The Joke Is The Procedure

Kubrick bought Peter George's novel Red Alert intending a tense procedural and discovered while writing that the logic of deterrence could not be dramatised straight without becoming ridiculous. So he kept the procedure exactly and changed nothing but the tone. Every step in the film is correct: a wing commander issues a legal recall code, the fail safe works as designed, the Soviet doomsday device is a rational response to the American one, and the world ends because each system performs as specified. Ken Adam's War Room, a black triangle with a ring of light over a poker table, was so convincing that Ronald Reagan reportedly asked to be shown it after taking office and was disappointed to learn it was a set at Shepperton.