Fail Safe

Hal Schaefer wrote a score for the film but director Sidney Lumet decided to release it without any music. However, a promotional single by The Hal Schaefer Quintet, "Fail Safe Parts 1 and 2", was released on the Colpix label. There is music on the trailer, and it is probably extracted from Schaefer's score.

The interior shots of the bombers, Convair B-58 Hustlers, were actually shot inside a commercial airline simulator then under repair at a a New York airport. The three crew members sit within feet of each other in an open cockpit layout. In an actual B-58, the world's first fly-by-wire and supersonic bomber (and capable of twice the speed of sound), the three-man crew of pilot, bombardier/navigator, and defense systems specialist were seated in tandem and had no physical contact with one another. To make survivable ejection possible on such a high-speed aircraft, each compartment was specifically designed as a wholly contained clam-shell "pod" that would be ejected intact if the need arose. As a result, the crew had to rely on an internal telecommunications system to talk, or a string-and-pulley system that ran along the cabin wall to exchange notes if those systems failed. It's speculated that this pod design was incorporated as a presidential safeguard on modern 747 versions of Air Force One, as implied in the film Air Force One (1997).

[FINAL CREDIT]: The producers of this film wish to stress that it is the stated position of the Department of Defense and the United States Air Force that a rigidly enforced system of safeguards and controls insure that occurrences such as those depicted in this story cannot happen