There was speculation that both General Ripper and Gen. Turgidson were based partly on Curtis Lemay. Not sure if that was true or not. However, my father was friends with Gen. Lemay, and I'm sure there was nothing to be offended about. It was satire, of course, and having a clever sense of humor about nuclear annihilation would have been quite handy for the Air Force brass back in the early 60's.
Incidentally, Peace is Our Profession was the actual motto of the Strategic Air Command. There's no way Kubrick could have made that one up!
The Peace on Earth/Purity of Essence stuff was off the charts brilliant satire.
It went way over the head of most folks.
He was the architect of the firebombing raids on Japan in WWII, something I am wholly in support of, and when he made the decision to lower the altitude on the bombing raids from 25-30,000 feet down to about 8,000 feet, he very nearly caused a mutiny.
They were losing many planes, and not hitting any targets, which meant going back over and over again, losing more planes, and still not hitting any targets (much of it was due to the jet stream in the Stratosphere, something we didn't know about until we tried to fly to Japan, and they found they were doing 200 mph faster going one way, and battling headwinds the other way.
Anyway, it worked. I don't relish the fact that we did that to Japan, but that was war. And you hear all these people saying Japan was close to surrender, putting out feelers (which they were) but there was little possibility they were going to surrender, as much as some like to think so.