I watched a clip from Dr. Strangelove where James Earl Jones played the bombardier of a B-52. Is the sequence of arming the nuclear weapons legitimate, or created for drama by the writers?
The details are all Hollywood, but the basics of multiple crewmembers looking up codes, entering them into control panels, flipping multiple switches, etc., is generally how it works. Lots of “Are you SURE you’re sure?” steps. PlLus steps where the machinery is trying to ensure you really do have permission from HQ to do this thing.
I’ve always been struck by them setting the detonation altitude to “zero”. That doesn’t make any sense, right? Most of the blast would be deflected back into the sky.
I think they had to do that because they were flying so low to begin with.
From Dr. Strangelove - Wikipedia
Lacking cooperation from the Pentagon in the making of the film, the set designers reconstructed the aircraft cockpit to the best of their ability by comparing the cockpit of a B-29 Superfortress and a single photograph of the cockpit of a B-52 and relating this to the geometry of the B-52’s fuselage. The B-52 was state-of-the-art in the 1960s, and its cockpit was off-limits to the film crew. When some United States Air Force personnel were invited to view the reconstructed B-52 cockpit, they said that “it was absolutely correct, even to the little black box which was the CRM.”[17] It was so accurate that Kubrick was concerned about whether Adam’s team had carried out all its research legally.[17]
Given all that, I would think the sequence itself had to be invented for the movie. How close they happened to get to the real deal…dunno.
There are lots of reasons to do a “ground burst” as opposed to an “air burst”. It depends on what you’re trying to destroy. A fragile city gets an air burst to maximise the radius of the comparatively weak blast effects needed to wreck it. A hardened underground bunker (or a large warship) needs a ground burst or the folks in the bunker probably won’t even get their hair mussed.
If you’re going to shake the ground, or use a crater to dig them out like killing garden moles, you need to get the fireball to directly interact with the ground. Zero or near zero burst height gets that done very nicely.
Harbors, airfields, missile complexes, etc., may get either (or both) depending on the details.
At the era of Dr. S, if the missile complex at Laputa was an ICBM site it probably would be hardened silo(s) needing a ground burst. That was about the time of transition from exposed launch gantries to silos. If they were some sort of continental air defense missiles they’d almost definitely be on exposed trucks or hard mounts but probably in revetments.
The movie chose to portray the target as a raised vertical launch platform akin to a space launch. Presumably because that’s the iconic image of “missile launch facility” the 1964 audience would recognize as such.
ISWYDT
Mr. President, we must not allow a Dr. Strangelove quote gap!
When we were young teens and this movie was only a few years old, my brother commented that there is no life situation you’ll ever encounter where there’s not an applicable Dr. Strangelove quote. With the possible exception of being in the middle of sex, 50 years later I still think he was/is right.
Some might occasionally have to mutter something about “precious bodily fluids.”
“Looks like it’s pretty hairy.”
Or scream out “I want your essence! Don’t deny me your essence!”. 
“Twenty million killed, tops!” must come in there somewhere.
I withdraw my caveat. There is a line for every situation. 
I foir one am glad there are a lot of safeguards. A B52 managed to drop a nukular weapon on a farm in South Carolina in 1958, and the high explosive went off, Made a 25 foot crater. In the infamous Goldsboro crash, one of the weapons was “one safety” away from exploding.
But Peace was their profession.
What gets investigated first: B-52’s breaking up in mid-air, that there had to be an order given to jump out of an um-perfetct plane and correct me if I’m wrong, those “high explosives” are supposed to set off the fission reaction powerful enough to set off the thermonuclear warfare that sets off Dr. Strangelove’s cobalt bombs and cue the Vera Lynn.
Also I’ve heard that neither Slim Pickens or James Earl Jones were ever given the script that would show the movie was a comedy. The script page where Slim is riding the bomb down may have been given the last day yet Jones plays it all straight.
Well, there ain’t nothing funny about dropping nuclear weapons, even on other nuclear weapons.
“Shoot, a fella’ could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.”
I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious…service…along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics…which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature,
From a submission to Humor in Uniform in a issue of Reader’s Digest during that period: Some bored clerk at a USAF facility took several hundred sheets of letterhead stationery, and under
Peace is Our Profession
typed and added
War is Just a Hobby.
I wonder if this was before or after the film came out.
Another substantive argument for having like buttons on the 'Dope.
Er, who is John Galt?