gh, and it drops its bombload. This is where Kubrick tries to show the futility of everything. The governments of both the worlds superpowers have thousands of safeguards and security precautions for their nuclear weapons. But one man manages to get a nuclear warhead to be hit its target. And this warhead hits the زDoomsday Deviceس. The Doomsday device is the ultimate deterrent, because if you try to disarm it it will go off. It has the capability to destroy every living human and animal on Earth, and it does So it is all pointless. We have these weapons, and no matter how hard we try to control them everyone still dies. And so to make ourselves feel better about all this impending doom, Kubrick, like Vonnegut, satirizes the entire system. By making such moronic characters, like the wimpish President Mertin Muffley, Kubrick is saying, similar to Vonnegut with Dr. Hoenikker, that we are even worse off because these weapons are controlled by people that are almost buffoonish and childish. General Ripper, the man who causes the end of the world, is a portrait of a McCarthy era paranoid gone mad. He thinks the communists are infiltrating and trying to destroy are country. And he says the most heinous communist plot against democracy is fluoridation of water:Like I was saying, Group Captain, fluoridation of water is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face . . . They pollute our precious bodily fluids! (George 97)And General Rippers personal prevention of the contamination of his bodily fluids is equally perplexing. He drinks only ز . . . distilled water, or rain water, and only grain alcohol . . .س Kubrick uses this kind of absurd reasoning in his movie to show the absurd reasoning behind nuclear weapons. Both him and Vonnegut were part of the satirical side of the apocalyptic temper in the early Sixties. They laughed at our governments, our leaders, the Cold War and the ar...
