Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is one of the most celebrated and significant films ever made. This book traces the movie's origins as a thriller novel through its evolution into a devastating black comedy, to its ultimate reception as an undisputed cinema classic. A wealth of fresh detail is provided on Dr. Strangelove's production, its initial reception and its lasting influence. The book also examines the film within the context of the real-life superpower standoff it satirized and evaluates its place alongside director Kubrick's entire catalog of famous works. Drawn from interviews, biographical research and extensive cultural analysis, this work is an indispensable resource for Kubrick fans, movie buffs and students of Cold War history.

During his career Stanley Kubrick became renowned for undertaking lengthy and exhaustive research prior to the production of all his films. In the lead-up to what would eventually become Dr. Strangelove (1964), Kubrick read voraciously and amassed a substantial library of works on the nuclear age. With rare access to unpublished materials, this volume assesses Dr. Strangelove's narrative accuracy, consulting recently declassified Cold War nuclear-policy documents alongside interviews with Kubrick's collaborators. It focuses on the myths surrounding the film, such as the origins and transformation of the "straight" script versions into what Kubrick termed a "nightmare comedy." It assesses Kubrick's account of collaborating with the writers Peter George and Terry Southern against their individual remembrances and material archives. Peter Sellers's improvisations are compared to written scripts and daily continuity reports, showcasing the actor's brilliant talent and variations.

In May 1998, India resumed the underground testing of nuclear weapons. Pakistan responded with tests of its own, and all of a sudden the arms race was on again. Not that it ever stopped—China, Israel, Iran, and Iraq have been pursuing weapons-building programs, and the ultimate horror of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists draws ever near. In this book, Michael Foot looks back over 40 years of fighting the nuclear menace and surveys the world scene at the close of the 20th century as a warning of the continuing danger of building weapons of mass destruction.

King of the Cold War crisis film, Dr. Strangelove became a cultural touchstone from the moment of its release in 1964. The duck-and-cover generation saw it as a satire on nuclear issues and Cold War thinking. Subsequent generations, removed from the film’s historical moment, came to view it as a quasi-documentary about an unfathomable secret world. Sean M. Maloney uses Dr. Strangelove and other genre classics like Fail Safe and The Bedford Incident to investigate a curious pop cultural contradiction. Nuclear crisis films repeatedly portrayed the failures of the Cold War’s deterrent system. Yet the system worked. What does this inconsistency tell us about the genre? What does it tell us about the deterrent system, for that matter? Blending film analysis with Cold War history, Maloney looks at how the celluloid crises stack up against reality—or at least as much of reality as we can reconstruct from these films with confidence. The result is a daring intellectual foray that casts new light on Dr. Strangelove, one of the Cold War era’s defining films.

Speculative fiction--both science fiction and fantasy--reflects, among other things, the fears of the culture that created it, contributing (perhaps unconsciously) to our efforts to prevent our fears from coming true. While the names and media change over time, the themes of speculative fiction have a long history. Nineteenth century works such as Frankenstein and The Invisible Man contain many of the same messages as the more modern tales of Terminator, Jurassic Park and even Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, although almost a century separates their creation. This critical study discusses the ways in which speculative fiction reflects societal fears and analyzes how such cautionary tales contribute to society's efforts to avoid the realization of these fears. Beginning with a discussion of the nature of speculative fiction, it takes a look at the characteristics of the cautionary tale. The core of the book, however, is the concept of the "Nightmares Model," which examines and categorizes the repetition of specific themes within the genre. The dangers of science and technology, the perils of power, and the threat of the unknown are discussed as recurrent themes within a variety of works in prose, film and television. Works analyzed range from Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea to 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Blair Witch Project. Sources include the author's own observations as a member of the genre's fandom, a variety of published commentaries and the perspectives of contemporary professionals gained through personal interviews and panel discussions.

From ‘Duck and Cover’ in the 1950s, when American schoolchildren were instructed to hide beneath their desks in the event of nuclear attack to contemporary campaigns against pandemic flu, education campaigns have been used to prepare the general public for apocalyptic events. Governments have made use of various media from films, leaflets and television to the internet to inform, inspire and scare populations. Forms of disaster education also permeate popular culture with films and television programmes illustrating survival techniques from dealing with terrorist attacks in ‘24’ to thwarting zombie apocalypse in ‘The Walking Dead’ and ’28 Days Later’ . Using critical race theory and whiteness studies the book argues that information about disasters has always, tacitly or overtly, prioritised the survival of certain groups of citizens above others. Drawing on examples from the UK and the US, from past and contemporary disaster education and popular culture, it considers that rather than being kitsch, naïve and ephemeral, such campaigns are central to the way in which states define survival, life and death. The book will be of interest to educationalists, historians, sociologists and cultural theorists as well as those working in emergency planning, public health and communications.

A collection of essays that takes stock of the current impact of the image and imagination of the catastrophe in art, science and philosophy