Dr. Strangelove or: How I Killed God and Learned to Love the Nihilism

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882.[1]

You could say Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Cold War black comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb was a wakeup call for America. The New York Times’ film reviewer at the time, Bosley Crowther, suggested the film was, “based upon a modicum of truth.”[2] But was this just a spoof having a bit of fun at the expense of America’s Cold War political and military leadership, or a work of art that had a more serious message? The film was based on Peter George’s novel, and more serious treatment of nuclear policy, Red Alert (1958), but as Kubrick was crafting the screenplay he attempted to keep it somewhat serious. “Ideas kept coming to me which I would discard because they were so ludicrous,” said Kubrick in a 1970 interview, “I kept saying to myself, ‘I can’t do that—people will laugh’. But after a month or so I began to realize that all the things I was throwing out were the most truthful.”[3] Dr. Strangelove can be read as Kubrick not just offering a political critique of nuclear policy, but also offering a deeper moral critique. In doing so Kubrick took the core tenets of political realism and pushed them beyond their limit to reveal their moral nihilism.[4] While the scenario Kubrick painted was entirely hypothetical and bent the reality of nuclear policy, it nevertheless reveals historical fragments that suggest that the push towards hyper-realism, which in turn lead to a sense of moral nihilism by the early 1960s in the United States, was indeed real. Dr. Strangelove can be understood as emblematic of a growing trend in the early 1960s to question and expose that moral nihilism. The political realism of the Cold War was not primarily pragmatic, but also rooted in ideology—an assertion that is also made by Dr. Strangelove.

One of the most thorough analyses of America's atomic culture is Margot Henriksen's Dr. Strangelove's America (1997), which systematically challenges the assertion that substantial dissent towards nuclear weapons did not occur until the 1980s. Henriksen argues that the arrival of the bomb in the 1940s split American culture into two distinct groups: a culture of consensus and a culture of dissent. The bomb became the, "unifying symbol of American safety and security in the culture of consensus," she argues, while, "at the same time the bomb became the disunifying symbol for American insecurity, immorality, insanity, and rebelliousness in the culture of dissent."[5] When Dr. Strangelove is viewed through this framework, Kubrick can be seen as highlighting these two cultures by playing them off one another. Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper insanely puts his faith in the bomb while Group Captain Lionel Mandrake challenges his authority by appeal to universal morality. Similarly, President Merkin Muffley is faced with the flippant attitude of General Buck Turgidsen and his reluctance to give up strategic and ideological presuppositions for the sake of avoiding apocalypse. In the 1940s and 1950s the cultural consensus reigned supreme only to be fragmented during the 1960s, fuelled by the Berlin crisis, the craze for bomb shelters, and the Cuban Missile Crisis—allowing for visible emergence of the culture of dissent.[6] This shifting public discourse and culture toward dissent also fits with the periodisation developed by Scott Zeman and Michael Amundson in their collection of essays, Atomic Culture (2004). Zeman and Amundson break down the post-war period in an effort to highlight the shifting attitudes towards nuclear technology through an analysis of popular culture. Early, High, Late, and Post Atomic Culture are the four distinct periods they identify, which I will briefly describe in order to place Dr. Strangelove within this framework.[7]

Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove

Early Atomic Culture spanned the years 1945 to 1948, and embodied a sense of hope for the future and a celebration of the benefits of nuclear technology. Little Boy and Fat Man brought World War II to an end and spared America from a costly invasion of Japan. Atomic Culture included a fascination with nuclear technology and a desire to understand nuclear physics. These years allowed America to enjoy prosperity under a nuclear monopoly. High Atomic Culture, spanning the years 1949 to 1963, was initiated by the first successful Soviet nuclear test. The Second Red Scare, inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and the threat of mutually assured destruction, were some of the defining features that shaped this age. Atomic Culture shifted into overdrive, albeit a romanticisation of the bomb. Nuclear jargon seeped into many facets of popular culture from Skip Stanley's sci-fi rockabilly hit 'Satellite Baby' (1956) to The Atomic Kid (1954) starring Mickey Rooney. The horrors of nuclear war's reality become lost in its illusory popularisation. Late Atomic Culture, from 1964 to 1991, entailed the fracturing of the culture of consensus Henriksen refers to. The arms race and its tension manifested itself as the cusp of Hot War. The moral righteousness of America's foreign, and indeed nuclear policy, became the subject of scrutiny, especially in the wake of the Vietnam War. The Three Mile Island accident in 1979 certainly did no favours to the nuclear consensus. Post Atomic Culture, from 1992 to the present, could be defined as a period of ambiguity, sense of loss, or even of nostalgia. The collapse of the Soviet Union certainly eased nuclear tension, but raised uncertainties about America's nuclear role. The nostalgia for an earlier Atomic Culture was jokingly portrayed in the 1990s on the popular television cartoon The Simpsons.[8]

