“Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, it’s a war room.”
Rogue Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), stationed at Burpelson Air Force Base, has gone a little wacko. He believes the fluoride in the nation’s water supply is a Communist plot to poison America. To retaliate he has used a back door to access the codes to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Ripper is the only one who knows the code to call off the attack. Unwittingly stuck with Ripper is RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers) who is on exchange from Britain. All communication has been suspended and the B-52 bombers are in the air.
All the big shots are assembled in the Pentagon War Room to figure out what to do. Among the higher echelon are The President of the United States Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers), Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), former Nazi Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers), and Russian Ambassador Alex de Sadesky (Peter Bull). The president and Sadesky relay to the Soviet Premier Dimitri Kisov of the situation. Sadesky informs the president that the Soviets have a weapon called a Doomsday Machine that will automatically detonate if any key Russian areas are hit. The doomsday machine will wipe out all life on the planet.
When the Air Force Base is infiltrated by American soldiers General Ripper commits suicide so that the code cannot be forced out of him. Captain Mandrake figures out the code and relays it to the president. The code is sent and the bombers return to base. All except for one.
An attack on one of the B-52 bombers damages their communication system and they do not get the code needed to call of their attack. The plane, piloted by Major T.J. “King” Kong (Slim Pickens) is still up in the air and Kong intends on hitting his target.
“Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” was released in 1964 and was directed by Stanley Kubrick. It is a British film. There are a lot of doomsday movies out there. This one is probably the funniest. There are so many things that this movie would correlate with, even now.
Sellers improvised most of his lines. I’m not sure why it was called Dr. Strangelove especially since it is the one character of the three that Sellers plays with the least amount of screen time. Sellers was supposed to play four characters in the movie. The fourth being the Texas pilot King Kong but he hurt his ankle so Pickens was cast as the pilot. Sellers was nominated for a single academy award as best actor playing three different characters in the same movie.
The scene where Gen. Turgidson (Scott) trips and falls in the War Room, and then gets back up and resumes talking as if nothing happened, really was an accident. Stanley Kubrick mistakenly thought that Scott did it in character, so he left it in the movie.
The film led to actual changes in policy to ensure that the events depicted could never really occur in real life.
While shooting aerial footage over Greenland, the second unit camera crew accidentally filmed a secret US military base. Their plane was forced down, and the crew was suspected of being Soviet spies.
In the early 1960s the B-52 was cutting-edge technology. Access to it was a matter of national security. The Pentagon refused to lend any support to the film after they read the script. (Go figure) Set designers reconstructed the B-52 bomber's cockpit from a single photograph that appeared in a British flying magazine. When some American Air Force personnel were invited to view the movie's B-52 cockpit, they said it was a perfect copy. Stanley Kubrick feared that Ken Adam's production design team had used illegal methods and could be investigated by the FBI.
During the attack on Burpelson Air Force Base there is a sign reading "Peace Is Our Profession". It is the actual motto of the Strategic Air Command.