In current American society, motion pictures have a large impact on day to day life.
Films can shape the way people view the world and create and enforce beliefs.
Not only do films create ideologies those, but they can also show society what their beliefs are. The phenomenon can best be seen in Reagan era movies that glorify the military like Top Gun and Cold War era films that express a fear of nuclear war and communism through mutated creatures like Godzilla, or zombies in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Night of the Living Dead. During the Cold War, Americans justified their possession of the atomic bomb by rationalizing that it was necessary to have the bomb in order to deter other nations from using their own weapons, that America s military leaders could be expected to behave responsibly with the destructive technology, and that Russia was to be feared because the communists were Godless people, who would do anything to undermine their democratic opposition. In Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick takes each of these myths and shows how truly absurd they are, in the hopes that the film s audience will come to see that nuclear weapons have no place in a rational society. One of the main arguments for the existence and maintenance of nuclear weapons in the United States is, and was that weapons of such mass destruction must be present in order to deter Russia, or some other enemy nation, from attacking the United States without fear of retaliation.