Zeman and Amundson's framework is useful for an analysis of Dr. Strangelove within Cold War culture, especially in synthesis with Henriksen's thesis. I would locate Dr. Strangelove at the transition between High and Late Atomic Culture, or, as a transition between a culture of nuclear consensus to a culture of nuclear dissent. This shift in culture is also exemplified by films such as Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959), Rod Sterling and John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May (1964), and Sidney Lumet and Walter Bernstein’s Fail Safe (1964). The influence of the late 1950s to early 1960s political climate can be seen weaved vividly throughout Dr. Strangelove. There are many fragments of history that surface during the film, so a detailed analysis of all of them is beyond the scope of this essay. I will however elaborate on some of the major motifs Kubrick uses to contextualise this film historically, as well as a means to support my argument. As aforementioned, the common theme that ties all these motifs together is a manifestation of a moral nihilism guided by an ideologically driven political realism. Although the unfolding of events in Dr. Strangelove is entirely hypothetical, Kubrick nevertheless drew upon a myriad of contemporary sources to make his statement to America.

Grant B. Stillman has attempted to uncover the impetus for Dr. Strangelove by referring to the February 17th, 1961 issue of Time as the “Rosetta Stone”, which is somehow a revolutionary piece of evidence that unlocks the ingredients that made the film.[9] I would argue Stillman’s claim of a “Rosetta Stone”, as plausible as it may seem, is perhaps over-zealous, as the political milieu Kubrick would have been immersed in in the early 1960s was already saturated with discourse on nuclear policy. Being a former photo-journalist for Look, Kubrick is known to have been well-read on the subject, and merely being present in the late 1950s and early 1960s would certainly be enough for him to be fully aware of the politics of the bomb without simply picking up an issue of Time.[10] Kubrick also talked to military strategists Thomas Schelling and Herman Kahn, and the influence of Kahn’s 1960 book On Thermonuclear War essentially serves as the cornerstone of the film’s main plot device, the Doomsday Machine.[11] Despite Kahn’s detailed explanation of the theoretical Doomsday Machine, he makes a rejection of such a system based on several arguments including an explicitly moral argument. “A failure [of the Doomsday Machine] kills too many people and kills them too automatically,” he argues, “there is no chance of human intervention, control, and final decision.”[12] Even if Kahn rejected the Doomsday Machine, the mere proposal of it, albeit hypothetical, as the ultimate end in nuclear strategy is enough for Kubrick to question the moral implication of making such a strategic jump by including it as the central plot device in the film. Kahn’s book deals with the nuclear strategy of deterrence that prevailed and set the tone of Cold War itself. In the film, Strangelove asserts, “deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the fear to attack,” a concise summary of psychological impetus for mutually assured destruction.

The post-war nuclear arms race was the defining feature of American military and political policy. Michael Sherry argues that the, “1960s marked the apogee of America’s post-1945 militarization.”[13] The Kennedy administration ramped up defence spending, especially in contrast to Eisenhower’s cuts to conventional spending. The Eisenhower administration became reliant on the strategic power and cost efficiency of nuclear weapons rather than massive spending on large conventional forces. This increase in defence spending on conventional forces during Kennedy’s administration did not however mitigate the massive stockpiling of nuclear weapons. By 1967 the all-time high for nuclear warheads reached 32,500.[14] If we assume each warhead was several megatons in equivalent TNT, then the cumulative power of the stockpile can be imagined, if not visualised, in the hypothetical event it was used in a short space of time. In Dr. Strangelove the narrator comments in a news-like manner, “each B-52 can deliver a nuclear bomb-load of fifty megatons, equal to sixteen times the explosive force of all the bombs and shells used by all the armies in World War Two.” The devastation brought to Europe was still fresh in the minds of Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, so to have the power of that devastating war multiplied seemed so abhorrent it was almost incomprehensible.

