As we await the next chapter of My Button Is Bigger, and wonder how much we should worry about the possibility of nuclear war, let's take a trip back to 1964. That was an era when apocalypse seemed imminent, and a year when three seminal works of nuclear fear hit the screen.

The most famous of the three imagined Armageddon as pitch-black comedy, and the circumstances as bleakly absurd. Dr. Strangelove, directed by Stanley Kubrick and co-written by Sunset High School graduate Terry Southern, gave us the cracked Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), who decides American forces must launch a nuclear attack on Russia because they're messing with our precious bodily fluids.

Ripper is joined in this goon gallery by Gen. Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott in a deft comic performance), Col. Bat Guano (Keenan Wynn), always on the lookout for "preverts," and, most famously, Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers, who plays three key roles in the movie), the former Nazi scientist so jazzed by the prospect of nuclear war that it makes him get out of his wheelchair and walk.

Ripper was based on Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, who was known to have an itchy button finger. But the movie's iconic line comes from beleaguered U.S. President Merkin Muffley (Sellers again), who looks on in dismay as Turgidson scuffles with the Russian ambassador (Peter Bull). "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here," admonishes the president. "This is the war room!" Here we have the double-speak of military euphemism boiled down to a single line. If you can't cry you might as well laugh.

As Kubrick was readying Strangelove, he was also suing to make sure Fail-Safe wouldn't come out first. The plot lines are nearly identical: A standard military exercise goes haywire and brings us to the brink of nuclear war, as American and Russian leaders scramble to stop it. But there was nothing funny about Fail-Safe. The film plays it straight — Henry Fonda is the president, so you know it's serious — and tragic, packed with the realistic intensity for which director Sidney Lumet was known.

Larry Hagman in "Fail Safe" (Columbia Pictures, 1964). (Columbia Pictures)

It's a great film in its right, with a nice early role for Larry Hagman, who plays the president's translator. Much of the film consists of Fonda and Hagman in a stripped-down room, on the phone with Moscow. The big difference here is that the machines are more to blame than the men. Here are no lunatics boasting of their countries' nuclear capabilities, though there is an academic civilian adviser, played by Walter Matthau, who seems rather eager to see the button pushed. Fail-Safe, arriving in Strangelove's mushroom shadow, flopped at the box office. That's a shame, because it's a really good movie.

The third leg of the 1964 nuclear triangle appeared only once, on television. This is "Daisy," the infamous one-minute commercial spot produced by the Lyndon Johnson campaign. Though it never mentions the name of Johnson's opponent in the presidential race, Barry Goldwater, it manages to argue that a Goldwater presidency could mean the end of the world.

The ad starts with a little girl, picking and counting the petals of a daisy. She gets to nine, then stops, looking confused. Then an ominous voiceover begins a countdown from 10, and as the camera zooms in on the girl's eye we see the reflection of a mushroom cloud. After the noise of the blast comes the voice of Johnson: ""These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God's children can live, or go into the dark. We must either love each other or we must die."

The ad is outrageous even by today's anything-goes standards. Yes, Goldwater was a hawk at the height of the country's nuclear anxiety — which means, the ad extrapolates, that he wants to kill your children. The gloves had come off the political attack ad, and it would never be the same.

This was a different time, just two years removed from the Cuban Missile Crisis. Duck-and-cover drills were classroom staples, as if ducking and covering could protect you from a nuclear blast. For one anxious year nuclear anxiety permeated pop culture, much as the TV movie The Day After loomed over the landscape of 1983.

We're not there yet. Note to the button-heads: It would be nice to keep it that way.