Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Mutually assured destruction is inherently absurd because no sane person would trigger it. Only a crazy person would do that, and once that happened all the sane people would try to prevent it. That’s the basic premise of Dr. Strangelove, and Kubrick takes the concept to its absurdist end with the kind of ironic humor that obviously tickled him (with a healthy smattering of Peter Sellers, of course).

General Ripper sends his air wing to launch a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union using...