Dr; Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick Productions, Hawk Films, Columbia, 1964)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, August 14) Turner Classic Movies showed one of my all-time favorite films as part of their day-long “Summer Under the Stars” salute to Sterling Hayden: Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Dr. Strangelove began life as Red Alert, also known as Two Hours to Doom, by a writer named Peter George – though for some editions (including the paperback I read) he signed the book with the pseudonym “Peter Bryant.” George’s novel was published in 1958 and dealt with a senile U.S. Air Force general named Quinten who orders an unprovoked nuclear attack on the Soviet Union under “Wing Attack Plan R,” which allows a lower-level commander to order the use of nuclear weapons in case a first strike by an adversary has decapitated the U.S. government and left the President either dead or so disabled he couldn’t order a retaliatory attack. The following year Harvey Wheeler published a short story in Dissent magazine called “Abraham ‘59,” and he and Eugene Burdick turned it into a novel called Fail-Safe which was first published as a three-part serial in The Saturday Evening Post during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and then was put out as a full-length book. Though the U.S. nuclear attack on Russia in Fail-Safe is triggered by accident (a European airliner strays into the zone between American and Russian airspace and leads to a decision to launch the attack), the two plots were similar enough, especially in the detail that the U.S. President actively cooperates with the Soviet government to help shoot down the errant aircraft that are about to start World War III, that George sued Burdick and Wheeler for plagiarism and settled out of court. Director Stanley Kubrick bought the movie rights to Red Alert and hired George to help him write the screenplay. Meanwhile, another production team bought the rights to Fail-Safe and placed it at the same major studio, Columbia, that was co-producing Kubrick’s film.

To research for his film, Kubrick started reading the theoretical literature on how a nuclear war could be fought and won, and he decided that the ideas on that were so ridiculous that the only way he could dramatize their absurdity was to make his movie an out-and-out comedy. So Kubrick added Terry Southern to his writing team, and it was most likely Southern who was responsible for the cartoonish names of the characters. The errant general that invokes “Plan R” and orders an unprovoked attack on the Soviet Union became “Jack D. Ripper” (Sterling Hayden). The President of the United States became “Merkin Muffley” (Peter Sellers) and his principal military advisor became “Buck Turgidson” (George C. Scott, apparently warming up for his Academy Award-willing portrayal of General George S. Patton six years later). His scientific advisor became “Dr. Strangelove” (also Peter Sellers), a wheelchair-bound ex-Nazi who keeps inadvertently referring to President Muffley as “mein Führer,” and in an aside his original German name is revealed to be “Merkwürdigliebe,” which literally means “strange love.” Ripper’s assistant, a British Royal Air Force colonel officially on loan to the U.S. as part of an officer exchange program, is “Lionel Mandrake” (Peter Sellers again), and the base General Ripper commands is called “Burpleson.” (It’s ironic that of the three parts Sellers plays, his accent sounds phoniest when he’s playing a Brit, even though he was British in real life.) The never-seen Russian premier is called “Dmitri Kissoff” and the Russian ambassador is “Alexi de Sadesky” (Peter Bull). There are also supporting characters with equally ridiculous names, including the pilot of the attack plane, Major “King” Kong (Slim Pickens; originally Peter Sellers was supposed to play this part, too, but he had a heart attack just before the scenes inside the B-52 cockpit were to be filmed); his crew member, Lt. Lothar Zogg (James Earl Jones, six years before he was launched into stardom by playing a boxer based on real-life African-American heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson in The Great White Hope on stage and then on film in 1970; I joked to my husband Charles, who returned home from work and joined me for the last three-fifths of the film, that this was 13 years before Jones voiced Darth Vader, also a crew member in service to an evil empire); and the leader of a U.S. commando team that attacks Burpleson, “Bat” Guano (Keenan Wynn).

What follows is a delightfully absurd movie about the follies of warmongering and political bureaucracies in general. General Ripper admits that he ordered the attack because he couldn’t get it up anymore; he traced his problem, common among older men (including me), to fluoridation of drinking water, which he associated with a Communist plot to sap Americans of their vitality and ruin the “purity” of their “bodily fluids.” Ripper tells Mandrake that he still has sex with women, but “I do deny them my essence,” which I presume meant he pulls out before he ejaculates. Ripper’s intent in ordering the unauthorized nuclear attack is to spark an all-out nuclear war with the U.S. as the aggressors, and in a secret Cabinet meeting President Muffley calls to discuss the situation Turgidson seems actually willing to go along with Ripper’s plan. Muffley disagrees, saying, “I am not willing to go down in history as the worst mass murderer since Adolf Hitler.” He calls Soviet Ambassador Sadesky to the War Room meeting and asks for his help getting Premier Kissoff on the phone. When Muffley finally gets Kissoff on the line, he sounds like a hapless teenager who’s borrowed the family car for a date and then wrecked it and is having to call his parents at home. Ambassador Sadesky’s face goes white as he delivers the dreadful news that the Soviets have installed the “Doomsday Device,” a series of nuclear weapons coated with Cobalt-Thorium G that will be automatically fired and envelop the world in a radioactive cloud that will kill all human and animal life on earth and render the planet’s surface uninhabitable for the next 200 years. If even one of the 40 attack planes in General Ripper’s group gets through and drops bombs on its target, this will trigger the Doomsday Device. Sadesky defends his government’s decision to build the Doomsday Device by saying that the U.S. was already considering one of its own, and when that’s questioned, he thunders, “Our source was the New York Times!” Dr. Strangelove admits that the U.S. did consider building and maintaining a Doomsday Device, but decided not to “for reasons that should be obvious right now.” Strangelove also asked why the Soviets kept their Doomsday Device a secret, and Sadesky answers that the Premier was about to announce it at next Monday’s Communist Party conference and “our Premier likes surprises.”

