destination — Moscow.

In a bomb shelter beneath the White House, the calm young president turns to his Russian translator and says, "I think we are ready to talk to Premier Kruschchev." Not far away, in the War Room at the Pentagon, the secretary of defense and his aides watch with growing anxiety as the luminous blips crawl across a huge screen map. High over the Bering Strait in a large Vindicator bomber, a colonel stares in disbelief at the attack code number on his fail-safe box and wonders if it could possibly be a mistake.

First published in 1962, when America was still reeling from the Cuban missle crisis, Fail-Safe reflects the apocalyptic attitude that pervaded society during the height of the Cold War, when disaster could have struck at any moment. As more countries develop nuclear capabilities and the potential for new enemies lurks on the horizon, Fail-Safe and its powerful issues continue to respond.

Gale Research

Norman Cousins noted in Saturday Review that the novel is "less about an ultimate war between one nation and another than it is about the ultimate war between man and his machines. . . . The book becomes an essay on man--and a powerful one. It indicates that as man has gone up in the order of power he has gone down in the order of control." When Cousins asked the author if this kind of accident was possible, Burdick replied: "I believe it to be inevitable under the present circumstances. That is why [Harvey Wheeler and I] wrote this book. I don't know of a scientist who has a direct knowledge of `fail-safe' who isn't worried."