Fail-Safe (novel)

Fail-Safe is a bestselling American novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. Expanded from Wheeler's short story "Abraham '59" (originally published in the Winter 1959 issue of Dissent under the pen name F. B. Aiken), it was initially serialized in three installments in the Saturday Evening Post on October 13, 20, and 27, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The novel was published in book form on October 22, 1962, and was then adapted into a 1964 film of the same name directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Henry Fonda, Dan O'Herlihy, and Walter Matthau. In 2000, the novel was adapted again for a televised play, broadcast live in black and white on CBS. All three works have the same theme, accidental nuclear war, with the same plot.

Fail-Safe was purported to be so similar to an earlier novel, Red Alert (1958), that the latter's author, Peter George, and film producer Stanley Kubrick (whose own forthcoming picture Dr. Strangelove was loosely adapted from George's novel) sued on a charge of copyright infringement, settling out of court.