In reference to launching nuclear missiles when they shouldn’t be launch and a mutiny happening aboard a submarine. Is this movie realistic in any of that regard? I have to assume that men in the navy would act differently. Are those the same procedures that would take place in real life? keys in safe, codes in safe, etc
Excellent question, but one nitpick: Wasn’t the point of Crimson Tide that both sides believed they were acting in accordance with Navy regulations? I.e., that the captain and his people reasonably believed that the missile launch had been properly authorized, while the first officer and his supporters reasonably believed that it had not? IIRC, Jason Robards on the the review board stated that both men were right, and both were wrong, and the board declined to find that there was a mutiny.
But I would be interested to hear whether such a situation could ever conceivably arise in real life.
Here’s a thread where it was discussed a while ago. The nukes seemed to come down pretty hard on the “No, it couldn’t have happened that way” side. IIRC from the movie, Jason Robards character at the Court Martial sort of implied that Gene Hackman was right in the absolute sense, and they should have launched, but it was a damn good thing that Denzel prevented the launch, since it was no longer necessary and would probably have actually started a nuclear war.
IIRC, the other point was not quite that Denzel Washington didn’t believe that the launch was verified–it was and they had a valid launch code. It was that he didn’t concur with the launch and wanted to wait until they received a complete follow-on message. He was sort of in the wrong to wait after receiving a good launch code, but this was mitigated by his knowledge of how the Navy works wrt strategic missile platform deployment, and he was able to keep the big picture (i.e., he wasn’t being contrary out of ignorance).
Gene Hackman wanted to launch despite the non-concurrence of the second in command. The whole point of the dual-person system is to prevent the outcome of Gene Hackman’s scope-locked view toward launching the birds when he had a valid launch code but not a concurrence from the other party.
Could this happen again (with an actual launch outcome) today? Dunno. And even if I did, there’s no way I’d say it on a message board. This info is not for public consumption.
I think that Denzel believed that the launch was verified, but there was a second message coming in that was interrupted, and he believed that it could have been a recall message, not that he just wanted to make sure about a launch. IIRC.
Hang the traitor! From the yardarm!
greatshakes
From all open literature that has been available online, it takes pretty much the whole crew to launch the missiles. If there was a mutinuy, I doubt the vessel would even be able to launch.
Some points from the previous thread:
In the real world, there’s no way to recall a launch order. Once it goes out, the missiles are flying. Since missile subs are there to be a deterrent, this makes sense - there’s no way the enemy could even think they could prevent a launch. So the whole plot where Denzel didn’t want to launch until they got the second message in full wasn’t plausible.
Also in the real world, no one person can launch, and no one person can prevent a launch. In the movie, they could not launch without the weapons officer (Viggo Mortensen) - apparently he was the only one with the combination to the safe that held the launch triggers. Remember the scene where the Captain threatened to kill a sailor unless Viggo opened the safe? Again, this makes sense - you don’t want your shiny & expensive sub to become useless because someone hit his head, or turned out to be a closet pacifist.
Big Red by Douglas C. Waller is an interesting nonfiction look at life aboard the USS Nebraska SSBN during a submerged deployment after the fall of the Berlin Wall. One of the more interesting things I learned from it is that, if missile-launch orders come out of the blue with no preceding international crisis, boomer captains are now permitted to break radio silence to ask Washington for confirmation.
Personally, I thought The Fifth Missile was a better movie.
Just looked it up on Wiki. It’s based on The Gold Crew, which I read in high school and remember as being pretty good. Have you read the book? Does the movie change much? Remind me how it ends, please - PM or spoilerbox. Thanks!