This year marks the 50th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”, a very funny movie about an unfunny subject. It is essential viewing for any IR student for a host of reasons. It is a fantastic period piece, capturing the fear and paranoia that comes with living under a “nuclear umbrella” at a time (right after the Cuban missile crisis) when nuclear war was not an abstract concept but a realistic threat. It also provides a text-book explanation and a scathing critique of the logic behind deterrence theory. The subtext of the movie also provides a brilliant, and again scathing, gender analysis of the American military. And there is much more….
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-half-century-anniversary-of-dr-strangelove
IR Theory & Practice 