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‘Dr. Strangelove’ Is Basically a Documentary"
Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove is a black comedy that ends with the world being completely destroyed in a nuclear war. Many aspects of the film might seem absurd, but according to Daniel Ellsberg, who worked as a nuclear war planner in the 1960s, it’s actually pretty close to reality.
“That was a documentary,” Ellsberg says in Episode 297 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “Everything in that film existed as an operational reality at the time.”
He says that while the specific Doomsday Machine featured in Dr. Strangelove is fictional, the Russian and American nuclear arsenals function as de facto Doomsday Machines, since a first strike by either power against the other would be more than enough to plunge the world into nuclear winter.
“If [the US] had followed their actual plans, and they did what they were supposed to do under wartime contingency, it would have destroyed nearly all human life,” Ellsberg says.
Not only that, but the idea for the Doomsday Machine in Dr. Strangelove was inspired by the real-life thinking of Herman Kahn, one of Ellsberg’s colleagues at RAND. “Kahn’s words are actually quoted in the movie, and Kahn himself wanted a cut, he thought he should get some royalties from this,” Ellsberg says. “And Kubrick had to assure him that wasn’t the way it worked.”
Unfortunately nothing has really changed since 1964, and the chances of an accident or misunderstanding leading to a nuclear holocaust remain terrifyingly high. “It is time for another Dr. Strangelove, or at least a revival of it,” Ellsberg says. “And I would be very interested in the reactions in the Pentagon to a viewing of that movie.”
From Geek's Guide to the Galaxy
https://www.wired.com/.../03/geeks-guide-doctor-strangelove/ S