That’s what I thought.
As the stress of the crisis builds, Strangelove seems to be reverting towards (or reliving) his earlier Nazi behaviors and training. (His arm also stabs out in the Nazi salute, too, as he experiences more and more stress.)
His regaining the use of his legs seemed (to me) to indicate that maybe his paralysis probably stemmed from a psycological issue, and not a physiological one.
Would it help if you knew the original ending was supposed to be a pie fight? It was filmed and scrapped.
I did know that, and it reinforces my feeling that the existing ending is a cut-and-paste job. It stands out, because the rest of the movie is so well-constructed.
I have to say, I think a pie fight would have been worse. The theme of the movie is people doing absurd things for very serious and logical (to them) reasons, and I don’t know how you sustain that through a pie fight.
Old fashioned exposition the way Kubrick did it in his next movie? 
We know the bomb went off, and given how closely they were watching there is no way they didn’t know the bomb went off - and the mine shaft bit, which they wouldn’t do if it hadn’t, seals the deal.
I suspect lots of people today don’t get the final joke. “The mine shaft gap” is a reference to the (spurious) missile gap which JFK used in the 1960 campaign.
BTW, the novelization says this is one of the annals of dead civilizations, so in that version at least they don’t make it.
I find the “mine shaft gap” particularly amusing because suggests that if they can’t compete over who has the bigger missile (phallus) they’ll choose to compete over who has the deeper hole (vagina). The whole movie is packed with snarky sexual overtones, from the eroticized refueling shots at the beginning, to Buck Turgidson’s interactions with his “secretary”, to Ripper’s obsessions with keeping his essence pure, to characters named Mandrake and Merkin Muffley. Kubrick reduces nuclear warfare to a big dick wagging contest.
I have to say I agree with all of that but I still think it is a brilliant scene from a comedic genius. One of the funniest scenes ever put on film.
Not to mention the focus on how much sex will be required to repopulate the earth - the men will have to perform prodigiously and the women will have to be selected for extraordinary sexual attractiveness! The look on George C Scott’s face as Sellers explains this is brilliant, he’s practically drooling in anticipation.
Yeah, he was looking forward to becoming a turgid young buck.
I like to compare Scott’s performance in Dr. Strangelove with that in Patton. It’s almost the same character; the difference is subtle, but it makes Turgidson absolutely hysterical. (Context probably helps, too.) He was brilliant in that movie. Hell, everybody was brilliant in Strangelove.
The centerfold Major Kong is looking at is his secretary - she really is, just picked for other than typing skills, no doubt.
As for character names, we also have Jack D. Ripper, Premier Kisov, and Colonel Bat Guano. (When I was in grad school our standard name for PDP-11 batch files was guano.bat) And don’t you think the president is a ringer for Adlai Stevenson?
One of the things I love is how the President plays it straight all the way through.
Speaking of lookalikes, to later audiences, Dr. Strangelove’s curly hair and German accent evoke Henry Kissinger. But Kissinger was an obscure professor in 1963, and not one associated with nuclear game theory, and was not one of the many influences on the character.
Re Kubrick’s “wheelchair trope:” classic post modern critical bullshit. Sellers, originally cast also as the pilot, fell from the aircraft set, and had to use a wheelchair.
Someone here mentioned a wheelchair correspondence, to which the above applies (but the poster wasn’t being all arty-critical).
