It’s the fifti­eth anniver­sary of the release of one of my favourite films – Stan­ley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love the Bomb. Described by the direc­tor as a satire about a ‘nuclear Wise Man’, it was co-writ­ten by Peter George, the British author of the 1958 nov­el on which the film is based, Red Alert, pub­lished under his pen name, Peter Bryant. In Britain the nov­el was called Two Hours to Doom.

Kubrick read George’s thriller in Octo­ber 1961, the month Sovi­et sci­en­tists test­ed the largest nuclear bomb ever det­o­nat­ed. On 30 Octo­ber at 08.30 GMT, sci­en­tists in Europe detect­ed what was described as ‘the biggest man-made explo­sion on record’. Newsweek described the super­bomb as ‘Khrushchev’s mon­ster’. On an aer­i­al pho­to of Man­hat­tan Island, the mag­a­zine mapped the extent of its awe­some destruc­tive pow­er. The bomb had a yield of at least 50 mega­tons. It would blast a crater at least a mile wide and would lev­el build­ings up to ten miles from ground zero. New York with its proud sky­scrap­ers would be reduced to a radioac­tive waste­land.

Lat­er, sci­en­tists said that the Rus­sians had mod­i­fied the bomb for the test; if it was ever used in war it would explode with a force of 100 mega­tons. The Hiroshi­ma bomb was a mere 12.5 kilo­tons. The Sovi­ets nick­named their super­weapon the Tsar Bom­ba, ‘King of Bombs’. Andrei Sakharov, who designed it under direct orders from Khrushchev, called it sim­ply the Big Bomb. The det­o­na­tion of the Tsar Bom­ba made Kubrick even more deter­mined to make a movie about nuclear war. He had become obsessed with the sub­ject.

Kubrick and George’s film was well received when it was final­ly released in Jan­u­ary 1964 – the press screen­ing of Dr Strangelove was orig­i­nal­ly due to take place on 22 Novem­ber 1963, the day of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion. The New York Times panned the movie as a ‘shattering sick joke’. But Sight and Sound said it demon­strat­ed how ‘power pol­i­tics have become a Franken­stein mon­ster which one lit­tle error can send out of con­trol’. Their crit­ic praised it as ‘the most hilar­i­ous­ly fun­ny and the most night­mar­ish film of the year’. For the New States­man it was a ‘mesmeric’ film that set out ‘to cre­ate its own cat­e­go­ry or genre.’ Despite Pere­grine Worsthorne in the Sun­day Tele­graph liken­ing Kubrick’s por­tray­al of Amer­i­cans to Sovi­et pro­pa­gan­da, the film was huge­ly pop­u­lar with movie­go­ers who ‘ringed the block’ at the Colum­bia cin­e­ma in Lon­don. The cin­e­ma even had to put on spe­cial late screen­ings at 11 p.m. each night. Tick­et sales were 25 per cent high­er than for any oth­er film the Colum­bia had shown, and The Times report­ed that ‘all house records have been bro­ken’.

Of course, it is the fig­ure of the mad sci­en­tist, Dr Strangelove, that has helped make the film so mem­o­rable. Peter Sell­ers suc­ceeds won­der­ful­ly in fus­ing togeth­er the traits of the real-life, and indeed fic­tion­al, fig­ures on which he is based. Through the alche­my of film-mak­ing, Kubrick and Sell­ers cre­at­ed cin­e­mat­ic gold in the fig­ure of Dr Strangelove.

The so-called father of the H‑Bomb Edward Teller, Hitler’s rock­et pio­neer Wern­her von Braun and the hawk­ish, wheel-chair-bound math­e­mati­cian John von Neu­mann were all key play­ers in the sci­ences of destruc­tion. The ref­er­ences to Peen­emünde and the con­cen­tra­tion camps in the film’s nov­el­iza­tion make it abun­dant­ly clear that von Braun was Peter George’s main mod­el for Dr Strangelove. How­ev­er, his words are those of the man who had worked with and admired both Teller and von Neu­mann: Her­man Kahn, the physi­cist and futur­ol­o­gist who pop­u­lar­ized the idea of the dooms­day machine. He was the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of the mil­i­tary intel­lec­tu­al – detached and cold­ly ratio­nal. Like the four rid­ers of the apoc­a­lypse, these fig­ures come togeth­er in the unfor­get­table char­ac­ter of Dr Strangelove, the ulti­mate dooms­day man.

For the his­to­ri­an and cul­tur­al com­men­ta­tor Lewis Mum­ford, respond­ing to the New York Times’ pan­ning of the film, Kubrick’s mas­ter­stroke was to make Dr Strangelove ‘the cen­tral sym­bol of this sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly orga­nized night­mare of mass exter­mi­na­tion’. For Mum­ford, the tragedy of the age they were liv­ing in was elo­quent­ly expressed by the man­ic fig­ure of this fanat­i­cal ratio­nal­ist:

‘This night­mare even­tu­al­i­ty that we have con­coct­ed for our chil­dren is noth­ing but a crazy fan­ta­sy, by nature as hor­ri­bly crip­pled and dehu­man­ized as Dr Strangelove him­self.’

He con­clud­ed by hail­ing Kubrick’s film as ‘the first break in the cata­ton­ic cold-war trance that has so long held our coun­try in its rigid grip.’

