Exactly! Another pedantic geek. The OP should put in in the goofs list.

The old "this is the worst movie" thread. Classic.

I just watched this movie for the first time and I thought it was very good - very similar to 'The Bedford Incident'. I didn't have an issue at all with anything you mentioned, even if they are technically inaccurate, which I don't know to be the case one way or the other.

You do realize the SR 71/ A12 needs lots of air to air refuelling? Nor did the Russians ever get anything near them. Closest they came was the much later Mig 25, mach 3 for very very short distances and this was only in the early 70s, not 63.
The only AWACS in 63 was the old Warning Star version of a prop Super Connie? Even a modern AWACS has a few hundred mile scope.
The nukes over Japan were toy versions of modern nukes.
The B 58 used to fire the AIM 47 was a specially modified airframe with a modified radome to house a Air to Air search radar. It was only used as the F-103 interceptor never materialized. This was not an operational machine, nor were B 52 loaded with air to air missiles
I stand by my earlier assesment, this movie sucks.

Many Japanese who were in a city over which a nuke went off and who were not vaporized instantly would disagree with you.
Those were kiloton bombs. The bombs in the film are megaton bombsa whole other ballgame. Fat Man and Little Boy exploded with a combined force of 36 kilotons. The two bombs dropped on NYC in the story have a combined force of 40 megatons. That's over a thousand times more explosive force.
1964-era NYC would be vaporized/firebombed-to-a-crisp and Newark, too. In addition, a lot of southern New England, New Jersey, etc. would be irradiated and made unlivable. But they were still pretty naive about radiation back in 1964:
http://alanpetersnewsbriefs.blogspot.com/2007/05/effect-of-20-megaton-nuclear-bomb.html
http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
It is a stupid premise from this vantage point. Now we know that the fail-safes were stronger than we thought (since we're still here). And it's unlikely a U.S. President would ever drop a bomb on NYC, for any reason. But at the time, nuclear war theater, however ridiculous, was a compelling nightmare.
I wonder if the author/screenwriter picked New York as a target because of the World's Fair.
Innsmouth Free Press
http://www.innsmouthfreepress.com

Where to start, fighter interceptors do not have one tenth of the range shown, especially with burners lit.
They do if they're F-12s. The recon version (the only one that went to production) once went from London to Los Angeles at over 1400 knots and crossed the US in little over an hour on several occasions.
The whole launching decoy planes and calibrated missles, bombers that launch air to air missles straight upuggghhhh.
During the '60s the B-52 typically carried two ADM-20 Quail decoys. I don't recall the bombers carrying air to air missiles in the movie, but it has been a long time since I saw it. In any case, the B-70 was intended to carry the AIM-47, a very long range all-aspect missile which was successfully launched from both the B-58 and the prototype F-12.
Even now 50 years later we don't have the technology to watch a whole air battle over Russia unfold on a display.
What, the several AWACS that would be involved can't uplink to the Capitol?
i'm sure if a nuke goes off over a city you would never know it and be vaporized instantly.
Many Japanese who were in a city over which a nuke went off and who were not vaporized instantly would disagree with you.

They had to use stock footage, the movie was made on a lesser budget, and the defense department refused to help the movie production.
~ I'm a 21st century man and I don't wanna be here.

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You guys complaining about technical inaccuracies. "It showed technology they didn't have in 1963, so therefore it was the worst movie ever made". Who cares if they had long-range radar triangulation in 1963, or if their decoys were that effective? And who says the film was not set in a future decade as predicted technical improvements?
But all that aside, it's a low-budget drama. Why some people care so much about the technical realism is beyond me. It was NOT a documentary, you know.

I wouldn't say everything, but this film is stock-footage hell and production incompetency. Just read the very long Goofs section. I'd have expected Roger Corman or Ed Wood, Jr. to have made this film.
Like,
, did the Air Force threaten to sue if a Hustler bomber was called by its real name, so the producers had to use a WWII name?
It's a riveting story, but I give it a 5 based on
production quality.

