No Fighting in the War Room: Satire and Institutional Design in Dr. Strangelove

By Micah Slater

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Stanley Kubrick’s legendary 1964 feature, is both a satirical and genuine interpretation of an unintentionally initiated nuclear holocaust. The film’s conflict is approached from four main perspectives: the fictional American president Merkin Muffley and his War Room, Army general Buck Turgidson (a staunch anti-Communist), the international attachés to the General Jack Ripper and the President, and Major ‘King’ Kong’s crew of an American bomber, flying into Russian airspace to drop a nuclear weapon. These four perspectives collectively illuminate the approaches of various government institutions, primarily American, Russian, and British, to international nuclear conflict; and how their characters individually react to the minutiae of the situation as it develops. Kubrick’s directorial voice also recontextualizes these characters’ actions into a distinctly satirical space, ridiculing global and national institutional designs in a way that is yet inimitable. Through deliberate and satirical portrayal of political and military institutional design in an international context, Dr. Strangelove artfully lays bare the absurdity of these designs and the roles that their constituencies play within them—however willingly. 

The defining moment for Major ‘King’ Kong (Slim Pickens) within the institutional design of the U.S. military comes early in the film, when his B-52 crew receives a coded message from Burpelson Air Force Base to begin ‘Wing Attack Plan R.’ The plan entails cutting off nearly all radio transmissions, flying blind into Russian airspace, and dropping a nuclear payload on a prescribed Russian target [00:08:00–00:11:30]. Though the overarching timeline of events appears to show a group of soldiers in the Air Force receiving and following orders, the intervening scenes detail a much more complex relationship between the characters of the soldiers and their institutional roles. When the plane’s code specialist relays the received order to Major Kong, his initial reaction is to doubt its veracity: he tells the Lieutenant and the men with him that he “doesn’t want no horsin’ around on the airplane” [00:08:23]. The nature of the order is so drastic that he casually questions his crewmates, also implying a degree of camaraderie among them that would provide for ‘horsing around’ in flight, precluded in their roles as low-level Air Force personnel. However, once the order comes back as authentic, Major Kong’s demeanor shifts: demonstrated visually by donning a cowboy hat (further American iconography) over his headgear, he commits himself and his crew to pursuing their Russian target, justifying their orders by offering the likelihood that the “‘Rooskies’ had already clobbered Washington” and some degree of smalltown America, and that Attack Plan R is a form of retaliation [00:10:00]. In this way, Major Kong accepts his institutional role, justifies to himself the mass destruction he will soon enact, and follows orders in the exact form asked of him in the Air Force. 

However, the satirical overtones that color this scene subvert the institutional design of the American Air Force, Major Kong’s character, and the fictional Attack Plan R itself. The cadence of Major Kong’s lines are slow and stilted, and what he says aloud is equally absurd. He refers to their opponents solely as “the Rooskies” [00:10:05], implying both his own lack of complex intelligence and the wholesale American military’s lack of knowledge concerning the Soviets. The name of his character also lends to the idea of blind, clumsy destruction. King Kong is a well known pop culture icon, a massive gorilla visually synonymous with the destruction of iconographical sites emblematic of modern society. In this eponymic relationship, however, a secondary connection forms: Kong is not inherently violent, simply misguided. As William Tsutsui notes in his oft-cited book Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters, King Kong and Godzilla have long been accepted as metaphorical representations of nuclear conflict. These two mythic beasts locked in battle lend themselves to Dr. Strangelove in Major Kong’s nomenclature, furthering his place as a comedic figure in the film. Major Kong, in committing his crew to violence on a flimsy thread of radio command, emulates the beast Kong himself and becomes a vehicle to satirize the American Air Force and its simultaneous overwhelming power and lack of critical thought. 

The character that the film next falls to, General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), embodies a different type of role in the institution of the military—refocused to the uppermost echelon of command. At [00:11:45], he receives a phone call concerning the rogue bombers’ attack on Russian territory while in a hotel room with his secretary, Miss Scott (Tracy Reed) who he is having an affair with. He relegates the call to her, and repeatedly brushes off comments about urgency. When he finally acquiesces and leaves for the War Room, he tells Miss Scott to count backwards while she waits for him: “I’ll be back before you can say ‘Blastoff!” [00:14:52]. This illustrates how he, much like Major Kong, feels reluctance to engage with his institutional role, but for a very different reason: where Kong’s doubt comes from the gravity of the situation, Turgidson’s comes from a wish to remain in a hotel room with a much younger woman in order to continue their affair, treating the threat of nuclear war with dismissive brevity. 

