With the Cuban Missile Crisis fresh in viewers' minds, the Cold War at its frostiest, and the hydrogen bomb relatively new and frightening, here was a film about what could happen if the wrong person pushed the wrong button -- and it played the situation for laughs. The film's jet-black satire (from a brilliant script by director Stanley Kubrick, Peter George, and Terry Southern) and a host of superb comic performances have kept the film fresh and entertaining, even as its issues have become (slightly) less timely. Loaded with thermonuclear weapons, a U.S. bomber piloted by Maj. T.J. "King" Kong (Slim Pickens) is on a routine flight pattern near the Soviet Union when told to commence Wing Attack Plan R, best summarized by Maj. Kong: "Nuclear combat! Toe to toe with the Russkies!" On the ground at Burpleson Air Force Base, Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers) notices nothing on the news about America being at war. Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) calmly informs him that he gave the command to attack the Soviet Union because it was high time someone did something about fluoridation, which is sapping Americans' precious bodily fluids (and apparently has something to do with Ripper's sexual problems). Meanwhile, President Merkin Muffley (Sellers again) meets with his top Pentagon advisors, including superhawk Gen. Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), who sees this as an opportunity to do something about Communism in general and Russians in particular. However, the ante is upped when Soviet ambassador DeSadesky (Peter Bull) informs Muffley and his staff of the latest innovation in Soviet weapons technology: a "Doomsday Machine" which will destroy the entire world if the Russians are attacked. The movie features endlessly quotable comic dialogue served to perfection by a superb cast, with Sellers a standout in three roles and Hayden giving perhaps his finest performance as the cooly insane Ripper. Kubrick keeps the comedy tense and edgy throughout, with an assist from Gilbert Taylor's crisp black-and-white camerawork and Anthony Harvey's razor-sharp editing in the sequences aboard the bomber. The cinematic equivalent of whistling past the graveyard, Dr. Strangelove finds humor in the shadow of nuclear holocaust without losing sight of the seriousness of the issues.