Dr. Strangelove Showed the Folly of Nuclear War

On Jan. 29, 1964, a triple premiere in New York, London and Toronto launched one of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpieces into the chilly Cold War atmosphere:

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the

Bomb. Kubrick described it as a “nightmare comedy,” and 60 years later, the immediacy of the nightmare might be missed. Shot at Shepperton Studios outside London in 1963, Dr. Strangelove was created in the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which unfolded over 13 terrifying days in October 1962 as President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev played a deadly game of chicken before stepping back from the precipice.

Kubrick, who subscribed to the

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and voraciously read nuclear warfare literature, had long been interested in the theme of nuclear war being started, in his words, “either by accident or madness.” He found a blueprint for a film in the novel Red Alert by Peter George, a former Royal Air Force pilot, and enlisted Peter Sellers, his collaborator on 1962’s Lolita, for the project. Praising the actor’s “high level of comedy acting skill,” he told THR’s Rambling Reporter in 1962, “I wanted to make this picture very much and Sellers is the only man who could make this possible.”

Kubrick’s vision of nuclear combat is intricately and logically plotted: After Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) orders an unauthorized first strike on the USSR, President Merkin Muffley (Sellers) desperately works the hotline to avoid Armageddon while excitable Gen. Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott in a rare comic role) wants to seize the opportunity. When things go south, the title scientist (Sellers again) concocts a survival plan for the lucky 1 percent, 90 percent of them attractive women. In the end, a newsreel montage of mushrooming H-bomb detonations explodes across the screen to the tune of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again Someday.”

A Columbia Pictures release,

Strangelove was well received by critics and moviegoers, with

THR calling it “the cleverest satirical handling of a current global apprehension ever treated onscreen.” It earned Oscar noms for best picture, director, actor and adapted screenplay — incidentally, four of the categories for which Christopher Nolan’s nuclear war-themed Oppenheimer is nominated.