Not saying we won't get our hair mussed ...

America had become an obsessively anti-Communist national-security state. Twenty-four hours a day, at least a few bombers, fully loaded with nuclear weapons, were aloft, as a way of warding off a Soviet sneak attack. The strategist Herman Kahn, in a notorious book, “On Thermonuclear War,” published in 1960, insisted that a nuclear war was winnable, and that life would go on despite millions dead and nuclear radiation everywhere. In the movie, George C. Scott’s General Buck Turgidson, the Air Force Chief of Staff, advocates for war as follows: “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say that no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops—depending on the breaks.” And Kahn later proposed a doomsday device as the ultimate deterrent: threatening the extinction of human, animal, and plant life, he believed, would end the dangerous brinkmanship displayed by the Soviet Union and the United States in the Cuban missile crisis. He thought that it was a reasonable idea, even a clever one.

All of this was, so to speak, in the air. So were many kinds of ridicule in response—not just schoolboy pranks but the disbelieving complaints of liberal intellectuals at dinner parties, cabaret sketch humor, scabrous Off-Broadway plays, Norman Mailer’s rants against technology, and, most of all, the nihilistic funning of Mad, which had started as a comic book in 1952 and become, a decade later, a nagging presence in American humor. Mad made indiscriminate fun of everybody and everything. Growing up fast and hard in New York in the late forties and early fifties, and scraping around the edges of photojournalism, Kubrick the young filmmaker was certainly aware of all this. For “Strangelove,” he distilled the essence of hipster disgust: the only sane response to the prospect of nuclear annihilation was ridicule and black farce. Columbia Pictures produced the movie; nothing like “Strangelove” had ever been made before by big-studio Hollywood.