Summary

• Stanley Kubrick's Cold War classic is praised for its depiction of US-Soviet deterrence strategies by a military historian.
• The film reflects the real history of US program Chrome Dome, the delegation of nuclear weapons authority, and a Soviet Doomsday Machine concept.
• Kubrick's dark satire would make a good double-feature pairing with Nolan's soberly dramatic Oscar winner Oppenheimer.

Stanley Kubrick's Cold War classic gets a perfect accuracy score from a military historian. Released in 1964, Kubrick’s dark satire presented a nightmare scenario about a rogue American bomber threatening to ignite nuclear war against the Soviet Union. Now considered an all-time classic, the movie currently holds a 98% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, making it the legendary Kubrick’s highest-scoring film on the site.

Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is not just highly-rated by critics, it also gets high marks for accuracy from at least one expert. In a video for Insider, historian James Hershberg praises the film for its depiction of US and Soviet deterrence strategies, including the Soviets’ Doomsday Machine, as well as its overall skeptical handling of the nuclear arms race. Check out his remarks below:

The movie is historically accurate to a considerable extent. The US did have a program known as Chrome Dome in which there were dozens of B-52 bombers armed with thermonuclear weapons close to fail-safe points within a couple of hours of targets in the Soviet Union, airborne 24 hours a day, and the idea was to make deterrents...that of course it was mad in the sense of insane, as the movie shows. That was real.

In the late 1950s, especially during Eisenhower's second term, US presidents did delegate authority to lower ranking commanders in the case that they believed an attack was taking place and they could not communicate with Washington. They would have the ability, and the right, to order nuclear weapons use.

The Doomsday Machine was a concept that was discussed. The Soviets did develop a Doomsday Machine known as operation perimeter in which, hundreds of miles east of Moscow in the Ural mountains a bunker was built. If that bunker lost communications with Moscow, and if they had evidence to believe that nuclear detonations were taking place, they could launch a missile that would send an authorization to all surviving nuclear missiles and this would fire them all against the United States.

The idea that there could have been a mistaken order, or a deliberate order by a person who was fanatic about the inevitability of World War III, and desiring that the US get the first strike in, was not entirely historically implausible. You had Curtis LeMay, for example, the director of Strategic Air Command, that if he believed the Soviets were about to launch a nuclear attack in the United States, he would launch a preemptive strike whether authorized or not, and Eisenhower is not happy to hear about that.

It's clear that humans are fallible. Technology is fallible, it's designed by humans, and crazy people like Jack D. Ripper do exist in the world and in the military. I'd give it a 10 for breaking that orthodoxy and really generating a far more skeptical - not necessarily cynical – discourse.

Dr. Strangelove is the Perfect Double-Feature Movie With Oppenheimer

Nuclear weapons are back in the cultural discussion thanks to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which just cleaned up at the Oscars, winning seven awards including Best Picture. A sober consideration of the man who led the effort to build the first atomic bomb, the film could not be more different from Strangelove, an at-times farcical and always-bleak satire taking aim at the doomsday-embracing mentality that gripped military minds as a result of Oppenheimer’s achievement.

Dr. Stranglove ranked 39th on AFI's 2007 ranking of the greatest American films.

While Oppenheimer presents the beginning of the nuclear age, and endeavors to grapple with the moral issues raised by the invention of the first atomic bomb, Dr. Strangelove presents a twisted logical end-point to that age – one that, thankfully, did not come to . A double-feature that starts with the deadly serious Oppenheimer and ends with the wildly satiric Dr. Strangelove offers a satisfying juxtaposition of tones, and a full-bodied history lesson, even if Kubrick's Strangelove is not technically based on reality (though it is very accurate, at least according to one historian).

Source: Insider