In 1964 Stanley Kubrick released his black comedy masterpiece Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb against the unstable backdrop of the Cold War.

As the whole world was poised on the brink of the destruction, Kubrick’s satire powerfully illustrated the ludicrous nature of the communist East/capitalist West dichotomy and highlighted the imminent apocalyptic potential in an unnervingly funny manner.

That the end of the world can be precipitated by, amongst other things, paranoid generals obsessed with bodily fluids and mad scientists with lustful ideas about future Aryan underground races succeeds on a comic level. At the same time though, the film puts forward scary truths about the fragility of the Earth’s existence in the modern age. The scene where befuddled British RAF man, Captain Lionel Mandrake (just one of Peter Sellers’s numerous roles in the movie) has to deal with Colonel “Bat” Guano, a by-the-book American trooper played by Keenan Wynn, is one of the most inspired examples of insanity in Dr Strangelove.

Mandrake needs to call President Merkin Muffley (Sellers again) to try and divert disaster but runs out of change and impotently insists that Col. Guano break into a Coca Cola vending machine to get the coinage. “You’re gonna have to answer to the Coca Cola company,” warns the unreceptive American; just one classic line of many in this sublime satire.

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