The strangely unloveable Nazi virus

Stanley Kubrick's classic Dr. Strangelove (1964) is undoubtedly about the cold war with America and the "commie" Russians as mutual antagonists. But the film--and I saw it for the first time recently--has, I think, a curious subtext: The Nazi virus is indomitable. 

The virus manifests itself in the plan that Dr. Strangelove has at the movie's end. After an American bomber drops the dreaded H bomb on a Russian ICBM base, Dr. Strangelove tells his spellbound audience, comprised of both Americans and the Soviets, that the radiation from the explosion will invade the earth's atmosphere for a hundred years making the planet uninhabitable. During these hundred years, says Dr. Strangelove, it's advisable to build a subterranean hideout, a society if you will, where the most virile of men will cohabit with the most seductive and fertile of women in the ratio of 1:10. 

What he doesn't spell out, but what strikes us like a bolt of lightning, is the fact that these would be males and females of a particular race, the chosen race. The truth of Dr. Strangelove springs out like a Jack-in-the-box when in a moment of exhilaration, the "doctor"--a German scientist who had emigrated to the U.S. after world war II and changed his name--gets out of his wheelchair and exclaims, "Mein fuhrer I can walk!!!"

The subtext then is that Dr. Strangelove had borne inside of himself the unfulfilled Nazi dream of racial domination--the emergence of a society of the racially superior types. After the fall of Hitler, who would revive that dream but the stupid Americans and Russians, punch drunk in love with arms racing? 

In this magnificent satire on the Cold War and the hollow ideologies the war was supposed to have been fought in the service of (there are many hints that the war was really a way for Coca Cola and mega corporations of the ilk to thrive), Kubrick shows us how extirpation isn't just something we expect from fascists; the Americans and the Russians were equally extirpative in their outlook during the Cold War, except that the "death to all but the best among us" was hidden behind a veil of a just war.

N.B. There was also a rumor floating the time of the film's release, that Dr. Strangelove is a satirical portrait of Dr. Henry Kissinger. Kissinger, a Jewish-German emigre to the United States spoke with a distinct German accent; there were talks back then, in light of the Vietnam war, of trying him in the International Court of Justice at the Hague.