Dr. Strangelove And The Cold War

The Cold War era in the United States was a time of fear and anxiety. Tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States had risen to such a level that every interaction between the two nations presented a potential for danger. The film, Dr. Strangelove, directed by Stanley Kubrick in the early 1960s, portrays a scenario that is frighteningly plausible to the American people by playing off of their sense of foreboding and apprehension in order to make a point about powerlessness of the average American in world affairs. The movie primarily asks viewers to embrace the idea found its secondary title, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. While Dr. Strangelove might not necessarily encourage Americans to “love the bomb,” it most definitely encourages them to “stop worrying” by emphasizing their inability to stop the horrors of the bomb or similar doomsday devices. During this time period, the American people also feared that the United States would slowly lose its power in the world to the Soviet Union and its influence. They believed that as the US lost its cultural influence, the image of the “exceptional” American way of life would lose its power on a world stage. But even as the United States worked to use
The idea was that if either the United States or the USSR launched a nuclear attack against the other, there nation that was attacked would then retaliate with an act that would destroy the attacking nation. That the United States possessed nuclear weapons was quite clear after the end of World War II. Due to Soviet bomb testing in 1949, Americans knew that the USSR had the technology to cause serious nuclear damage as well and this knowledge would only serve to deepen their sense of apprehension that had settled over the country. This fear is shown quite clearly in Dr. Strangelove through the existence of the doomsday