Policy Change

Something that’s lost in the shuffle about Stanley Kubrick’s immortal satire Dr. Strangelove is that it wasn’t originally going to be a comedy. The film is based on a VERY serious novel called Red Alert, which is crucial to this next bit.

While the film played the scenario of a mad general launching nuclear weapons as a gag, the book was seen as raising real concerns about such a scenario. But the book became considerably more popular after the film’s release, and ended up being taken seriously by the Pentagon’s Scientific Advisory Committee for Ballistic Missiles. It led to actual policy change that prevented a single individual from unilaterally unlocking nuclear weapons.