This reminds me that, despite the prissy and offended denouncements from the Air Force and DOD (War Department?), the only fiction in Dr. Strangelove is the characters. All of the systems depicted were built.
It was worse than that: in Doctor Strangelove, General Buck Turgidson was at least waiting for Truman's say-so before doing anything irrevocable. In real life, there's this anecdote about Curtis Lemay:
SAC had reconnaissance aircraft flying secret missions over the Soviet Union twenty-four hours a day. “If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack, I’m going to knock the shit out of them before they take off the ground.” Sprague was shocked. “But General,” he countered, “that’s not national policy.” Sprague remembered LeMay responding, “I don’t care. It’s my policy. That’s what I’m going to do.”
It's funny because the open source arms control community (like Martin Pfeiffer[1]) works really hard to inform people of how few safeguards our nuclear policy has. But even those anemic safeguards (the idea that only the president can arbitrarily launch nukes) have frequently been illusory!
I genuinely think we way-under-rate how closely we escaped nuclear annihilation in the last 100 years.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/almost-everything-i...