But the memory of the war, especially in the face of the perceived threat from the Soviet Union, did not dampen the Kennedy administration’s thirst for nuclear superiority. Throughout his presidential election campaign Kennedy alluded to America’s lack of vigilance in the nuclear arms race. Referring to the Eisenhower administration, on August 14th, 1958 Kennedy argued that a mutual deterrence scenario that created a “balance of terror”, was no longer the case, rather, the United States was, “rapidly approaching that dangerous period which General [James M.] Gavin and others have called the ‘gap’ or the ‘missile-lag period’”[15] Kubrick satirised this desperate need to close the missile gap when General Turgidsen implores with President Muffley after Strangelove suggests that they shelter Americans in mineshafts after the nuclear holocaust, “Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!” Turgidsen is concerned, even after the unthinkable, that the Russians will also have mineshafts to shelter their population, and that if they have an advantage in a post-apocalyptic world they may strike back. His belief in the ideological superiority of the United States is not even dampened by nihilism of the situation.

George C. Scott as General "Buck" Turgidson

Kubrick creatively uses several instances of juxtaposition and irony as an immanent critique of the absurdities of militarism—absurdities that when they are treated with a dose of flippancy and black comedy, and from the perspective of the fourth wall, allow questions regarding their moral legitimacy to be raised. One of the most memorable lines from the film is President Muffley shouting at General Turgidsen and the Soviet Ambassador, Alexi de Sadesky, “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room.” It is ironic that these men can unleash untold death on humanity but must not ‘war’ with each other in a room whose very purpose is war. The fictitious Burpelson Air Force Base, commanded by the war-mongering General Ripper, displays a slogan that shows similar irony that is squarely pointed at moral nihilism of strategic deterrence and mutually assured destruction. As friendly forces spill their blood to stop Ripper’s madness, signs scattered around the base declare, “Peace is Our Profession.” It stands in stark contrast to the actual purpose of a military. Nuclear deterrence may create peace, but it is a paradoxical peace, because in hypothetical event of war, its justification rests on highly unstable moral ground. Kubrick’s use of this phrase was not mere fiction: the slogan of Strategic Air Command for the entirety of the Cold War was actually “Peace is Our Profession.”[16] Similarly, A promotional single distributed with the film, ‘Love That Bomb’ by Dr. Strangelove and the Fallouts captures this same sense of juxtaposition that exposes a deeper moral nihilism. Its campy music, melody, and lyrics sound like a goofy dance-floor shaker from the 1950s rather than a moral critique: “Love that bomb. I’ve got a strange love for that bomb. I can hardly wait for World War Three. Here’s the way we think it’s gonna be.”[17] The song offers more explanatory power to Kubrick’s choice of name for the eponymous doctor. The love for the bomb, within the context of a paradoxical peace, was indeed strange, if not morally vacuous.

The seemingly complex intertwining of morality and religion, and the question of their inextricability is a persistent theme that also runs throughout Dr. Strangelove. Doubt is implicitly raised about the homogeneity of Christianity and the universality of Christian morality. General Ripper is evidently a devoutly religious man who fears the supposed atheism of communism—without God how can communists be moral? Despite Ripper’s insanity justified by piety, Mandrake also displays a religious faith that hopes and prays for a peaceful resolution to the situation. How can their two faiths be incompatible if they believe in the same God? Whose God is the real God? Henriksen has drawn upon similar themes from the early to mid 1960s to suggest that there was indeed a moral and spiritual crisis in America in response to the height of the nuclear threat. The paranoia of humanity’s annihilation pushed morality to its limit, and led to, “an extensive questioning of the nature and relevance of God, of all spiritual and political authority”.[18] Henriksen refers to a starkly conceived article from Time two years after the release of Dr. Strangelove that took Nietzsche’s famous aphorism and posed it as a question to its readers: “Is God Dead?”[19] The article asserts that the fundamental nature of God must be readdressed in light of the shifting currents of history and that, “Christian atheists are waking the churches to the brutal reality that the basic premise of faith—the existence of a personal God … —is now subject to profound attack.”[20] The doubts expressed regarding the diminished nature of God in the article did not however mitigate its ideological entrenchment, allowing the writer to declare by recalling Marx’s aphoristic attack on religion, “nearly one in every two men on earth live in thralldom to a brand of totalitarianism that condemns religion as the opiate of the masses.”[21] Similarly, General Turgidson’s fear of the atheism of communism pushes him to loudly protest the Soviet ambassador’s acceptance into the War Room—a fear that offers a shrill juxtaposition to his cavalier acceptance of casualties for the sake of the ultimate game of one-upmanship.

