Goofs for
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) More at IMDbPro »

• Miscellaneous: The opening sequence contains the grammatically incorrect credit "Base on the book Red Alert by Peter George".
  
  
• Miscellaneous: Towards the end of the film, when Strangelove is fighting with his renegade right hand over control of his wheelchair and punches it several times out of frustration, the Russian Ambassador clearly corpses (laughs) at Peter Sellers' performance and then quickly regains his composure.
  
  
• Continuity: When Gen. Ripper and Capt. Mandrake are using the belt-fed machine gun, in one shot Mandrake is holding a chair over his head for protection, but when it cuts and the camera is behind them and Ripper crawls away from the window, Mandrake isn't holding the chair, and the closest chair is 10 feet away from him.
  
  

• Revealing mistakes: The background footage for the model B-52's is filmed from a Boeing B-17G, whose shadow can be seen on the ground. See also Trivia.
  
  
• Audio/visual unsynchronized: After Major Kong lists the contents of the emergency ration kits, he says "Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good time in Dallas with all that stuff." After filming, the line was dubbed to "pretty good time in Vegas". The mismatch can clearly be seen. This was done because President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas shortly after filming was completed, and the producers did not want to offend anyone.
  
  
• Factual errors: In the opening credits, the standard disclaimer about events and characters being fictitious has the word misspelled as "ficticious".
  
  
• Miscellaneous: In the opening crawl, the word "occurrence" is misspelled "occurence."
  
  
• Anachronisms: (Possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers) The big map on the Pentagon wall is badly out of date - Finland lost Karjala to the USSR during WWII.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: Strings can be seen holding up the model of the bomber.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: According to the movie, Colonel Bat Guano is a member of the non-existent 23rd Airborne Division. As seen in the Coca-Cola machine scene, his shoulder patch is from the 2nd Infantry Division.
  
  
• Continuity: General Turgidson learns from his secretary, Miss Scott, of General Ripper's ordered attack on the USSR at 3 a.m. Washington D.C. time. However, the concurrent scenes at Burpleson Air Force base (somewhere in the Western United States) take place in the daytime.
  
  
• Audio/visual unsynchronized: In the scene where Mandrake finds the radio, it is on the shelf of an IBM 1403 high-speed printer, with the cover open. The printer is running; anyone who has ever been around a working 1403 printer knows that they are very loud. Operators had to shout to be heard, and it is unlikely that Mandrake could have heard a tiny pocket radio. In the scene, the printer is making no noise even though it is running at 600 lines per minute with the cover open.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: When General Ripper first speaks to Captain Mandrake, he refers to "Attack Plan R, as in Robert". 'Robert' was the phonetic for R in the RAF phonetic alphabet. (Captain Mandrake was from the RAF.)
  
  
• Factual errors: Several times during the film, when the B52 is shown in flight from the side, even though the camera angle "pans" with the aircraft when banking (turning), there is no change in the angle or geography of the scenery on the background plate footage - it still looks as if the plane were in straight level flight.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When the bomber is evading the missile a crewman calls out the closing speed in Mach number. He pronounces it "mack", rhyming with "tack." An American bomber crewman would pronounce it "mock," rhyming with "hawk."
  
  
• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): The accent of the "Russian" ambassador is incorrect to the point that a native Russian-speaker would have difficulties to understand his "Russian".
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: When Major Kong is reading the contents of the crew's survival kits, he mentions, "one automatic pistol". The weapon shown as he reads that description aloud is a typical semi-automatic pistol, not a fully automatic weapon which continues to fire as long as the trigger is depressed - in other words, a machine gun. However, the correct military designation of the standard issue sidearm depicted is "Automatic Pistol, Caliber .45, M1911-A1."
  
  
• Factual errors: The bombs carried by the B-52 are 20 and 30 megaton thermo-nukes. However, the stock detonation footage used for the target blast is from operation Upshot-Knothole, event Grable at the Nevada Test Site. This test yielded 15 kilotons or 1/1000 the yield stated in the film. Many of the "Doomsday" blasts are similarly-sized weapons. There are a few megaton range blasts in the latter sequence but none approaching the 100 MT bomb size the Ambassador mentions as comprising the Doomsday Machine.
  
  
• Continuity: In a number of scenes showing the B-52 flying from behind, the plane banks and turns yet none of the control surfaces on the wings move.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: When Mandrake made the phone call to the president, the communication system was supposed to be dead. However, there are no doubt multiple phone lines going into a major air base, and it is quite conceivable that a public pay phone would be on a completely separate phone system than the direct line to SAC Headquarters. In fact, Mandrake did mention the possibility that it would not be working.
  
  
• Factual errors: The B52 pilot is a Major (Maj Kong). This is too high a rank to be a pilot; would normally be Captain.
  
  

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