For me the goose bumps were when the ambassador’s phone melts. The set-up (the Ambassador’s job is to let the President know when the planes arrive in Moscow which means certain death). The cut off conversation. The long screech. The cut shots of the different locations where everyone is silently staring in disbelief.
Anyone else do the triumverate? The book, the original movie and the remake?
Yup. The remake gets hammered in the youtube comments, but I think that’s ridiculous. It’s not as good as the original of course, but it does have a fascinating cast. It’s still the same story, and a subtle change is that instead of a shrieking wife we get Clooney’s characters son. And it’s plainly shown that Clooney KNOWS it is his son and knows it’s a mistake, but goes ahead anyway because that’s what they’re trained to do.
As I’ve said before, I’d watch black and white, live remakes of classic stories any day of the week if they’d make them. “Inherit the Wind”, “12 Angry Men”…etc…
Even with the poor quality that’s still an earth-shattering scene.
I found a link to the one I was talking about
I want to mention also, I was at a friend’s house when the remake aired, he wasn’t home, so I was sitting around with his wife and said, “Hey we should watch this”. She had never seen or heard of the film, book or remake.
at the end, the poor woman was sobbing…and mad as hell at me.
It’s been a while, so can someone remind me what the “fail safe” is that the title refers to? Fail safe systems, well, are designed to return to a safe state in the event of a failure. That doesn’t really describe this scenario, which is closer to a fail deadly scenario, the opposite. Was there something in the story I don’t recall that actually involved a fail safe, or did they just decide it was a catchy title?
Chelyabinsk was pretty obviously a meteorite, and given the trajectory it wouldn’t have been categorized as a probably RV. However, unbeknownst to many people even now that the Soviet Union developed and at least partially deployed a system called “Perimetr” which was designed to be activated during times of high alert and would provide a semi-automated response to conditions indicating attack in the case that military and political leaderhsip were incommunicado. Just how automatic the system was and whether it was actually used (or intended to be used) is a point of contention with some former Soviet officials claiming that it was actually put in place and still exists, and others arguing that it was scrapped because of the essential unworkability, but just the fact that it exists in any realized form at all is frightening enough.
The enitre point of “launch-on-warning” was to limit any discussion in political leadership; that if certain criteria indicating high likelihood of attack were to be observed, the decision would be essentially automatic. Would an executive have mindlessly pushed the button upon such a warning? Reagan, for all of his hawkish talk, hated nuclear weapons and would likely have never authorized a strike. Carter appeared to have little faith in strategic alerts. And while there were tensions during the tenure of Bush #1 as power struggles within the Soviet Union and the ultimate fall of the “Evil Empire” occurred, I’d like to think that he would also have averred from anything less than a clear mass strike. But should the POTUS and VPOTUS be out of contact and the decision runs down the chain of national command authority, the probabiliy and preparedness of people to make difficult rational decisions declines.
“Counterstrike capability” was the mission of the Scowcroft commission (yes, the same guy who is the icon of the eponymous award to the official who sleeps through the most official meetings) to find a suitable basing method that would assure the ability to respond even to a disabling first strike by the feared SS-18 ‘Satan’ MIRV. The proposals range from the absurd to the ludicrous, from submarines in Lake Michigan and Superior with two ICBMs missiles strapped to the outside of the hull and a giant underground racetrack from which would burst upward to miles-deep silos bored into the Rocky Mountain range and covering almost a quarter of the entire state of Utah or New Mexico with thousands of semi-hardened missile shelters through which hundreds of LGM-118A ‘Peacekeeper’ missiles and thousands of optical dummies would be shuttled around like a giant shell game. In the end, it became obvious that these basing modes were all just about as absurd as putting missile launch sites on the back side of the Moon or under the Icelandic ice sheet (serious proposals, I shit you not). The cost and viability were astronomical for questionable benefit.
There is nothing sensible or rational about strategic deterrence or nuclear weapons despite many attempts to make it seem a logic-y. Anyone who says otherwise is drinking the Flavor-Aid.