This paranoid fear and its accompanying devaluing of all human life for the sake of ideological and individual ends was an all-too-apparent thread running through American society in the early 1960s. The Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis pushed the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war and fuelled a real fear of an impending apocalypse. An August 18th 1961 article in Time highlighted this fear—a fear that a post-apocalyptic world would become highly invidualised and certainly compatible with American ideology—but questioned the legitimacy of its moral righteousness.[22] The contrast between the Second Amendment and the Christian ethic of reciprocity, ‘love thy neighbour’, are highlighted as paradoxical and radically incompatible in American society.[23] The author reported on the increase in Americans arming their bomb-shelters with extensive caches of weaponry not only to fend off any Soviet attack, but to defend themselves from fellow Americans, neighbours, who failed to adequately prepare for war. The article focused on Texan hardware store owner Charles Davis, who was prepared to unleash tear gas on his neighbours if they claimed his shelter before him. A photograph shows Davis posing with his family in their shelter openly displaying rifles and handguns.

In response to the article, on August 25th Time readers either gave their support for Davis or were reviled by his supposed lack of value for human life. Of the first four responses, three were penned by men, all in favour of Davis’ heavily armed shelter. Cecil R. Coale Jr. from Austin, Texas commended Davis by suggesting, “It is indeed wonderful to see there are still some Americans around who are able to think for themselves without aid from the Federal Government,” he then concludes, “Guns are man’s best friend”.[24] Concerned by his own apartment block’s lack of a shelter, Bill Francis, a Californian, nevertheless found solace in the fact Davis would survive a nuclear attack. Aside from two women debating the finer points of Christian theology and its relationship to shelters, one lone woman’s voice, Marjorie Hoffman of Detroit, finds Davis’ attitude monstrous and suggests, “I, for one, would not knock on his [shelter] door”.[25] The fear of nuclear attack not only made some Americans vigilant, but it turned them on each other. This highly individualised paranoia plays itself out in Dr. Stangelove when General Ripper virulently defends his base against fellow American troops by ordering, “I would sooner accept a few casualties through accidents rather losing the entire base and its personnel through carelessness.” These are similar to the amoral sentiments expressed by General Turgidson regarding acceptance of millions of casualties for the sake of a proactive strike. President Muffley in response scoffs at Turgidsen, “I will not go down in history as the greatest mass murderer since Adolf Hitler.” War, especially not nuclear war, cannot simply be regarded a dehumanised exercise in game theory, it has serious moral consequences that when taken into consideration trump any perceived strategic benefits.

The plot of Dr. Strangelove could be interpreted as analogous to the technical explanation of a nuclear weapon’s detonation. When read in this manner it can offer further layers of moral questioning to what was the unleashing of the most awesome power ever achieved by humanity. Kubrick follows the consequences of a deliberate, yet unwarranted, and unstable decision by General Ripper to attack the Soviet Union. The decision was precise and calculated but soon spiraled beyond control—one small decision by a single human unleashed its own doomsday. This is where the parallel between the plot and nuclear detonation can be observed: it begins with a small, deliberate, and calculated act, to produce a chain reaction that goes vastly beyond the control of the individual who started it. Two unstable and enriched subcritical masses of uranium-235, initially separated, are forced together at a very high velocity with a small but controlled conventional explosion. The two masses of uranium reach a critical mass and undergo a fission chain reaction. Anyone who has had to deal with Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc², in their high school physics class knows that even a small amount of mass can unleash a disproportionally enormous quantity of energy—and when released, it is essentially unstoppable. Again, Kahn’s comments regarding the Doomsday Device, “there is no chance of human intervention, control, and final decision,” expressed the out-of-control nature of nuclear weapons.[26]

