Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 movie Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is one of the most piercingly topical movies ever made. Its genius rests on the fact that, barely a year after the ‘world held its breath’ through the Cuban Missile Crisis, it threw off the solemnities of the nuclear age and sent the whole thing up. That was 60 years ago, so why would anyone want to turn it into a West End play today?

You might think that the appeal of Armando Iannucci’s and Sean Foley’s new adaptation, which opened on 29 October at London’s Noel Coward Theatre, would lie in lampooning the renewed threat of nuclear war that has stirred since Russia invaded Ukraine – or that might arise from the prospect of a second Trump administration. But that didn’t seem to be in the front of the audience’s mind the night I saw it. A big part of the fun of this uproarious, laugh-out-loud show lies in watching Steve Coogan nail not just the three parts Peter Sellers carried off in the movie – the British Group Captain Mandrake, the US president, and Dr Strangelove himself – but a fourth. Coogan also takes on the role of the US cowboy-pilot Major ‘King’ Kong, whose Texan accent Sellers couldn’t get right. Better yet, the script pulls off the feat of finding new gags in the plot of one of the greatest movies ever made. Coogan’s Strangelove makes ‘NASA’ sound like ‘Nazi’; we learn he has broken his own hand and leg with a hammer in order to mechanise them because one ‘cannot experiment on other people any more’. He keeps having to remember to remark, in his campy accent, that the Third Reich was ‘a dreadful business, which I really hayded’.

None of this is exactly topical. But Iannucci and Foley have uncovered a strand of thought in this old story that strikes a deep chord with today’s anxieties. As Iannucci wrote recently, they were writing as ‘social media was spreading conspiracy theories and Donald Trump was asking his country to believe a lie’. Far more than the screenplay, their stage version points up how the Cold War became a wilderness of mirrors, where endemic secrecy and deception made reality itself seem utterly treacherous, even unknowable. Lines in the movie are spun out into a whole tirade about how the insidious Red enemy might disguise himself as your wife; someone warns, in perfect seriousness, of an ‘undetected sneak attack’.  When one soldier shouts, ‘I’m not a commie!’, another fires back: ‘That’s what a commie would say.’ In the movie, the crazed US base commander General Jack D. Ripper is obsessed with a real-life conspiracy theory of the early 1960s: that fluoridation of the American water supply was actually a dastardly communist plot. It’s this that provokes him to dispatch bombers to nuke the Soviet Union. The stage version runs with this theme with glee, which is not surprising: much of it could have been written last week.

That maddening Cold War sense of imminent, invisible threat still haunts our imaginations.

This has had an impact in surprising ways, because we tend to forget how the fear of Armageddon that drives Dr Strangelove also provoked other Cold War-era fears and traumas that endure. In the real War Rooms of the 1950s and 1960s, the terror of triggering nuclear war drove an obsession with secrecy that was not only self-defeating and ludicrous, but opened up spaces into which terrible imaginings flooded. Despite the cooling of our fear of Armageddon, those secondary spectres are still with us.

In the wake of their great victory in the Second World War, Americans faced a sudden series of shocks: the dread implications of the atomic bomb, the fear of communist subversion, the Soviets’ advance across Europe. In response, the federal government developed a new obsession with ‘national security’. This was meant to protect America, but it brought yet another unnerving surprise – the creeping sense that government was big and forbidding and was keeping a lot of secrets. Naturally the question soon arose: what is the government hiding – and is it extra-terrestrial invaders?

In the summer of 1947, hundreds of Americans started to spy strange things in the skies, and duly reported them to the media or the authorities. From the start, this was intertwined with the Cold War. As the American historian Greg Eghigian points out, in his fascinating, deeply-researched new book After the Flying Saucers Came, witnesses assumed that these ‘unidentified flying objects’ were secret Soviet weapons. (Cold War Americans were not as wide-eyed as we might assume.) Even for those who did fear that ‘flying saucers’ were alien spacecraft, the Cold War was still at their shoulder: the extra-terrestrials’ curiosity about earthlings was often thought to have been triggered by the advent of the atomic bomb. Intelligence officials expressed interest in the reported alien sightings, but maintained their obsession with secrecy: unsurprisingly, as Eghigian notes, this ‘fuelled suspicions about conspiracies’. It didn’t take long before plucky maverick UFO investigators emerged, alleging a ‘government conspiracy of silence’.

