I am a fan of The Offspring, a punk rock band. I had always known their song “Slim Pickens Does the Right Thing and Rides the Bomb to Hell” (quite the name!) was based on the film, Dr. Strangelove. The music video features a highly stylized animation filled to the brim with scenes of war, explosions, and of Death himself, personified as Dr. Strangelove.

Peculiarly, Dr. Strangelove is regarded as a comedy film. Yet, any individual component of the film cannot be considered amusing. The deranged general’s rambling monologues hints at rampant paranoia and megalomania. The at-times inefficient war council is a snide remark at the governmental bureaucracy. And, of course, the issue of nuclear bombs and the apocalypse are anything but jokes. The way that the characters make light of the “end of the world” may seem as concerning as it is amusing to some.

However, having done some research on nuclear weapons, I have realized that, even if every nuclear weapon were fired and detonated, a nuclear apocalypse would not occur. Massive swathes of land would be rendered unlivable, and perhaps a majority of the human race would be killed, but civilization would not end, and the world would not be immersed into nuclear winter for hundreds of years.

Many experts were convinced that the Kuwaiti Oil Fires would blot out the skies in ash and smoke, plunging Europe into an artificial winter. The amount of oil burned, and the amount of energy expended, would have been close, if not equal to, the detonation of nuclear devices. The result of the Kuwaiti Oil Fires was a temperature drop of around five degrees Celsius over the Persian Gulf– not quite the apocalypse that experts had prophesied.

What was the purpose of that tangent? It meant, to me, the movie was a comedy. The possibility of the doomsday device which Dr. Strangelove described seems ludicrous to me.

The nature of public fear has changed as the years go by. Once, exposed angles and scandal were the foremost phobias; then, it was fear of the military draft, then, mutually assured destruction. Today, one of the foremost fears of society is the loss of privacy– from hackers and from the government.

The moral of my seemingly aimless ramble is that the movie would not have been as funny had it been translated to a more pertinent modern issue. Given time, someone may make a parody of today’s greatest phobias, just as The Offspring have parodied nuclear annihilation with a punk rock song.