Now THAT is just plain sick! - even at war.
It is a satire, also called "black comedy", and war has not actually been declared , but a pre-emptive B52 bomber strike has been launched by a rogue US Air Force base commander.
When discovered by the US President, he alerts the Russian Premier to the problem so that they have enough warning time to be able to shoot down the bombers, because the rogue officer who launched the strike is the only one who has the recall code.
One lone plane, Major Kong's, manages to penetrate the Russian defenses but in the process its radio decoder (and bomb bay) is damaged and it can't receive the recall message when its finally discovered, so Kong does his duty by manually releasing the bomb which has become hung up in the damaged bomb bay.
This summary leaves out the various scenarios related to the launch of the attack and the interchanges between the Russian ambassador and the US President which are really at the heart of the movie.
Director Stanley Kubrick was already well-known for his anti-war philosophy:
Prior to ""Dr. Strangelove" he directed "Paths of Glory" about a French officer who defends his court-martialed soldiers in WWI for refusing to go into the massive meat grinder of Verdun.
There are a couple of others in his canon too, but rest assured the real message gets through if one watches "Strangelove" in its entirety.
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