Stanley Kubricks nuclear war satire is fantastic, i mean fantastic. for you young whipper snappers (under thirty especially) that has never really had to LIVE under the threat of instant atomic annihilation, THIS film can give you the true friggin' CREEPY feeling of just HOW IT REALLY WAS. crazy, yeah. completely nuts. and i mean that.
oh, they had a zillion fancy, smancy names for it... slick-sounding zip terms to make it seem somehow okay or all right... the right thing to do. maybe the only thing to do. nuclear deterrance was one of those gung-ho terms. however perhaps the best and most direct term being, MAD. yeah, a very descriptive term for complete insanity. M (mutually) A (assured) D (destruction) ---and that's exactly what it was. in other words... if you mess with us, we'll mess you up too, and in fact, we'll mess up the whole GD world while we're at it so that even if you take us down, what in the hell will you have left?
as i said, complete insanity.
both sides sitting on high, watchful, super-suspicious walls of atomic-tipped missles with more than enough pure blast power to actually remove the entire surface crust of the planet. and of course, that was just brute blast fury alone...no counting the raw, murderous radiation from even a few dozen of said weapons.
sure, i guess somehow we all got lucky and the MAD scheme worked...sort of. humanity as a whole is still alive. but damn, we can thank our very lucky stars that it did. for knowing/understanding humanity in any little way, it SHOULDN'T have worked at all. most people don't think much about it now... and a lot that do, try hard not to, but the fact is.... it really was crazy and it really shouldn't have worked in any way, shape or form. think about it...thousands of high megatonage missiles and bombs poised to rain COMPLETE destruction down upon this old and tired earth at any given moment. each side completely distrusting the other in every way. nutcases in both political AND military branches of all the involved governments. fallable humans at the switches of every bomb and rocket. a flock of birds in the wrong place at the wrong time, a jumpy or over-zealous commander or weapons operator at just one of the launch sites. faulty or cheap equipment going bad. natural disasters such as earth quakes, flood or fire, inside or even just near by one of the sensitive command and control silos. etc, etc.
and all it took was just ONE accidental launch. and then everybody went ape-shite and fired. cause nobody wanted to be the LAST one to shoot their birds.
this movie, Dr. Strangelove, surely is black comedy or satire at its finest. yeah, it's supposed to be funny and it is. but guys, its scary as hell too, for it reeks of just how MAD the GD world was at that place and time. and JUST how close we came to "lights out" for the whole flipping world.
and all it took was just ONE real guy (on either side) like the Stewart Hayden-played (and done magnificently too, i might add) General Jack Ripper. to blow us all to kingdom come. all of course, to preserve his (our) precious bodily fluids.
yeah, the movie is funny as hell. and scary as hell too. if you older guys haven't seen it in awhile, check it out one more time. for you younger dudes... take a real CLOSE look at it. by the way its one of the BEST performances of George C. Scott. also a fine performance by the rebel-yelling, cowboy hat-wearing, A-bomb riding, B-52 pilot, Slim Pickens...what a hoot. its a real eye-opener to the nutty times that we older dudes grew up and lived in, during the fifties/sixties and even seventies and early eighties.
and has an all star cast of golden oldie actors included just for maximum laughs. James Earl Jones, for instance... in his younger days. even then, sounding very Darth Vader-ish. and Peter Sellers in multiple, funny-arse roles.
hopefully these days, the biggest danger is past, and MAD is really no longer needed. hopefully. and hopefully, it never will be needed again. again, hopefully.
POE, as General Ripper would say. (the recall code for the errant, nuclear bomb equipped B-52s in the movie.) Peace On Earth, according to Ripper's doodle on the desk calendar on his desk... or is that, Preserve Our Essence. ---our precious, natural, bodily fluids.
LOL!
hey, duck and cover!
and thank God we never had to... for even as a small child, i had my doubts as to how the cheap, wooden, school desk in Chester County public schools would hold up against a Soviet, thermo-nuclear tipped missile, or hydrogen bomb.
Beowolff
got the DVD with the new sound remix. great! and yeah, the trailer is soooo cool. "love the bomb!" 
