The dialog in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is replete with “Commies”, “Reds” and “atheists”; it struck me that if you replaced those words with “terrorists”, “jihadist” or “Islamist” the movie wouldn’t loose an iota of effectiveness.
The characters also seem to be straight out of the Bush cabinet. Brig. General Jack Ripper—superbly played by a cigar chomping Sterling Hayden—is insane, and amongst his pet theories are that the addition of fluoride to the water supply is a communist plot, and he only drinks grain alcohol with rain water (Dick Cheney comes to mind with his conviction that Iraq had a hand in the 9/11 plot and the single-handed attack on Iraq). General ‘Buck’ Turgidson, the Airforce Chief of Staff played by a very young George C. Scott, could be Donald Rumsfield still fighting the cold war only against different antagonists. The Slim Pickens character, Maj. T.J. 'King' Kong, pilots the crippled B-52 bomber and like George Bush is equipped with a vernacular that consists of platitudes and simple down-home truisms.
This is Stanley Kubrick’s finest work and it was meant to showcase the acting talents of Peter Sellers who gets three parts: Group Captain Mandrake of the RAF, a mustachioed parody of the decent, self-effacing Brit.; President Merkin Muffley, an effete portrayal with an American accent similar to the one Sellers would later use in Being There; and the ghastly Dr. Strangelove, a grotesque caricature of a Nazi scientist, complete with a Nazi saluting artificial arm. Strangelove has all the characteristics of why I think Sellers is an overrated actor. The German accent is overdone, as is the mechanical arm. It could have been far worse: supposedly Sellers was also to play the part of Maj. Kong but mercifully he wasn’t able to quite master that southern accent. The movie is redeemed by the brilliant acting of George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden and Slim Pickens.
Dr. Strangelove is a savage parody of the “us” and “them” syndrome that marked the foreign policy of the United States during the cold war and a brutal indictment of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. Ripper, who is completely insane, orders his B-52 bombers to launch a nuclear strike against Soviet targets, invoking an arcane defense department rule which allows him to take action unilaterally if the chain of command, i.e., the President and the cabinet, is decapitated. The military bureaucracy makes calling off such an attack virtually impossible because the bombers refuse any communication on normal channels. The only channel open requires a three-letter code before it will be acted upon and obviously that code is with Ripper, who has barricaded himself at the airbase and has asked his men to shoot first and ask questions later. Maj. Kong pilots the crippled B-52 unerringly to its target wearing, in the best tradition of George Bush, a cowboy hat!
Disclaimers by the airforce are shown with the opening credits that such a scenario is impossible and could never happen. I wonder sometimes.