Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove: The Secret History of Nuclear War Films

Maloney, Sean M.

ISBN 10: 1640121927 / ISBN 13: 9781640121928

Published by Potomac Books, 2020

About this Item

Cover and edges may have some wear.

Seller Inventory # mon0004007866

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove: The Secret History of Nuclear War Films
• Publisher: Potomac Books
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1640121927
• ISBN 13: 9781640121928
• Binding: hardcover
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

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.
 
 

About the Author

Sean M. Maloney is a professor of history at the Royal Military College of Canada and served as the Canadian Army’s historian for the war in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2014. He is the author of several books, including Learning to Love the Bomb: Canada’s Nuclear Weapons during the Cold War (Potomac Books, 2007) and Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove: The Secret History of Nuclear War Films (Potomac Books, 2020).