Although decried as communist propaganda at the time, the fact is that many of the aspects depicted in the film were uncannily accurate; Americans and others in charge of US nukes could, in fact, have initiated Mutual Assured Destruction at will.
Half a century after Kubrick’s mad general, Jack D. Ripper, launched a nuclear strike on the Soviets to defend the purity of “our precious bodily fluids” from Communist subversion, we now know that American officers did indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own.
And as depicted in the film, the Russians' secret "doomsday device", designed to destroy the world in the event of a sneak American attack, actually was constructed. Nobody knew it until after the fall of the Soviet Union. Kubrick was more dead-on than anybody realized.
