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

How will the world end? Which political rivalries and conflicts, military strategies and technologies, human delusions and decisions, accidents and unintended consequences will bring about global disaster? What kind of society will be left after this disaster? These are the questions at the heart of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Made at a time when nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union was a real possibility, the film is menacing, exhilarating, thrilling, insightful and very funny, and it retains its power today when humanity is facing new global challenges.

Based on an in-depth, step-by-step analysis of Dr. Strangelove and extensive research in the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts London, this short monograph (of 114 pages) discusses how Kubrick’s project changed shape across several years of research, writing and production, and shows that, in the end, Kubrick and his collaborators constructed the film as an intellectually stimulating and morally challenging, emotional rollercoaster ride.

Kubrick’s masterpiece has long been recognised by historians, psychologists and film scholars as one of the key artistic expressions of the nuclear age. Unlike previous studies of Dr. Strangelove, this book foregrounds the many connections the film establishes between the Cold War and World War II, more precisely - and quite shockingly - between sixties America and Nazi Germany. How did Dr. Strangelove, an adaptation of the British nuclear thriller Two Hours to Doom (1958), come to be named after a nuclear strategist who is absent from the novel and appears only briefly in the film? Why does he turn out to be a Nazi? And what do his sinister ideas for post-apocalyptic survival in mineshafts have to do with the sexual anxieties and fantasies of the military men who destroy life on the surface of the Earth?