In at least one major instance, government fear of triggering war and the secrecy surrounding it fuelled the belief that the aliens were coming. In the 1950s, to gather intelligence on the Soviets’ progress in developing nuclear weapons, the CIA funded the development of a spy plane, the U-2, which was capable of flying at altitudes far higher than was generally believed possible – fully 40,000 feet above commercial aircraft. This produced what a declassified internal CIA history drily described as ‘an unexpected side-effect’ – a ‘tremendous increase’ in sightings of UFOs. Airline pilots spotted mysterious glints high up in the sky, particularly when flying west in the early dusk. The silver-painted U-2 wings far above were still catching the sun.

When air force investigators checked UFO sightings against U-2 flight logs, it confirmed that this was indeed what the spotters had seen, but the air force could not say so. President Eisenhower feared that the U-2 missions technically constituted an act of war – and if one were shot down, actual war might well follow. And so the way was clear for ufologists to read the glints from the wings as harbingers of a different threat. Eventually, in 1960, the Soviets managed to shoot a U-2 down, exposing the secret. This triggered much embarrassment – but it was not the end of the world.

The fear of UFOs, however, carried on regardless. The state had sealed off great tracts of New Mexico and Nevada to conduct nuclear tests – and so, just as air force analysts projected their nightmares of enemy missile production onto the unknowable blank spaces of the Soviet Union, members of the public projected their nightmares of alien invasion and government nefariousness onto forbidden locations in the desert.

One of the earliest manifestations of apparent evidence of UFOs was the discovery in 1947 by a ranch foreman near Roswell, New Mexico of mysterious debris – sticks, foils, rubber, and sticky tape. At first, a public information officer from a nearby army air force base described it as a ‘flying disc’, only to be overridden next day by a general who insisted it was simply a ‘high altitude weather balloon’. Decades later, in 1980, this story was exhumed, with the correction of the story interpreted as a cover-up. The debris, it was claimed, was the wreckage of an alien craft which – as ever – had been spying on the military’s atomic research efforts. From there, stories of alien corpses and secret autopsies proliferated. As became clear in 1994, the weather-balloon story was a cover-up. The debris did come from a balloon, not a flying saucer – but the balloon was not monitoring the weather. It was dispatched to record audio traces of Soviet atomic bomb tests, as part of something called Project MOGUL. As with the U-2s, this could not be made public – and so a jumble of detritus became the plaything of all kinds of fearful imaginings.

Perhaps the closest the world came to the mortal peril dramatised in Dr Strangelove was the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. The resolution of the crisis was President Kennedy’s finest hour, but tensions between his and Fidel Castro’s governments continued – which is not entirely surprising, given the repeated American attempts to kill the Cuban leader. In early September 1963, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported Castro saying that if the Americans didn’t stop trying to oust him, they themselves wouldn’t be safe. When Kennedy was assassinated soon afterwards, the Cuban government was among the suspects – particularly when it emerged that the man arrested for the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, was an avowed Castro supporter.

Here, once again, fear of nuclear war was an easily-forgotten driver of the wave of conspiracies that followed. As the historian Kathryn Olmsted has argued, a crucial motive for the new Johnson administration’s secretive response to the assassination was a terror of triggering global annihilation. When a Dallas assistant district attorney mooted charging Oswald with ‘communist conspiracy’, a White House aide bawled him out, shouting ‘What the hell are you trying to do, start World War III?’ Johnson used the threat of nuclear holocaust to pressure the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, to lead a commission tasked with confirming that there was no conspiracy, particularly not a communist one. One aim was to smooth away Oswald’s fervent support for Castro; another was to obscure the Kennedy administration’s murderous campaign against the Cuban leader. If that came out, it might make the assassination look like the kind of revenge attack that Castro had appeared to threaten so recently. Just a year after the missile crisis, the idea that the Cubans had killed the American president would produce tremendous pressure on Johnson for military retaliation, and with it the danger of all-out war.

As with the UFOs, this fearful secrecy left the field clear for conspiracy theorists to develop their own explanations of the assassination, fuelled by the sense that the government was hiding something. Olmsted notes that the Warren Commission was an attempt to ‘maintain Americans’ trust in their system of government’; instead, it helped to undermine it. But for all the trouble that has brought, it was a small price to pay to avoid the end of the world.

