TS outrageous title sequence ? a B-52 bomber coupling in mid-air with a US Air Force KC-135 refuelling tanker, a grotesque image of misdirected sexual energy ? instantly establishes the premise of director / writer Stanley Kubrick's 1963 Cold War "nightmare comedy" .

The concept is implicit in the very title ? the strange, perverse love affair between Cold War theoreticians and sleek, beautiful, unimaginably powerful weapons that could in practice bring about instant global extinction.

It's a theme which runs right through the film to the final fade-out, earth spasming beneath mushroom clouds flowering in a multi-orgasmic, world-shattering frenzy.

Key decision makers on both sides of the Iron Curtain, Kubrick suggests, had been seduced by the genocidal weapons they had forged - their most fundamental natural instincts and yearnings lured away from healthy relations with other humans and into a grand passion with the instruments of nuclear Armageddon: procreation trumped by the allure of annihilation, Eros wooed and won by mega-death.

As a comic device, the military-industrial complex's insane love affair with weapons capable of bringing about world-wide genocide was inspired. With Kubrick and co-writer Terry Southern created what remains one the most culturally resonant of all Cold War artefacts ? a slapstick time-capsule as immediately evocative of the genuine and misplaced superpower fears, tensions and ambitions of the time as, say, news footage of the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolding or President Kennedy's defiant Berlin Wall speech.

While the situation is explored in an intentionally absurdist manner, Kubrick and Southern unerringly identified some key elements of the Cold Warrior's psyche. The fetishising ? the eroticising ? of the technology capable of bringing about nuclear obliteration so brilliantly lampooned in was a distorted projection of real world psychology.

For the moral blindness of those who built and maintained ? and were prepared to use ? these thermonuclear stockpiles was, in part, explained by the fact love even in its most corrupted form really is blind.

Robert Jay Lifton, the Harvard academic who has written the definitive psychological study of the architects of World War Two's genocide, has identified some of the self-same traits in Cold Warriors that allowed the Nazis to so effortlessly dissociate themselves from the physical and moral carnage inflicted by their infinitely cruder technology.

Just as was the case with the German engineers, bureaucrats and party officials who almost brought about a mechanised and highly organised final solution to the Jewish problem, so American and Soviet officials were largely oblivious to the probable consequences of their flirtation with the machinery of global mass murder.

Lifton has catalogued the grim, dehumanising parallels: "The fear of a 'germ of death', of a contagious illness (Soviet communism or American capitalism), threatening the life of the group (the United States or the Soviet Union); a promise of a revitalising cure via an absolute vision (of American virtue and Soviet evil, or the reverse) that justifies 'killing them all' and excludes the suicidal dimension of that vision; the mobilisation of claims of spiritual altruism and scientific truth and of opportunities for transcendence as one presses towards mass killing in the name of healing; the designation of killing professionals and professional killers for the task, along with increasingly perfected technology . . . and finally (the political and military leadership's) embrace of the weapons out of attraction to their ultimate power and to their high technology."

Lifton's analysis amounts to a cautionary retelling of the Pygmalion myth for the Nuclear Age ? the creator falling under the fatal spell of the most destructive and mindless of his creations.

While public opinion on both sides of the Iron Curtain always subscribed to the concept so perfectly encapsulated in the acronym MAD ? the Mutual Assured Destruction that would inevitably result from a full-scale superpower nuclear exchange ? the politicians, generals and technocrats were more circumspect.

For 40 years, until a pauperised Soviet Empire collapsed from within from the cost of an arms race a new, realistic leadership recognised would lead to a war no one would win, there were hawks on both sides who believed in victory through nuclear power rather than the avowed policy of nuclear deterrence which maintained an uneasy peace between Moscow and Washington.

These hard-liners believed not in prevention but in preparation for a nuclear conflict.

Consequently the whole planet became the front-line in their undeclared war ? a global chessboard around which they moved their intercontinental bombers, ballistic-missile armed submarines and fighter-bombers, the people who would have been obliterated had a shooting war broken out seen as entirely dispensable pawns.

They studied every conceivable way in which to get the most bang for their taxpayers' nuclear bucks. Nuclear bombs were studied as possible volcano detonators; as means of instantaneously melting the polar icecaps; as triggering mechanisms for earthquakes and as a method for transforming entire regions of both the US and the USSR into quicksand.

And the technocrats were always in pursuit of bigger and bigger bangs.

They sought to turn the theoretical possibility of an anti-matter bomb into a reality for their arsenals, a weapon of almost unlimited destructiveness ? one capable of producing a 43 megaton blast (the equivalent of 43 million tons of TNT) for every kilogram expended.

They conducted feasibility studies on the gigaton (or thousand megaton) bomb, a device that would have been exploded outside earth's atmosphere and which would have ignited continent-incinerating firestorms that would have consumed virtually all of the world's oxygen supply as fuel.

And all the while, as they dallied with these toy-bright, obscene objects of their affection, the technophiles denied the lethal fallibility inherent in these weapons systems. It turns out, of course, they were only about as fail-safe as the was unsinkable.

The unintended consequences of pouring incalculable amounts of treasure, brain-power and state-sponsored energy into these weapons was demonstrated exactly 20 years ago.

Only fate in the unlikely form of a sallow-faced young Russian submariner saved Bermuda from the catastrophic results of a nuclear accident that had the potential to dwarf the environmental impact of the Chernobyl reactor tragedy. In October, 1986 the Soviet K-219 submarine was on active duty in what was known as the "Bermuda patrol box", the oceans east of the island from where its missiles could most accurately be fired at targeted East Coast cities.

The K-219 was powered by two pressurised nuclear reactors and carried 16 SS-N-6 submarine launched ballistic missiles, each armed with two one megaton nuclear warheads.

When a fire broke out in one of the K-219's missile tubes ? possibility as a result of a collision with a US attack submarine shadowing the steel leviathan ? the Soviet vessel surfaced in an attempt to halt what soon became a runaway chain reaction of increasingly catastrophic mechanical failures.

It seems only the suicidal heroism of 21-year-old engineer Sergei Preminin, who died as a result of manually shutting down the submarine's reactors, averted a disaster that would resulted in the the meltdown of the nuclear core.

if the superheated core had burnt through the deck of the submarine, the ensuing explosion would have "cooked off" ? detonated ? the K-219's nuclear warheads, resulting in a blast some two-and-a-half times more powerful than the Hiroshima explosion.

Even though the submarine was located some 600 miles from Bermuda, the almost unimaginably destructive blast impact and ensuing radioactive contamination would likely have rendered the island uninhabitable.

The world would do well to reacquaint itself with the details of this extremely close-run nuclear disaster, particularly given the anniversary of the K-219 sinking coincided precisely with the culmination of North Korean strongman Kim Il-Jong's own love affair with the bomb. Unlike even his most hawkish superpower counterparts during the Cold War, Kim - who seemingly used Orwell's as a How-To manual when it came to constructing his hermit-like police state ? is a man who does not subliminally worship the genocidal potential of nuclear warfare. He openly proclaims his love.