"Dr. Strangelove" ridicules nuclear war planning. It takes passing shots at numerous contemporary Cold War attitudes, such as the "missile gap" but it primarily focuses its satire on the theory of mutual assured destruction (MAD), in which each side is supposed to be deterred from a nuclear war by the prospect of a universal cataclysmic disaster regardless of who "won". Military strategist and former physicist Herman Kahn, in the book "On Thermonuclear War" (1960), used the theoretical example of a "doomsday machine" to illustrate the limitations of MAD, which was developed by John von Neumann.