“I didn’t know ANYONE, back then, who became anti-war/anti-nukes/ban the bomb, pro-USSR after seeing that movie, when it came out.”
A media slug blubbered about Reagan’s election: “I didn’t know *anyone* who voted for him.”
Guess you hung out with a better class of person, but that movie embedded in the public consciousness the idea that dummies and loonies could accidentally start a nuclear war that would destroy us all.
It embedded the notion that if anyone ever launched, everyone everywhere would inevitably use *all* their nukes in an orgy of destruction, completely without restraint.
It was the first portrayal I can remember of the military as mentally ill and stupid.
It presented the Soviet nuclear threat as immensely more dire than it really was.
It presumed the failure of mutually assured destruction, creating the illusion that Americans were totally unprotected from nuclear holocaust.
Perhaps no one you knew fell for this, but a lot of people did. Even in the 1980s I heard talk radio whining about the scenario. When a caller told them that the best minds on both sides had been working for decades on methods to prevent it, they were actually surprised to hear it.
They thought the world was just like Strangelove, and it could happen at any second.
It was a comedy!
This move was and advertised as a COMEDY and a SATIRE!
There were also plenty of "dramatic" political movies, churned out the same year...FAIL SAFE, SEVEN DAYS IN MAY, with two earlier ones...THE RIGHT MAN ( 1960 ) and ADVISE AND CONSENT (1962 ), that should and actually DID freak out many people who read the books/saw the play or movies, about politics as it was.
I don't know how old you are, but the COMMIE BAN THE BOMB crowd had been around and VERY loud, since we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki!
Also, the crazy John Birch Society FLOURIDE CONSPIRACY ( they claimed that it was a "COMMIE PLOT" ! ) had been around since the early 1950s and really reached full steam in the mid 1950s-early 1960s and THAT was part of the movie as well.
Apparently, yes, I did hang out with a far better, more well informed, better educated bunch of kids and grown ups than you did...since we all understood that DOCTOR STRANGELOVE was just a funny satirical look at the time.
And anyone, especially in the 1980s and today, who still harbored the patently ridiculous opinion, you proffered, was/is not only a political naif, but a benighted fool, bereft of factual knowledge of ANY kind !
And before you jump to the conclusion that the people I knew, back then, were all the same/lived in a bubble, please allow me to disabuse you of that assumption! These kids were from a variety of different backgrounds, ethnicities, socio-ecnomic strata, and yes, even political affiliation. What bound us together was the fact that we were all in college, though not all of us went to the same one, and friends.