Dr Strangelove

Wednesday 24 December 2025

In Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 cold-war farce, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the world totters on the edge not because of malice alone, but because of process. An American military officer, obsessed with the idea that the Soviets are poisoining the West by introducing fluoridation into their water systems (an eery echo of the current US Health Secretary's stated desire to eliminate fluoridation nationwide), launches the US strategic bomber fleet against the Soviet Union. He believes he will be able to wipe out the Soviets with a first-strike capacity, and then blows his brains out with the only reverse codes committed exclusively to his memory. Automatic Soviet nuclear response mechanisms ensure global annihilation. In an attempt to avert the catastrophe switches are flipped, doctrines invoked, men in rooms reassure one another that everything is under control, and then discover that control has been delegated to an automated Soviet machine with a sense of humour. The laughter is brittle, the rooms are well lit, and the catastrophe is impeccably organised.

Fast-forward six decades and the sets look familiar, albeit refurbished. The United States reassures Europe that she is steady, Europe reassures herself that she is united, and Russia reassures anyone still listening that she is misunderstood. Each builds, modernises, rehearses and calibrates, all in the name of restraint. The joke, as Kubrick would recognise, is that restraint now comes with a procurement line item and a delivery schedule.

The War Room has not vanished; it has merely acquired screens. Where once men argued over circles on maps, they now debate dashboards. Escalation ladders have become colour-coded. Deterrence is presented as a lifestyle choice. Every exercise is defensive, every missile purely stabilising, every troop movement a regrettable necessity that happens to require another brigade and a press release. One imagines General Buck Turgidson, the film's principal US antagonist, nodding approvingly as a slide announces that the build-up is designed to prevent precisely the scenario that the build-up is rehearsing for.

Russia’s contribution to the satire is the Doomsday Machine with a grievance. In the film, the device is infallible and therefore insane. In real life, the device is rhetorically infallible and practically leaky. It threatens apocalypse while carefully avoiding it, signalling resolve while testing thresholds, declaring red lines and then repainting them further east or west depending on the weather. The point is not to end the world, but to keep everyone convinced that it might, which in turn obliges everyone else to prove that they could respond, which obliges it to demonstrate that it anticipated the response. The machine hums contentedly.

Europe, meanwhile, plays the part of the anxious host. She lays the table, checks the exits and apologises for the noise from the neighbours. She insists that her build-up is prudent rather than provocative, overdue rather than excessive, and purely defensive even when it looks suspiciously like an insurance policy against the failure of every assurance she has been given. Her strategic culture has matured, we are told, which in practice means she has learned to smile while signing contracts for artillery shells.

The United States brings managerial optimism. There is always a plan, always a reassurance that escalation is controllable, always a briefing to explain that the worst-case scenario is unlikely. In Kubrick’s world the experts are sincere, articulate and catastrophically wrong. In ours, they are sincere, articulate and statistically hedged. The probability distributions are elegant, the confidence intervals comforting, and the conclusion remains the same: nothing will happen unless something happens, in which case it was unforeseeable but manageable until it was not.

What makes the comparison sting is not the prospect of immediate annihilation, but the choreography. Everyone insists that the dance is designed to prevent anyone stepping on anyone else’s toes, even as the tempo increases and the floor fills. The satire lies in the conviction that more rehearsal reduces the chance of a stumble, when the rehearsal itself requires sharper shoes and louder music.

Kubrick ended with mushroom clouds set to a lullaby, an obscenity rendered musical by repetition. Our ending is likely to be duller and therefore more dangerous: budgets approved, forces postured, doctrines refined, all justified as the price of peace. The lesson of Dr Strangelove was never that leaders are mad, but that systems can be perfectly rational and still march cheerfully towards disaster. Today’s military build-up wears the same grin, only now it is rendered in high definition.

We laugh because the script is familiar. We ought to worry because the production values are better.