This is further illustrated in a later scene where he discusses with President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) the practicalities of actually going through with the attack: in an extended monologue, he declares that an intentional attack on Russian air bases and facilities would destroy “90% of their nuclear capabilities” with the remaining 10% causing “acceptable civilian casualties…no more than 10-20 million” [00:32:30-00:34:00]. Here, he betrays the true difference between his and Kong’s role in the Air Force: understanding of scale. Where Kong has taken on a mission that will likely kill his crew and however many unnamed Russian personnel there are at the site of their target, he clearly has no complex understanding of the Russian landscape. Turgidson, however, luridly declares twenty million deaths as an acceptable consequence of crippling the Russians, an understanding of scale that Kong clearly lacks. There is more distance between his institutional role and the fallout of his actions than Kong, which subsequently allows him to treat human life with such callous indifference. He is shaped by the power granted to him as a General, and by the degrees of separation from consequence that power entails. Further, his character impacts his institutional role as a General in the way he behaves so dismissively of his post. He treats the same situation that Kong double-checked the orders of with enough indifference to ask his mistress to lay in bed and count down the seconds he would be devoting to it. 

Turgidson as a character serves as the most overt satire of the American institution in the film. He is repeatedly shown to be irresponsible, shortsighted, and compelled toward wanton violence. When the Russian Ambassador is admitted to the War Room at [00:37:00], he clutches his binders to his chest and describes the Ambassador, Alexi de Sadesky (Peter Bull), as a “lousy commie punk,” later physically tackling him against a buffet table [00:37:30]. As the film uses him to illustrate the shortcomings and pitfalls of upper echelon military command, Turgidson becomes an increasingly puerile figure, one whose inclination towards preemptive violence and distrust position him in conflict with the major characters in the War Room. He is, due to his rank, even more emblematic of the American military than Major Kong. As a general, he reports only to the president: a man that, as Dr. Strangelove goes on to establish, is primarily concerned with matters outside of the scope of the military. Despite Turgidson’s consistent vocal presence, Muffley’s institutional role in Dr. Strangelove has its own distinct approach to mitigating disaster: one that hinges on consistently dismissing Turgidson’s violent impulse. 

President Merkin Muffley, as defined by his institutional role, is greatly distinct from Turgidson and the design of the American military. He is occupying the actual seat of the American president as it existed in 1964, despite being fictional himself, which creates a recognizable, severe backdrop for him to inherit, capable of a range of moral actions: moral actions that his character, in its satirical design, perverts or neglects entirely. As he asserts at [00:25:43], he is supposed to have ultimate control over all nuclear weapons in America. This would theoretically create a firm, definitive character, but Muffley is later shown to subvert this office in both the domestic and national contexts. Muffley is defined by his role most notably in a scene where he opposes Turgidson’s proposal of nuclear war, firmly asserting that he will not “go down in the history books as the greatest mass murderer since Adolf Hitler!” [00:34:25]. Turgidson then challenges that he should be more concerned with the American people than his place in history, and Muffley dismisses him in favor of a conversation with the newly arrived Russian Ambassador, immediately sinking into the submissive and flimsy attitude this paper will explore in depth. Here, it is clear that Dr. Strangelove’s image of the American presidency has a significantly heightened degree of far-sightedness as opposed to the military: it values historical image as worthy of maintenance, where the military (as embodied by Turgidson) prefers immediate action, regardless of fallout. However, while Muffley is presented as the reasonable party between himself and Turgidson, he is nonetheless a satirical vehicle for both his place in the presidency and the larger American foreign policy of the Cold War. 

Throughout the film, Muffley’s character satirizes the President’s role in foreign policy, most commonly whenever he speaks over the phone with the Soviet Premier Dmitri Kissoff. His demeanor shifts dramatically from the authoritative attitude he holds toward Turgidson to a palliative, submissive tone of acquiescence. The first phone call he makes is characterized by one of the script’s more iconically meandering lines: “I'm sorry too, Dimitri. I'm very sorry. All right, you're sorrier than I am! But I am sorry as well. I am as sorry as you are Dimitri, don't say that you're more sorry than I am because I'm capable of being just as sorry as you are! So we’re both sorry, alright?” [00:40:45]. This drastic shift in Muffley’s embodiment of his institutional role follows a contextual shift into international politics, and serves to satirize American-Soviet political relations by proxy of the American presidency (Kissoff is only ever present on the phone). Muffley’s dialogue and presence as a non-military personnel in the notably-named War Room is also a source of great irony: during Sadesky and Turgidson’s aforementioned fight, he indignantly declares “Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!” [00:37:45]. While the oxymoron in this line is apparent, it also betrays his distance from the military institution that he, on paper, commands. Outright dismissing talks of nuclear contingencies and disavowing fighting in the War Room, all while wheedling around Soviet foreign officers, creates a satirical image of the Presidency as deeply emasculated and detached from the actuality of global politics. 