Sterling Hayden as Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper

Can spitting the atom be the ultimate moral barrier? Was Kubrick implying that the ability to unleash power hitherto reserved for God, simultaneously killed God and left a moral vacuum? Dostoyevsky elaborated similar sentiment in The Brothers Karamazov (1880) by suggesting that without God, everything is permitted. In an article in The New York Times on February 17th 1964, Brooklyn based minister Reverend Donald W. McKinney suggested that Dr. Strangelove could be understood in Freudian terms: it was an example of a nightmarish dream and humanity’s inherent death drive.[27] Kubrick insinuated, “… the only way to tell the story was as a black comedy, or better, a nightmare comedy, where the things you laugh at are really at the heart of the paradoxical postures that make nuclear war possible.”[28] Einstein himself knew all too well the power of the bomb, and he, along with several other Nobel laureates, including prominent British philosopher Bertrand Russell, issued a manifesto in 1955 publicly condemning nuclear weapons by appeal to universal morality. Without restraint, the manifesto declares, any future war involving nuclear weapons would almost certainly bring, "universal death, sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration."[29] This is one of the earliest public condemnations of nuclear weapons, a bursting forth from an undercurrent of unease and moral outrage. This progressing of the Atomic Age can be understood as the quiet cementing of a alternative voice of reason that occasionally broke through the surface of the disillusioned moral nihilism of status quo and manifested itself publicly as bold statements such as Dr. Strangelove. The remainder of the 1960s opened the floodgates for moral critique, not just regarding nuclear policy, but issues of class, race, gender, homosexuality, freedom of speech, and war. Paul Coates, writing for The Los Angeles Times on May 10th, 1964, praised Dr. Strangelove in response to conservative criticism, a sure sign of shifting political discourse, by arguing, “… we may hope that these occasional glimpses of a democracy correcting its errors will make them think more aggressively about freedom before long.”[30]

Stanley Kubrick on the set of Dr. Strangelove

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[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science; With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Arnold Kaufmann, New York, 1974.

[2] Bosley Crowther, 'Hysterical Laughter: Further Thoughts on 'Dr. Strangelove' and it's Jokes About the Bomb', in The New York Times, February 16th, 1964.

[3] Stanley Kubrick quoted in Grant B. Stillman, ‘Two of the MADdest Scientists: Where Strangelove Meets Dr. No; or, Unexpected Roots for Kubrick’s Cold War Classic’, Film History, 20, 4, 2008, p. 488.

[4] Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan have asserted realism, “emphasises the competitive on conflictual side of international relations. The idea of the balance of power is one of the most long standing analytical tools in realism … and the more specific analysis of military relations in strategic studies.” Oxford Concise Dictionary of Politics Third Edition, Oxford, 2009, s.v. ‘realism’.

[5] Margot A. Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age, Berkeley, 1997, p. xxii.

[6] ibid., pp xxii-xxiii.

[7] Scott C. Zeman and Michael A. Amundson, Atomic Culture: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Boulder, 2004, pp. 2-6.

[8] The Simpsons creator Matt Groening is also known for being an avid Kubrick fan. Many of the memorable motifs from Kubrick's films have been parodied on the show including Dr. Strangelove.

[9] Stillman, ‘Two of the MADest Scientists’, p. 488.

[10] Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War Second Edition, Baltimore, 1996, pp. 219-221.

[11] ibid.

[12] Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, Princeton, 1961, p. 147.

[13] Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s, New Haven, 1995, p. 241.

[14] ibid.

[15] John F. Kennedy, ‘Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy, in the Senate, August 14, 1958’, John F. Kennedy Presidential Museum, retrieved October 6th, 2015, http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/United-States-Senate-Military-Power_19580814.aspx

[16] Warren Kozak, The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay, Washington D.C., 2009, p. 314.

[17] Louis Carter and Paul DeWitt, ‘Love That Bomb’, [audio recording], 1964.

[18] Henriksen, p. 189.

[19] ibid.

[20] ‘Theology: Toward a Hidden God’, in Time, April 8th, 1966.

[21] ibid.

[22] ‘Gun Thy Neighbor?’, in Time, August 18th, 1961.

[23] The parallels between nuclear deterrence and the conservative pro-gun arguments can be discerned in this sense. If all are armed, then there is no incentive to attack another.

[24] ‘Letters’, in Time, August 25th, 1961.

[25] ibid; Dr. Strangelove was perhaps a film that resonated the absurdity of nuclear war with women more profoundly. Women Strike for Peace sponsored a benefit showing of the film in Washington to raise funds to send two delegates to The Hague to take part in the Women’s Multinational Peace Rally. ‘Strangelove Benefit’, in The Washington Post, March 4th, 1964. See also Lawrence S. Wittner, Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement 1954-1970, Stanford, 1997, p. 299.

[26] Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, p. 147.

[27] 'Minister Praises 'Dr. Strangelove': Unitarian Sees Harsh Truth Beneath Film's Fantasy' in The New York Times, February 17th, 1964.

[28] Stanley Kubrick quoted in Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, p. 220.

[29] Russell, Bertrand, and Albert Einstein, et al., ‘The Russell-Einstein Manifesto’, July 9th, 1955.

[30] Paul Coates, 'A Thing You Can Think About', in The Los Angeles Times, May 10th, 1964.

———————————————————————————————————————— "... we can explore space together, both inner and outer, forever in peace." —W. M. Hicks.