Tellingly, these two side-effects of government fear of nuclear war – conspiracy theories about UFOs and JFK – duly fused. In the 1980s, the influential conspiracy theorist Milton William Cooper contended that Eisenhower had made a secret deal with the extra-terrestrials. As his biographer Mark Jacobson notes, Cooper thought Kennedy was assassinated because he was poised to ‘blow the whistle on the alien cover-up’ – a notion later dramatised in The X-Files. Cooper would later conclude that UFOs were a grand hoax – but even then, the notion continued to feed his conspiracist worldview. He insisted that tales of UFOs were designed to manipulate the masses, the better to get them ‘in line behind a one-world totalitarian government’.

Cooper’s intense suspicion of the American state was in part a product of his experience of the Vietnam War, and the government’s endemic lying about what was really going on. In this he was hardly alone. More than any other historical event, the war in Vietnam entrenched the fear portrayed by Dr Strangelove – that the gap between how the Pentagon thought it could run things and the actual chaos it was capable of unleashing was both ridiculous and terrifying.

Much of the government’s deception – and self-deception – over Vietnam was arguably a product of the strange, self-defeating strategy it was pursuing. Lurking beneath this, too, was the fear of nuclear war.  The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara – the man who was tussling with the generals in the actual Pentagon while Kubrick was shooting his imaginary version – pursued a strategy of graduated pressure. What this meant in practice was that the America onslaught on North Vietnam slowly, grindingly intensified, dragging in ever more young Americans, dropping ever more bombs, killing and maiming ever more Vietnamese, pausing then resuming, without becoming any more effective. It was this failure that drove the need to lie over and over again that the US efforts was really making progress. This provoked the immense frustration of the anti-war movement – but also of the generals, who chafed against the Johnson administration’s restrictions: they wanted to send the B-52s we see in Dr Strangelove to destroy the ports through which North Vietnam appointed military supplies from the USSR and the land routes down which Chinese materiel arrived. One key reason Johnson and McNamara forbade this was to avoid provoking either of those hostile nuclear powers into war. As with UFOs and JFK, the consequence of this strategy was yet more damage to public trust.

Kubrick began writing Dr Strangelove before the Cuban missile crisis, shot it in early 1963, and was due to screen it for the critics on the day Kennedy was shot; the film finally opened on 29 January 1964. In the wake of the missile crisis, Washington and Moscow were looking for ways to step back from nuclear, and the intense fear of Armageddon was just beginning to cool. But the following year, Johnson deployed active combat units to Vietnam. As the conflict bled across American life, it infused Dr Strangelove’s portrait of mad strategists and their out-of-his-depth president with new relevance.

As Dorian Lynskey notes in his authoritative recent study of apocalyptic imaginings, Everything Must Go, the model for both the gung-ho Pentagon general and the crazed Jack D. Ripper was Curtis LeMay, the ‘belligerent former commander of the Strategic Air Command and the firebomber of Japan’. Even as he retired in 1965, LeMay was talking of threatening to bomb North Vietnam ‘back into the Stone Age’.

When he began work on the movie, Kubrick had intended to make it deadly serious, but he remembered finding that, ‘ideas kept coming to me which I would discard because they were so ludicrous. I kept saying to myself: “I can’t do this, People will laugh.” But after a month or so I began to realise that all the things I was throwing to were the thing which were the most truthful.’

He decided that ‘the only way to tell the story’ was as ‘a nightmare comedy’.

And if there is one, this is the lesson Dr Strangelove has to offer us today, as we stumble around in our new wilderness of mirrors. Conspiracy theory is an attempt to make sense of a skewed, absurd world and its frightening concentrations of power. But it ends up handing more power to the worst of those who already have too much of it, by further degrading the shared trust in truth on which democracy depends. Satires like Strangelove are conspiracy theory’s more constructive mirror image. Both genres extend reality to the point of absurdity, in a bid to reveal the ‘truth’. But instead of assuming that the high walls that surround those concentrations of power conceal perfectly efficient evil masterminds, satire assumes they conceal people who are either nuts or not up to the job. Instead of responding to the blizzard by doubting everything and descending into a kind of gullible cynicism, it’s better to respond, like Kubrick and Iannucci, with a sharp but humane scepticism.