Paranoid Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper of Burpelson Air Force Base, he believing that fluoridation of the American water supply is a Soviet plot to poison the U.S. populace, is able to deploy through a back door mechanism a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union without the knowledge of his superiors, including the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Buck Turgidson, and President Merkin Muffley. Only Ripper knows the code to recall the B-52 bombers and he has shut down communication in and out of Burpelson as a measure to protect this attack. Ripper's executive officer, RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (on exchange from Britain), who is being held at Burpelson by Ripper, believes he knows the recall codes if he can only get a message to the outside world. Meanwhile at the Pentagon War Room, key persons including Muffley, Turgidson and nuclear scientist and adviser, a former Nazi named Dr...
Written by Huggo
The character of Maj. T.J. "King" Kong (Slim Pickens) was based on Alvin "Tex" Johnston. Johnston was the chief test pilot for Bell Aircraft and Boeing in the 1940s and 1950s. Like Kong, he regularly flew wearing cowboy boots and a Stetson. While working for Boeing, he piloted the first flight of the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, the same plane his fictional counterpart piloted in "Doctor Strangelove." Johnston was perhaps best known for his demonstration flight of the Dash-80, prototype for the Boeing 707, over Lake Washington during the 1955 Gold Cup Hydroplane Races. He was scheduled to perform a simple flyover. Instead, he performed a double barrel roll, leading many in the crowd -- including Boeing president Bill Allen -- to believe the plane was out of control and about to crash. The same year "Doctor Strangelove" premiered, Johnston was promoted to manage the Boeing Atlantic Test Center. One of the projects he worked on there was the development of the Minute Man missile.
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Goofs
Incorrectly regarded as goofs:
Since there has never been any real 100 MT nuclear devices detonated, stock footage of other, much smaller, devices stand in as "actors" for the 20-30 and 100 MT detonations in the film. Clearly we can forgive Stanely Kubric for not using real 100 MT nuclear weapons to make a movie. Also, megaton explosions would not be photogenic for the rapid cuts of the end sequence since they expand much slower on film, as they are being filmed from much further away. Finally we can assume that in the early 1960's there wasn't much declassified material of megaton explosions available to the public as such explosions were achieved only less than ten years earlier.
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Quotes
[first lines]
Narrator:
For more than a year, ominous rumors had been privately circulating among high-level Western leaders that the Soviet Union had been at work on what was darkly hinted to be the ultimate weapon: a doomsday device. Intelligence sources traced the site of the top secret Russian project to the perpetually fog-shrouded wasteland below the Arctic peaks of the Zhokhov Islands. What they were building or why it should be located in such a remote and desolate place no one could say. See more »
Crazy Credits
The screenplay title is incorrectly spelled. It reads: 'Base' on the book
"Red Alert" by Peter George. This is pointed out on the DVD supplement
about the making of the film.
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