Classic Movie Review: 'Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb'

Dr. Strangelove (1964)

Directed by Stanley Kubrick

Written by Terry Southern, Peter George, Stanley Kubrick

Starring Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens

Release Date January 29th, 1964

Published July 24th, 2023

Dr. Strangelove is very much a movie of its time, in terms of its satire. When it was released in 1964 it was a boiling mad, raging cauldron of immediate satire of world events currently in motion. Imagine something like Oliver Stone's W, a film made and released while George W. Bush was still President, and you can get the sense of how timely Dr. Strangelove was in 1964. It's also far better than W which was a desperately bland attempted polemic. There was nothing bland about Dr. Strangelove in 1964. The film was a bitter and biting savaging of the powerful in a fashion that genuinely set the leaders of the day on edge.

Powerful leaders in military and government would have preferred that audiences in 1964 not know just how desperately unsafe our approach to nuclear weapons was at the time. They wanted us to be reassured that their leaders were well prepared, thoughtful, and of sound judgment. The reality, of course, was that the people in charge of our nuclear program were human beings just as potentially flawed and failing as anyone else. Dr. Strangelove takes the idea of egotistical, deeply flawed individuals in charge of world destroying technology to its most ugly, terrifying and yet logical conclusion.

The thought experiment was thus: What if one of our military leaders happened to come unglued and decided to end the world? What would it take to stop this military leader from causing the end of the world? Was it possible for one crazed lunatic in our leadership to end the world? The answer was a very uneasy, yes. The fact of the matter, though we were never blown up by nuclear weapons during the Cold War, it was always a possibility. All it took was a couple of bad breaks and one determined nut to bring about a global catastrophe.

Dr. Strangelove exposes the absurdity of this idea, putting the idea in your head and forcing you to understand the stakes of a Cold War. Cold War has become synonymous with a period of time from Post World War 2 through the fall of the USSR in the early 1990s. But the real definition of a Cold War was simply a war that didn't involve fighting battles with troops and guns. It was a war of behind the scenes maneuvering and global chess. It was a balancing of big egos, bitter words, and unrelenting suspicion. The only thing keeping us all alive was the desire among our leaders not to die. Had they come up with a solution that they could have comfortably survived, they might not have been so good at holding back the nukes.

We look back on it now with a sort of wistful sigh of relief, as if we aren't still under threat of Nuclear annihilation. But, the fact is, Dr. Strangelove is actually still entirely relevant. Nuclear détente is still a thing. We still have a standing agreement with other countries capable of having nuclear weapons that we won't destroy each other but we all still could destroy each other. We just don't talk about nuclear weapons anymore aside from vague observations during Presidential election years when someone will allude to not wanting so and so to have the nuclear launch codes.

So, yeah, we are still at the whims of madmen; even in a supposedly post-cold war era. Dr. Strangelove is still a realistic possibility. We live everyday with the fact that a member of our government could, theoretically fire off nuclear weapons. We also live in a world where Vladimir Putin is now leading an adversarial government in Russia and could use Nuclear Weapons if they chose to. If Russia wanted to annihilate the world, they have that option just as much as America does. The only thing preventing this are our leaders but it only takes a second for someone to consider the idea and bring an end to the entire global population.

The Cold War era may have ended but the era of Nuclear Weapons is still in the hands of a series of leaders, any of whom could one day make it their policy that they will use a Nuclear Weapon in a conflict. Whatever that conflict may be. General Jack T. Ripper may be a fictional creation but he's also a legitimate worst case scenario for nuclear armed countries. So is President Merkin Muffley, an ineffectual figurehead of a President, seen as powerless and overwhelmed by the pressure of the moment despite having risen to lead the most powerful nation on Earth.

George C. Scott's General Turgidson is another realistic creation amid the dark satire of Cold War politics. He's a Hawk who has deep and abiding suspicion of communism and any kind of leadership outside of his own. People like General Turgidson are how we ended up living our lives in the shadow of potential nuclear annihilation. People like Scott's General led the charge to create such weapons as a supposed 'deterrent' to a Hot War or shooting war. He's also someone who fought to give members of the military like himself a place on the chain of command that allows for a General Ripper to have the power he needs to move around the overall chain of command.

Chain of Command is a good metaphor here as chains are only as strong as their links. General Ripper in Dr. Strangelove proves to be a weak link in the nuclear chain and that's all it takes, one busted link in the chain of command to bring about worldwide disaster. Is it farfetched? Today, yes, it's a little farfetched. We have more communication technology today than existed in 1964, more supposed fail-safes. But can it be entirely ruled out? No, not entirely. I know some might dismiss that but it is true, as long as Nuclear Weapons exist anywhere in the world, we are always a few buttons away from world annihilation.

Dr. Strangelove was the first movie to bring this notion to our collective thoughts. The film was and is a warning that having nuclear weapons in the hands of anyone, leader or otherwise, means that we are always in the shadow of those weapons. As much as we'd like to ignore or dismiss that fact, it's the truth. When Dr. Oppenheimer spoke of putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle, he was talking about trying to convince the leaders of the world to stop making nuclear weapons and to destroy the ones we already have. That's literally the only way we can be sure that the world is safe from these weapons. As long as they exist, there is always a General Jack T. Ripper or a President Merkin Muffley or a drunken Russian Premier, some leader in the world who could simply decide that it's all over.

That's why Dr. Strangelove remains among the most relevant and necessary movies ever made. It's a horror movie about nuclear weapons. It's a horror movie about the egos of people we choose to elevate as leaders. It's a horror movie about how frail and human we all truly are, always vulnerable to annihilation on a whim. Distract yourself all that you like, but Dr. Strangelove is always lurking and will always be there as long as weapons of mass destruction exist at just the push of a button, the turn of a key, or a phone call from one leader to another.

There is a scene in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer in which Cillian Murphy's Dr. Oppenheimer admits to Matt Damon's General that he can be certain that the weapons test they are about to do won't destroy the entire planet. When pressed by the General, Oppenheimer says the chance is very, very small that they could light the atmosphere on fire and kill all life on Earth but he can't completely rule it out. Similarly, we can't rule out nuclear annihilation to this day.

Dr. Oppenheimer was still alive when Dr. Strangelove came out and acted as the proof of concept of exactly what Oppenheimer was warning us about regarding the 'nuclear genie.' Coincidentally, the character of Dr. Strangelove is loosely based on one of Oppenheimer's colleagues in the Manhattan Project, Edward Teller, known as the real life Dr. Strangelove. Teller created the H-Bomb and while Oppenheimer was trying to rally support for a Test Ban Treaty, a treaty that could have ended the Cold War in the 1950s, Teller was advocating for even more destructive weapons of mass destruction as a deterrent for war. Teller won and the satire of Dr. Strangelove was born just as Teller was triumphing.

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