Dr Strangelove was showered with cooperation.
[Citation Needed]
http://books.google.com/books?id=uHNvAeD4yR4C&pg=PA150&lpg=PA1 50#v=onepage&q&f=false
It's not surprising that the United States Air Force refused to offer Kubrick military cooperation, the result being that the entire film was completed in England.
http://kubrickfilms.warnerbros.com/common/Kubrick_101.html
Since the U.S. Air Force would not cooperate with a comedy film about nuclear war, Adam faithfully re-created the interior of a B-52 bomber using drawings and photos he found in various flying and science magazines.

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I suggest you watch the featurette on the Fail-Safe DVD before bitching about technical inaccuracies. Given that the filmmakers could not ANY cooperation from the US government in making the film "technical inaccuracies" were only to be expected. (Lumet's commentary on the DVD also has some remarks relevant to this.) In contrast, Dr Strangelove was showered with cooperation.
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Apparently, yes! Those shots in the film of the bombers taking off is actually a single bootlegged clip of the SAME plane because the Fail-Safe filmmakers could not get ANY footage whatsoever from the rental houses which handle such things.
You should be grateful the film got made at all!

It is distracting to see technical inaccuracies especially for an audience used to Desert Storm realism. The scene that always makes me laugh is the video clip of Delta Dart fighters, after being ordered to catch the bombers by going into after-burners fire their missles. Perhaps it was difficult for the production staff to acquire military stock footage in the 1962 Cold War environment?
I have no idea what you're talking about. They're the wrong planes? They're doing things that are unrealistic?
Maybe for me ignorance is bliss.

It is distracting to see technical inaccuracies especially for an audience used to Desert Storm realism. The scene that always makes me laugh is the video clip of Delta Dart fighters, after being ordered to catch the bombers by going into after-burners fire their missles. Perhaps it was difficult for the production staff to acquire military stock footage in the 1962 Cold War environment?
This film is not a Military Channel documentary but rather, a drama that illustrates the brutally cold reality of our government's policy of Mutually Assured Destruction. Perhaps it is easier for those of us who lived through this era to understand the palpable tension that came from growing up during the Cold War, in contrast to the national security theater of today's War on Terrorism, it's color coded alert schedule (still orange after all these years), and our business as usual attitude to the 9/11 tragedies.
In the early 1960s, many of today's "seniors" can recall neighbors building back-yard bomb shelters or receiving Civil Defense training in the Boy Scouts. Planning for the end of the world provided surreal start to the 1960s and this film is a response to the very real terror of the widespread human annihilation threatened by what was known as World War Three, and it stands as a left-brained bookend to the right-brained perspective of Stanley Kubrick's comic masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

The whole movie could have been part of Black's nightmare.
(I just blew my mind)
You Fill Me with Inertia.

Very well said. I view the matador nightmare as a wrapper around this notion.

Realism isn't the only quality I look for in movies.part of the reason I like "Fail-Safe" is that it feels like a nightmare, operating on its own internal logic.

I was not responding to you, so either you are trolling or being needlessly abrasiveeither way you are wasting your time

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You are stupidI would write something more articulate, but it would be lost on you

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How do you know what I have heard of or know? I was in the Airforce for 32 years, joined in 82. Aviation technician. Sorry still stand by my original assesment, in 63 there was no way to track a bomber acoss the Soviet Union.

People watching this movie in the 21st century tend to forget that this movie was extrapolating technical aspects of the cold war into a future scenario. This movie was meant to be speculative, not a documentary of the Cold War circa 1963/1964. Probably the idea was that the events of this movie were happening more around 1970 or so. And in 1963 (when the movie was actually made) no one knew exactly where we'd be technologically speaking in 1970. They could only guess.

Good points about the general public not getting as much information back then either. This was at the height of the Cold War and only a couple of years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Given the fear of the times, and the misinformation stuff used, the film might very well have intentionally shown our bombers and fighters having exaggerated abilities to try to fool the Russians.