Though American institutions are the overwhelming majority of those portrayed in Dr. Strangelove, two characters impart institutional perspectives outside of the American context. British Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers) and the aforementioned Russian Ambassador, Aleksei de Sadesky, both function as attachés to American offices: Mandrake to General Jack Ripper, who ordered the initial nuclear attack that serves as the film’s core conflict, and Sadesky to Muffley himself. Mandrake is defined by his role as a foreign officer multiple times throughout the film, most significantly at [00:22:00] where he has realized Ripper’s insanity and is trying to convince him to recall the planes carrying nuclear bombs into Soviet airspace. He has no command over Ripper, but Ripper’s command over him is also tenuous: as an exchange officer, he is not a part of the institution within which Ripper’s command has value. His obedience hinges on a complex, undetailed relationship between the British and American military commands, which alleviates him of the same institutional resignation to obedience seen with Major Kong. In the aforementioned scene, he tells General Ripper that he “must” ask him for the recall code for the aircraft [00:22:10]. Ripper refuses, and the remainder of Mandrake’s arc circumvents discovering the codes and transmitting them to President Muffley to halt the attack. As he has been removed from the British institution that his loyalty is sworn to, he has considerably more agency than characters like Muffley or Turgidson who are operating within their institutional roles for the duration of the film. Thus, he occupies his time in Dr. Strangelove by trying to prevent nuclear annihilation, in conflict with his institutional role and in the approach of the film’s second foreign counterpart. 

Aleksei de Sadesky’s presence in Dr. Strangelove possesses a distinct lack of agency, but is nonetheless a reflection of the film’s depiction of Russian foreign policy. He is a large, heavy-set man of few words, wearing dark clothing and continuously displaying a lack of willingness to assist the American side, even with the understanding that the nuclear payoff would kill millions of both countries’ civilians. Though his appearance immediately communicates hostility, his institutional role as Russian Ambassador manufactures even greater hostility through his introduction of the Doomsday Machine. After ending a phone conversation with Premier Kissoff, he announces to the War Room that the Russians have installed a preventative measure to ward off nuclear aggression called the Doomsday Machine. Further, that Attack Plan R will activate it: igniting a series of explosives jacketed with a radioactive substance (“Cobalt Thorium G”) possessing a half-life of 93 years [00:49:10]. Sadesky delivers this news in a stilted, ominous speech, physically walking away from the table centered in the War Room, communicating Russian disinterest in dialogue, or even the simplest act of sharing space (global or personal) with the Americans. His institution is locked in conflict with the one that occupies this room, and he behaves in accordance with his role in a government fighting a cold war. Even concerns for his own life appear to become stifled under his hostility towards the American officials: he continues to justify the Doomsday Machine’s existence through the rest of the scene, despite the fact he believes it will kill him and everyone in the War Room. Sadesky is, more completely than all characters identified here, utterly defined by the contemporary Russian state—which is, in the American perspective, cold, inhuman, and bent on destruction. 

Though the manifestations and completeness of it vary, Dr. Strangelove is acutely a film in which institutional design impacts—if not creates—the actions, perspectives, and roles of all major characters within its narrative bounds. All of its key players operate within an institutional role of some kind, including Major Kong and General Turgidson’s posts in the military, Muffley’s in the presidential office, and Mandrake/de Sadesky’s as foreign attachés to American officials. Throughout the film characters conflict, obey, interact with and embody their roles, in a way that is only narratively feasible through the implementation and address of governmental design, real or fictional. The looming presence of real institutions and real (albeit satirical) global threats in Dr. Strangelove only deepens its historical prescience and modern relevancy. Ideas of obedience and assimilation are near-compulsive inclusions on the topic of institutional design in film, and Dr. Strangelove tackles them with a direction that has made it a lasting piece in the canon of American film. Additionally, its relentless satire of every institution it addresses establishes unique perspectives on their designs, imparting singular narrative turns and character beats for their constituencies. There are infinite facets of Dr. Strangelove, but it is clear that its address of institutional design is deliberate, thoughtful, and unique, and presses forward as one of the most cunning pieces of political satire of all time.

Works Cited 

George, Peter, 1924-1966. Dr. Strangelove : or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. London :Prion, 2000.

Tsutsui, William M. Godzilla on My Mind : Fifty Years of the King of Monsters. New York :Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.