Hello?…Uh…Hello Dmitri?

“With great reluctance, Eisenhower agreed to let American officers use their nuclear weapons, in an emergency, if there were no time or no means to contact the President…Aware that his decision might create public unease about who really controlled America’s nuclear arsenal, Eisenhower insisted that his delegation of Presidential authority be kept secret. At a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he confessed to being ‘very fearful of having written papers on this matter.'”

Following up on the recent revelations that, for decades, the nuclear launch code was actually 000000: In the New Yorker and fifty years after the film’s release, Eric Schlosser discovers that pretty much everything in Dr. Strangelove was correct, right down to the secret Doomsday device. “Fifty years later…’Strangelove’ seems all the more brilliant, bleak, and terrifyingly on the mark.”

The Truth in Masquerade.

“[T]he closest comparison I can find for this season is Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove‘ — if, that is, Kubrick cared even one-tenth as much about humanity as Simon and partner Ed Burns so obviously do.” So said Alan Sepinwall in his Season 5 preview, and it’s definitely playing out that way. The masterful and gut-bustingly funny Wire 55 is now available On Demand. And, now that we can talk about it — don’t scroll over the link if you’re at all behind — a remembrance of last week’s fallen.

SDI, Schmesh-D-I.

Say what you will about the Dem ticket, but at least they understand the importance of protecting our precious bodily fluids from terrorist and Communist impurifications. This October, John Edwards will introduce Dr. Strangelove for Turner Classic Movies. (By way of Quiddity.) For the rest of the “Party Politics and the Movies” series, John McCain chose Paths of Glory, Joe Biden picked Dead Poets Society, and Orrin Hatch took To Kill a Mockingbird.