Mum­ford was absolute­ly right to iden­ti­fy Kubrick’s film as a cru­cial moment in the cul­ture of the cold war. For peo­ple all over the world, Dr Strangelove soon came to per­son­i­fy the sin­is­ter alliance of sci­ence and pow­er pol­i­tics that made it pos­si­ble to anni­hi­late mil­lions at the touch of a but­ton. Dr Strangelove’s log­ic could trans­form acts of inhu­man­i­ty into prac­ti­cal solu­tions, his rhetoric clothed bar­bar­i­ty in sweet words of rea­son, and his think tanks – such as the ‘Bland Cor­po­ra­tion’ (an allu­sion to Her­man Kahn’s RAND Cor­po­ra­tion) – used com­put­ers to trans­form lives into num­bers. For num­bers, as Kahn once said, are some­thing you can think the unthink­able about.

Dr Strangelove ends with an awe­some dis­play of mush­room clouds erupt­ing across the face of the earth, as the cobalt bombs of the Sovi­et dooms­day machine explode. News footage of H‑bomb tests is accom­pa­nied by British forces’ favourite Vera Lynn singing ‘We’ll Meet Again’. The bru­tal real­i­ty – ful­ly under­stood by the film’s audi­ence in 1964 – was that there would be no reunions after World War III.

The age of sav­iour sci­en­tists and win­ning weapons – famil­iar themes in the pop­u­lar cul­ture of the first half of the 20th cen­tu­ry – was dead. Nuclear war in the age of the Tsar Bom­ba could have only one out­come: mutu­al anni­hi­la­tion. It was exact­ly this point that the pio­neer­ing nuclear sci­en­tist Leo Szi­lard had made dur­ing a radio broad­cast in Feb­ru­ary 1950, when he first con­jured up the spec­tre of the cobalt bomb, a weapon that could destroy life on Earth. It was this idea that Peter George lat­er used in Red Alert.

In the 1960s, a new gen­er­a­tion began to reject a life reduced to num­bers and to look for answers beyond sci­ence and ratio­nal­i­ty. This gen­er­a­tion no longer felt com­fort­able with the easy post-war cer­tain­ties that their par­ents had accept­ed with­out ques­tion. For those who grew up in an age haunt­ed by the Strangelovean cobalt bomb, the old ways of look­ing at the world seemed to lead to a dead end – to dooms­day.

There’s anoth­er 50th anniver­sary this year, and that’s the death on 30 May 1964 of Leo Szi­lard. He was a bril­liant though often infu­ri­at­ing man, burst­ing with orig­i­nal ideas on every­thing from sci­ence to pol­i­tics and even fic­tion. He was, said one col­league, the great­est sci­en­tist nev­er to have won a Nobel prize.

In 1933, while walk­ing down Southamp­ton Row in Lon­don he had seen how a self-sus­tain­ing atom­ic chain reac­tion could lead to an explo­sive release of nuclear ener­gy. A close friend of Albert Ein­stein (they even designed a refrig­er­a­tor togeth­er), it was Szi­lard who encour­aged the great physi­cist to write to Pres­i­dent Roo­sevelt in August 1939 warn­ing of the pos­si­bil­i­ty that Nazi Ger­many might devel­op an atom­ic super­weapon. Leo Szi­lard was inspired by a utopi­an vision of how sci­ence and sci­en­tists could trans­form the world, but he was also haunt­ed by a fear of how peo­ple might mis­use this pow­er. His life epit­o­mizes the glo­ries and fol­lies of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry sci­ence and his­to­ry.

I told the remark­able sto­ry of Leo Szi­lard and his nuclear hopes and fears, exam­ined through the lens of pop­u­lar cul­ture, in my book Dooms­day Men pub­lished sev­en years ago. I think it remains rel­e­vant, both as an explo­ration of our ambiva­lence towards sci­ence and sci­en­tists, and as a his­to­ry of weapons of mass destruc­tion. Today, cold-war ten­sions may have fad­ed from the pub­lic mind and the media may be pre­oc­cu­pied with glob­al warm­ing, but the weapons are still out there, and the dooms­day men are still at work devel­op­ing new ones.

Few if any authors write for the mon­ey. I do it because I love books – both read­ing them and writ­ing them. Dooms­day Men and my last book, City: A Guide­book for the Urban Age, took at least three years to research and write. The book I’m now work­ing on – a cul­tur­al his­to­ry of crime, detec­tives and cities – will also take at least that long. Nowa­days advances from pub­lish­ers are extreme­ly mod­est (I’m being polite; stronger words occur to me). You couldn’t live on them for a year, let alone three. I’m not an aca­d­e­m­ic, so I scrape a liv­ing togeth­er by review­ing and edit­ing.

There’s a lot of talk nowa­days about crowd­fund­ing new books and arts projects. That’s fine but the best way I know of sup­port­ing an author whose work you enjoy is to buy their books, and that includes their back­list too. So if you’ve enjoyed read­ing this brief post, which of course is based on what I wrote in my book Dooms­day Men, then you might like to con­sid­er read­ing the whole book.

You can buy absurd­ly cheap copies of it now on Ama­zon (I don’t know who prof­its from these; cer­tain­ly not the author) or if you real­ly want to sup­port me and my writ­ing you might like to con­sid­er buy­ing the e‑book. You can buy it direct from Pen­guin (ePub) or from Ama­zon in the UK (Kin­dle), or Barnes & Noble (Nook) in the US.

Thank you for read­ing. Now go and watch Kubrick’s amaz­ing film!