Through a series of military and political accidents, a pair of psychotic senior military officers - U.S. Air Force Commander Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) and Joint Chiefs of Staff General "Buck" Turgidson (George C. Scott) - hatch an ingenious, foolproof, and irrevocable plan to unleash a wing of B-52 bombers and their nuclear payloads on strategic targets inside Russia. And when the brains behind the scheme, Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers), a wheelchair-bound nuclear scientist with bizarre ideas about man's future, accidentally activates the bombing mission, the President of the United States (Peter Sellers) is unable to stop it.