This was not merely a great film, but an important one. For those too young to remember, let me tell you: the Cold War was a damned scary time! We may simply have been lucky that the people in charge of the world didn't blow it up. Kubrick's film was, perhaps, the first time a serious artist had the nerve to view the Cold War as a proper subject for satire. In so doing, he gave us all a new way of looking at the central reality of our world. In those years, we were never more than half an hour away from annihilation -- whether because of a mechanical error (as in Fail Safe) or the deliberate act of a madman, like Jack D. Ripper in Strangelove. But the very policy of our government was known as Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). How much difference was there, Kubrick wanted us to ask, between General Ripper and, say, Curtis LeMay, or President Muffley and President Johnson? After seeing Strangelove, it was impossible to take our Cold War leaders or policies at face value. We could no longer ignore the man behind the curtain, because there was the very real possibility that he was as mad as General Ripper. But Ripper's madness was the madness of the times themselves. Without fully realizing it, like the Russians in the movie, we had built a Doomsday Machine. And the truly scary thing is...it still exists.