“GENTLEMEN, YOU CAN’T FIGHT in here. This is the War Room!” This is just one of the iconic lines for which the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is fondly remembered. The scene takes place in the “War Room” where the president of the United States and his advisors are desperately trying to avert the outbreak of nuclear war. As they meet, nuclear bombers unleashed by a deranged commander are heading towards the Soviet Union. It is when two participants nearly come to blows that the president—masterfully played by Peter Sellers—admonishes them in those words.
The film, directed by Stanley Kubrick, is a satirical comedy. It exposes the recklessness of nuclear games and of the ageing men who play or plan them. The subject is grim and may be regarded as unfit for a parody. But, the genre is quite effective in conveying the enormities that surround it.
Red Alert, the book that inspired the film, is dead serious. So was Kubrick’s purpose. He read a lot of nuclear-strategy literature before making the film, apparently concluding from it that “nobody really knew anything and the whole situation was absurd.” He expected the film to cause an uproar and to prompt some rethinking about nuclear strategy. That seemed all the more likely as the film was released soon after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when nuclear war was narrowly averted. Alas, no decisive rethinking happened, and the sinister games continued.
One of the central characters in Dr. Strangelove is—you guessed it—Dr Strangelove, also played by Peter Sellers. He is the brain in the room, a former Nazi scientist conversant with nuclear technology and strategy. When the Russian ambassador reveals that Russia has put in place a “doomsday machine,” a device that triggers worldwide nuclear war automatically in the event of an attack, Strangelove points out that the device has no deterrence value if it is kept secret. Around the end of the film, when nuclear war seems inevitable, he suggests that the US leadership take refuge in deep mines with a good number of young women and prepare to repopulate the earth with them, a proposal that creates some euphoria in the War Room and makes everyone forget the crisis.