In the early 1960s an Air Force official touring a Hollywood soundstage looked into a mock B-52 cockpit and assumed espionage, because the classified layout was flawlessly accurate. The designers had reverse-engineered it from a single unclassified exterior photograph and an older declassified aircraft. That set belonged to Dr. Strangelove, and this episode uses production notes, historical records and behind-the-scenes accounts to tell the story of a film that was never meant to be a comedy.

The discussion explains how Stanley Kubrick’s research into mutually assured destruction convinced him the logic was too absurd for drama, why co-writer Terry Southern’s credit angered novelist Peter George, and how Columbia’s demand that Peter Sellers play four roles ended at three after a sprained ankle. It covers Slim Pickens being kept unaware he was in a comedy, the warm-up takes Kubrick promised George C. Scott he would never use, the concrete war room ceiling and green poker felt, the real strategists behind the title character, the lawsuit that delayed the rival film Fail Safe, and how the Kennedy assassination changed a line of dialogue and killed the pie fight ending.

• Retro-scripting: how Sellers’ improvisations were written back into the official screenplay
• Why Kubrick beat Scott at chess on set, and what that says about the director’s own war room
• Herman Kahn, megadeaths and Operation Paperclip as sources for the film’s satire
• Leftover B-52 Arctic footage that turned up in The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour
• The Vera Lynn montage that replaced the pie fight, and the film’s place in the first National Film Registry