Dr. Strangelove and the Morality of Mass Murder in War
This is an unpublished reflection I wrote for a history class in the fall of 2024.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satire, reflects the era’s anxiety over nuclear attack from the Soviet Union and the questioning of U.S. morality. Despite the heavy topic and the real fears permeating beneath the film, Kubrick’s stance on nuclear destruction is humorous; he finds it all very ridiculous.
Dr. Strangelove reduces politicians and generals to morons who wrestle in the war room, and the leaders of the United States and Soviet Union to quasi-lovers who must reassure each other that they are both sorry for the events unfolding. While this film is situated within the circumstances of the Cold War, it also critiques through its caricatures the moral-bargaining of mass murder in war.
The invention of the atomic bomb in 1945 and the execution of the Holocaust throughout the early ‘40s exponentially increased the scale of war, triggering interrogations into the morality of sanctioned mass murder. The repercussions of this play out in Dr. Strangelove from the leaders of the Cold War powers to the pilots of the B-52s.
The diversity of responsibility in committing mass murder and the distance from its effects allow these characters to remove themselves from the morality of their decisions. This is the rationale that has explained away — successfully and not — soldiers who were simply “following orders” and politicians who made difficult, but always necessary, choices that resulted in carnage.
In Kubrick’s film, the flimsiness of this reasoning is apparent.
The unstoppable force in Dr. Strangelove is a Soviet doomsday machine that is set to begin a nuclear holocaust if provoked by a U.S. attack. In this case of accidental U.S. bombings, Soviet ambassador DeSadeski admits that enacting doomsday is not the response of any sane man — but the choice has been taken out of humanity’s hands. To eschew culpability, the Soviets made the machine automatic and irreversible. They removed themselves from the final decision to wash their hands clean of the crime.
Beyond the comically terrible logistics of this, it fails to realize that the choice to make a doomsday device without a failsafe is, itself, the final decision. The future that you set in motion will still come, even if you cover your eyes. The casualties of war are on your shoulders, even if you give the honor of dropping the bomb to a computer or a soldier.
The characters of Dr. Strangelove are also not free of the effects of their choices, despite many of them acting like actual war between the Cold War powers would amount in acceptable losses. General Buck Turgidson, for example, insists that the United States would only get its “hair mussed” if it launched a full-scale preemptive attack on the Soviets. Brigadier General Jack Ripper, the man who set the initial attack into motion, cared little for the consequences beyond stopping the Soviets at any cost.
The men of the movie are blinded by their “us versus them” mentality. Finally, U.S. President Merkin Muffley says to Soviet Premier Dmitri Kissov: “We are all in this together.” Simple, true, and yet rarely acknowledged — war harms all parties involved and, further, everyone associated with either side. The outcome of devastating war is not glorious victory; it is devastation. This is punctuated by the film’s closing sequence of bombs detonating across the world as no one can put enough distance between themselves and the effects of their nuclear battle.
Dr. Strangelove’s exploration of morality in war captures the mind-frame of many Americans in the ‘60s who questioned a society who could bomb others and call itself heroic.