What they NEVER TOLD YOU about the most SINISTER DOCTORS of World War II

In 1999, a reporter from Scientific American asked the 91-year-old physicist Edward Teller whether it was true that he had been the real-life template for Dr Strangelove, the chilling scientific adviser played by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick's movie Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Rumours had been circulating ever since the movie's release on 29 January 1964. After all, Teller had worked with Robert Oppenheimer on the atomic bomb (he is played by Benny Safdie in Christopher Nolan's film) and went on to spearhead the far more powerful hydrogen bomb. He had a terrifying reputation and a Hungarian accent as pronounced as Strangelove's German one. 

When Teller made headlines again in the 1980s as the brains behind President Reagan's so-called "Star Wars" defence initiative, several newspapers called him "the real Dr Strangelove".

But Teller exploded at the reporter. "My name is not Strangelove," he snapped. "I don't know about Strangelove. I'm not interested in Strangelove. What else can I say?… Look, say it three times more and I throw you out of this office." Teller died in 2003, a year before the publication of Peter Goodchild's biography Edward Teller: The Real Dr Strangelove, on the cover of which he is pictured wearing Sellers' spectacles in a still from the movie. It is unlikely he would have appreciated it.

It might seem strange that a fictional character was required to sell the story of one of the most consequential individuals of the 20th Century, but even now, on its 60th anniversary, Dr Strangelove is synonymous with the politics of nuclear war. Later this year, Armando Iannucci's stage version will open in the West End, with Steve Coogan taking on Peter Sellers' trio of roles.