 U.S. President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) is on the hot line to Moscow with some rather embarrassing news for the Soviet premier: "Hello, Dimitri....I m fine....Now then, you know how we ve always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the bomb....The bomb, Dimitri. The hydrogen bomb....Well, now, what happened is that, uh, one of our base commanders...he went a little funny in the head....and he went and did a silly thing....He ordered his planes to attack your country." A comedy about an accidental nuclear attack? One that ends with total annihilation, thermonuclear apocalypse? Preposterous! Stanley Kubrick thought otherwise. In the end his thinking prevailed. The mad saga revolves around a psychotic Strategic Air Command officer, Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), who lets loose his B-52 bomber squadron on the Soviet Union. Ripper takes this unilateral action because of his paranoid belief that Communists are sapping and contaminating "all our precious bodily fluids" as part of their plan to take over the world." Unbeknownst to Ripper, his attack will trigger the Russian s ultimate weapon, the Doomsday Machine, a diabolical retaliatory device set to blow up the planet.