This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film “Dr. Strangelove.” The movie’s comedy is simultaneously over-the-top outrageous (with characters like General Jack D. Ripper and Buck Turgidson) and disturbingly realistic. In fact, as Eric Schlosser writes, many details of its plot, including the American “Plan R” and the Soviet “doomsday machine,” were much more accurate than the public knew at the time. Nicholas Thompson is the author of “The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War” and the editor of newyorker.com. Here Thompson and Schlosser talk with Sasha Weiss about why the risks of human failure, mechanical accident, and all-out nuclear war were much higher than most people realized during the years of the Cold War, and why the dangers are still great today. Also, Vic Ramstone, Private Eye.

You can also read Schlosser’s guide to the long-secret documents that help explain the risks America took with its nuclear arsenal, and watch and read his deconstruction of clips from “Dr. Strangelove” and from a little-seen film about permissive action links.