With General Ripper having sealed off all communications to and from Burpleson Air Force Base, the President has no way to contact them. So he orders a commando team to attack Burpleson, whose soldiers defend the base because they’ve been told by General Ripper that the enemy might come disguised in American uniforms. The shots of pitched battles for control of an Air Force base plastered all over with the real Strategic Air Command’s oxymoronic slogan, “Peace Is Our Profession,” are some of the most grimly ironic and satirical in the film. Another aspect of this movie is that the U.S. President is shown as a basically decent but helpless man trying to do the right thing in a roomful of advisers pulling him in different directions, each of which is abysmal and barbaric. At one point he snaps at General Turgidson, “I’m getting tired of your ideas about what is and isn’t possible!” (In other words, he’s more Biden than Trump.) Yet another amazing thing about this movie is the way it equates nuclear war (and the desire for it) with sex. The film’s famous opening sequence is a series of stock shots of B-52’s being kept aloft via air-to-air refueling, and Kubrick, cinematographer Gilbert Taylor, and editor Anthony Harvey (who later became a director himself) emphasize the phallic nature of these images. (The same stock shots were used in 1964 in one of the greatest movies ever made, this one; and one of the worst, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.) Buck Turgidson is called to the War Room in the middle of a sexual encounter with his secretary, called “Miss Scott” on the cast list (Tracy Reed) but identified in some publicity photos wearing a sash proclaiming her “Miss Foreign Policy,” and Turgidson refers to their planned sexual activity in explicitly military terms: “You just start your countdown, and ol’ Bucky will be back before you can say, ‘Blast off!’” Later in the movie, after Kong’s B-52 has successfully dropped its bomb (and created one of Kubrick’s most legendary images: Slim Pickens riding the bomb to its target yelling and waving his cowboy hat in the air like he’s riding a bucking bronco in a rodeo), the men in the War Room are plotting how to keep a fraction of the human race alive by evacuating it into mineshafts.

Dr. Strangelove explains that in order to repopulate the mineshaft communities it will be necessary to have 10 women for every man. Turgidson says, “Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?” “Regrettably, yes,” Dr. Strangelove replies. “But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.” “I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor,” chimes in Russian Ambassador Sadesky – leading Turgidson to panic about how the Russians might build more mineshafts and occupy them with more people than the Americans. “WE CANNOT ALLOW OURSELVES A MINESHAFT GAP!” Turgidson thunders, and later he catches Sadesky photographing the map of Russia inside the War Room with a miniature camera, an indication that the madness that brought the human race to the brink of its own destruction is going to continue even after what’s left of the human race is living under ground and biding its time for the earth’s surface to be habitable again in 200 years. (In this respect Dr. Strangelove is a prequel to the many 1950’s movies, including World Without End, in which humans had already moved underground in the wake of a nuclear holocaust and are still living there even though enough of the earth’s radiation has dissipated that it’s no longer dangerous to live on the surface.) I remember in the early 1970’s thinking that Dr. Strangelove was a worthy successor to the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933), also a satire about political egomania and the needless wars it creates, and a movie that flopped originally and didn’t find its audience until the 1960’s, when young audiences enthralled by Dr. Strangelove and its cynical (to say the least!) view of politics and the military discovered a then-30-year-old movie that had essentially done the same thing.

Dr. Strangelove doesn’t seem quite as funny in the second Trump era as it did in the 1960’s or since, mainly because the U.S. is now being run by a bunch of people who are just as crazy as General Ripper is. Ripper was based on a real-life character, General Daniel Walker, who in the early 1960’s started making speeches not only attacking then-President John F. Kennedy but strongly suggesting that the U.S. needed a dictator and General Walker should be it. The fact that we now have a President who has literally proclaimed himself king (on a fake magazine cover posted to the White House Web site) and a Health and Human Services Secretary who genuinely believes that fluoridation is a source of evil inevitably makes the satire of Dr. Strangelove less amusing and more real. Dr. Strangelove was also based on a real person, and though the various candidates have included Henry Kissinger and Wernher von Braun (former head of the German rocket program and later a top scientific adviser to NASA), but the most likely real person on whom Strangelove was based was Edward Teller, who fled Nazi Germany before World War II, worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer on developing the atomic bomb, then went on the warpath against Oppenheimer and got his security clearance taken away because Oppenheimer was against developing the hydrogen bomb, which was Teller’s pet project. Dr. Strangelove holds up as an all too accurate view of the world as it works (or doesn’t) and the extent to which politicians’ egos (and their libidos) drive the world repeatedly to the brink of catastrophe. It’s frequently been compared to The Mouse That Roared (1959) – also a Columbia movie that satirized the Cold War, had Peter Sellers in multiple roles, and showed a sequence of the world succumbing to nuclear annihilation (though in The Mouse That Roared that sequence is a nightmare fantasy, not reality) – but Dr. Strangelove is a much deeper, richer movie, and it holds up as well as it does precisely because its depiction of the base motives of politicians and the entrenched stupidity with which they make major life-or-death decisions rings all too true today – indeed, even truer in 2025 than it did in 1964 on the eve of President Lyndon Johnson’s insane escalation of the Viet Nam war, which among other things would leave a lot of young people receptive to the message of relentless political satires like Duck Soup and Dr. Strangelove.