Interpretations of 2001: A Space Odyssey machines". Kubrick was also confronted with the fact that, during the production of the film, the US and USSR had agreed not to put any nuclear weapons into outer space by signing the Outer Space Treaty. Alexander Walker in a book he wrote with Kubrick's assistance and authorisation, states that Kubrick eventually decided that as nuclear weapons the bombs had "no place at all in the film's thematic development", now being an "orbiting red herring" which would "merely have raised irrelevant questions to suggest this as a reality of the twenty-first century". In the Canadian TV documentary "2001 and Beyond",
Interpretations of 2001: A Space Odyssey "The cyclical evolution from ape to man to spaceman to angel-starchild-superman is complete". The monolith appears four times in "2001: A Space Odyssey": on the African savanna, on the moon, in space orbiting Jupiter, and near Bowman's bed before his transformation. After the first encounter with the monolith, we see the leader of the apes have a quick flashback to the monolith after which he picks up a bone and uses it to smash other bones. Its usage as a weapon enables his tribe to defeat the other tribe of apes occupying the water hole who have not learned how