Burpleson Air Force Base example essay topic

Adam Gifford 11-2 Dennis Fille brown 11-2 Eric Augen braun 11-1"Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb " Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" is comedy that portrays the situation during the Cold War in comical fashion. The movie is about the United State's attempt to recall the planes ordered by the paranoid General Ripper to attack the Soviet Union and essentially save the planet from destruction. Producer and director Stanley Kubrick, basing the movie on the novel Red Alert intended the movie to be a straightforward drama but was unable to without using crucial scenes of the story that seemed to give the movie a more comical view of the plot. The first scene of the movie is the mid-air refueling of a fighter plan, where the refueling is depicted as a sort of sexual intercourse. The movie then shifts over to Burpleson Air Force base where General Jack D. Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden, gives his planes flying over the USSR the order to attack. When President Merk in J. Muffle y, one of three characters played by Peter Sellers, finds out about this, he calls a meeting with his advisors in the War Room of the Pentagon to discuss possible solutions to the problem.

General "Buck" Turgid son, played by George C. Scott, is called to attend this meeting and arrives late. Also attending the meeting is Dr. Strangelove, played by Peter Sellers, a German scientist with a robotic arm that insists on rising in Nazi salute. At the meeting, the viewers find out that General Ripper has put Burpleson Air Force base under lockdown and will fire on anything approaching the base. He also disconnects all the phone lines so there can be no contact with the outside world. Therefore, there is no way to reach the general and retrieve the correct sequence needed to recall the planes. These facts, along with the fact that finding the correct sequence with a computer could take days, forces the president to send Colonel "Bat" Guano and his troops to take over Burpleson and call on Ambassador de Sade sky to contact Premier Kissoff, the leader of the Soviet Union, to alert him of the situation and allow him to destroy the planes if the sequence cannot be determined.

Meanwhile, in Burpleson Air Force base, General Ripper explains to Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, played be Peter Sellers, when he first realized the threat of a communist invasion. While shooting at the "communist attackers", in reality Colonel Guano's troops, he explains how fluoridation of water was a communist attempt to control Americans. When the shooting stops, he goes into the bathroom and kills himself, still the only one with the code. Eventually, Guano reaches Mandrake and the dead general.

Mandrake begins looking for clues for the correct sequence and finds it written on the general's desk. With this he calls the president and the president then gives the order to fall back. However, one plane does not receive the transmission because it had been attacked and the receiver was destroyed Major "King" Kong, the pilot of the plane, flies to a secondary target to drop the atomic bomb. Due to malfunctioning bomb bay doors, Kong manually opens the doors and rides the atom bomb to its target. The bomb sets of the Soviet's doomsday device, which will create an enormous cloud covering the Earth that will last for 100 years.

The movie ends back in the war room with the president and his advisors debating over what to do to survive the effects of the doomsday device. Dr. Strangelove proposes the idea of evacuating important male officials along with an overwhelming majority of beautiful women to underground mines in order to survive for the 100 years and hopefully repopulate the Earth. The final scene is of Dr. Strangelove getting out of his wheelchair after proposing his solution and declaring that he can walk again.