Red Alert

eForeword

An apocalyptic nightmare for the modern age, Peter Bryant’s Red Alert is the gripping thriller that inspired the nightmare comedy of director Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The novel was first published six years earlier, just after the Soviet Union entered the Space Age, and its tale of nuclear brinksmanship echoes the fresh fear and paranoia of an uncertain time.

The English writer Peter Bryant, né Peter George (1925-66), brought to Red Alert a strong personal antipathy to the nuclear arms race that had heated up between the world’s major powers. A former R.A.F. pilot who had become involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, George was deadly serious when he wrote the novel, which was originally published in the U.K., as Two Hours to Doom under his nom de plume Peter Bryant. The satirical tone that dominates the film was Kubrick’s innovation, a way to drive home the story even more clearly to an audience that, by 1964, had seen a number of apocalyptic nuclear thrillers. Bryant did not like the idea, though he collaborated on the screenplay and later wrote a novelization of the film, which he dedicated to Kubrick. A pessimist about the world who continued to write about the doomed outcome of a world with nuclear arms, Bryant committed suicide in 1966.