The Pentagon Worried That a Classic Comedy Might Have the Same Effect as a ‘Revolution’

Stanley Kubrick wasn’t exactly known for being a laugh riot — although he did originally intend Eyes Wide Shut to be a Steve Martin farce. Nevertheless, the legendary filmmaking genius did happen to make one of the greatest comedies of all time: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb starring Peter Sellers, Peter Sellers, George C. Scott and Peter Sellers. 

Famously, Dr. Strangelove was originally going to be a very serious drama about the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons, based on the novel Red Alert by Peter George. That is, until Kubrick and his co-writer began cracking jokes during the writing process, at which point it morphed into a “nightmare comedy.” 

But despite the fact that it was reworked into a satire starring Inspector Clouseau, it was still viewed as a potentially incendiary film by the American government. 

Dr. Strangelove was released in the thick of the Cold War, hitting theaters in January 1964, just a little over a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis and mere months after the JFK assassination. In fact, it was originally supposed to premiere less than a week after the shooting, but it was rescheduled “out of respect for President Kennedy.”

According to The Hollywood Reporter, a lot of people were understandably pretty touchy about the mere idea of a comedy about nuclear war, including film critics. The New York Times review of Dr. Strangelove praised its humor, but cautioned that much of the film was “grave and dangerous.” The most ticked off group of all, it would seem, was the film’s satirical target. Washington Post reporter Chalmers M. Roberts, who was known as a “conduit for official leaks from the CIA and the Pentagon,” shared the government’s position on the film in an article entitled: “Film With A-War Theme Creates Problems for U.S.”

The piece began by comparing Dr. Strangelove to other “American headaches” such as the Vietnam War. It then claimed that “it is an outrageous effort to deal in satire with nuclear war and it is done in a way that maligns both the United States Air Force and the American Government. No Communist could dream of a more effective anti-American film to spread abroad than this one.” It even suggested that Dr. Strangelove could “cause the United States as much harm as many a coup or revolution.” 

The article went on to outline the Pentagon’s many technical objections to the film’s plot about a crazed general who starts a nuclear war with the Soviet Union purely to keep them away from his bodily fluids. 

Further underscoring just how touchy the government was, the Air Force produced a 20-minute propaganda film to debunk the plot of Dr. Strangelove, as well as the similarly-themed dramatic thriller Fail-Safe, thereby reassuring Americans. 

But privately, Red Alert, the book that had inspired Dr. Strangelove, was being “taken seriously as a cautionary tale about what might go wrong” by the Pentagon. It actually led to real policy changes concerning nuclear arms — and, presumably, a “no riding the bombs like a cowboy” policy.