Strange but true: “Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” is a mere fifteen days older than I am.

One of both Peter Sellers (back in the days when he might play half the characters in a film) and Stanley Kubrick’s greatest films, Dr. Strangelove is the ultimate send-up of the cold war mentality and the old “they can’t beat us if we wipe out all human life first!” mentality. While I didn’t see the film until I was in college, I was raised with plenty of cold-war “the Russians are going to bomb us all into oblivion” and “there might be a Russian sub off Long Island right now!” and air-raid drills in elementary school, all of which I’m sure goes a long way to explaining my fascination with the apocalypse.

Of course, Dr. Strangelove was all fiction, right? Apparently not. The new book “Doomsday Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon” not only discusses the actual doomsday plans of the cold war but mentions Dr. Strangelove by name in the title. As we rush headlong into the past, with the US insisting on missile defense systems and Russia posturing and resuming nuclear bomber flights, we seem to have travelled less far from our past than we might have though.

Why do we let people who think that nuclear war might be acceptable run our countries?

In writing this I have a weak recollection of my mother possibly calling me “Dr. Strangelove” when I was young. Endearing, mocking, insightful recollection or manufactured memory, I’ll never know. I will, however, always remember the image of Slim Pickens riding a nuclear warhead down to armageddon.

Via: Strangelove’s Doomsday: fiction meets facts | MetaFilter
[tags]dr. strangelove, peter sellers, the bomb, cold war, nuclear[/tags]

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