During the Cold War, many individuals around the world, especially in America and the Soviet Union believed that the end of the world was very soon because of the high amount of nukes both sides controlled. There was a shift in belief of an apocalypse from God to an apocalypse from nuclear weapons.

In the 9-minute clip “Duck and Cover,” students in school are being taught to go under cover the moment they would hear a siren. In other words, they’re being conditioned to know fear and death is imminent when a nuclear weapon strikes. This in turn causes mental conditions such as paranoia to form. The threat of a nuclear bomb has elevated from devastating attack in WWII to the end of the world in the Cold War.

In fact, Strozier’s study states, “Nuclear weapons represent the religion of our age.” In the film “Dr. Strangelove,” paranoia was shown almost everywhere. From General Turgidson’s paranoia to anything related to Russia to General Ripper’s paranoia of communists tainting the “precious bodily fluids” of Americans through water fluoridation. Even when both sides of the army were fighting each other, there was paranoia because all personnel in Ripper’s base stuck to protocol and didn’t bother to use their brains about the situation when firing on other American troops. The role of the nuclear bomb was a thing of both great pleasure for some and great fear for others in “Dr. Strangelove.” The pilots who were on orders to carry out “Wing Attack Plan R” loved the divine power of destruction so much that one of them even dropped with the bomb itself. The characters in the war room on the other hand, thought of the bomb as their annihilation. Although the film is a satire, it is still able to show the symbolic power of a nuclear bomb as well as the paranoia associated with fundamentalists in a more “modern” view for the time.