Well, mainly the one thought, but I'm intrigued how the movie lends a kind of charisma to the military-industrial apparatus - the technological component of it, anyway - even as it critiques said apparatus, pointing out how its totalitarian nature produces (especially through the nature of its failure points!) the irrational paranoia which justifies its existence. Maybe that's just the cost of centering said apparatus as the film's main subject, or maybe it's a product of contrasting that apparatus against a human element which both serves to keep it in check and makes that paranoia possible. (If you wanted to combine them, you could characterize this as the problem of centering an abstract subject through the individual actors which constitute it.)
However, I strongly suspect neither explanation suffices. Consider that one story about Kubrick crafting the B-52's cockpit; the implications of the US military monitoring a film that would openly criticize them. Or, if you want to limit yourself to the narrative, note how responsible easily identifiable individual actors, acting well beyond their own authority, are for accelerating the conflict: they serve to introduce an element of comic relief that serves to make the technological apparatus appear all the more infallible by contrast. And regardless of the cause, the result is a little Wow Cool Robot, if you will.
Is this what being Theodor Adorno was like?
Further scribblings:
National stereotypes abound in this film. While they absolutely date this movie (not in a bad way, mind you; just in a "yea, this is a product of the 1960s" way), they really only work when criticizing the American masculine strongman political persona. Less so when we're dealing with the silly direction Peter Sellers was given for his characters: Strangelove's eccentricity barely repressed Nazism, Mandrake's "Pip pip, cheerio, smile and nod as the general lectures me on koro and fluoride in the drinking water."
I wish I had more to say about the film's critique of postwar consumer culture, watered down as it is by the brief implication that the USSR is no different in this regard. Or the highly exaggerated direction Kubrick gives the actors.
The film's argument is undermined a bit by the establishment of the Moscow-Washington hotline about six months before the film released in theaters.
How did the bomb generate a mushroom cloud? Mushroom clouds are a result of detonating a nuclear bomb in the air, not direct contact with the ground like the film portrays.
Only at the tail end of this film did it hit me that filming in black and white was an intentional choice on Kubrick's part, given color films like Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) and Rear Window (1954).