Stranger
On the moon? Under the Icelandic icesheet? I am going to have to ask for a cite, if just to see what exactly were the proposers thinking?:eek:
True, the velocity was quite a bit higher than any ICBM RV would be expected to have, but damn, IMHO that dashcam footage is reminiscent of footage of RV’s impacting at Kwajalein (Scroll to 5:30 on the video). Aside, why don’t the RV’s in the linked clip have a glowing vapor trail behind them, like the Chelyabinsk meteor and re-entering Space Shuttles did?
Of course, they don’t shoot live warheads at Kwajalein, and, unlike at Chelyabinsk, there wouldn’t be any more vapor trail after the big blinding flash, but still. As to the trajectory, wouldn’t a Chinese ICBM shot take a similar path?
Bump things back 30 years, with a garbled message of a massive explosion over Chelyabinsk, and I can easily imagine things getting mighty tense at first. Cooler heads would soon prevail, but in an environment where both sides are expecting something nasty from the other, who’d believe at first that it was a meteor?
One of my favorites for weird ICBM basing ideas, was mentioned by John P. Craven in his book, The Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea, and consisted of basing the ICBMs on the ocean floor, beneath 3+ miles of seawater, and perhaps launched by glass submarines. No, really. (Page 8 of the .pdf)
Another collection of “interesting” ideas for ICBM bases made be found here. I haven’t double checked the math, but one comment at the above link mentioned that the concrete, ultra-hard shelter idea would use up several years’ worth of U.S. concrete and rebar production. EDIT: The list at the cite doesn’t have the far side of the Moon base idea, unfortunately. MX really brought out the loons, for some reason.
I did the “triumvirate” for Dr. Strangelove – I have copies of both Ace editions of the “Peter Bryan” novel Red Alert (one with the comic-book-like cover, and the more serious-looking one), I’ve seen Dr. Strangelove countless times, and I have the novelization by Peter George (his real name – Bryan was his middle name. He also co-wrote the screenplay)
Mostly “Hey! Wouldn’t it be cool if we had a secret base on the dark side of the moon? We could shoot missle from it!”
There were a couple of other “subtle changes” as I recall; they don’t show the dream at the start (which weakens the whole discussion about the matador), and when they have the countdown, instead of showing various scenes of New York, they show whom I assume is the First Lady.
Something else people seem to forget about the movie; other than in bits of background music - the only two I remember are a trumpeter in the bullfight and a radio playing while a teenage girl dances in the New York scenes near the end - there is absolutely no music in the film.
Its actually fail deadly, but the author thought the name failsafe worked better.
Declan
Did the term fail-deadly even exist at the time or did it have to be invented for the Cold War’s irrationality?
Okay, from the depths of my memory, I dimly recall that the bomber that made it through had sustained some damage from a defensive Soviet rocket, artillery, or fighter that destroyed the radio receiver that the Vindicator ( I think that’s what they were supposed be) crew would have received the abort/recall orders from. There was Soviet jamming also.
That was Strangelove.
In Fail-Safe the Vindicator was damaged too - just not the radio. They knew they couldn’t escape the blast radius so they set the detonation altitude to the altitude they were flying at.
Of course how much of that was not wanting to live after nuking Moscow?
The cold war was anything but irrational, irrational was a bad thing. The way it works is that the president authorizes the use of nukes, presumably because at the time the soviets were going to launch first. I imagine that a child of the soviet union had the opposite opinion.
The next part is conjecture, as people that were in the know, signed papers that detailed consequences of disclosing information.
Now if we take a generic scene out of a movie, that missiles are in the air and inbound to the states with a flight time of 30 minutes. The president would then have to respond in some way. That required a SIOP or a single intergrated operations plan.
The guy with the football (briefcase) would open it up, and give the president the appropriate operations plan based on what he and the generals decided to do, this code was then transmitted to the air force and navy in regards to their legs of the triad.
Since the return strike takes an equal thirty minutes, or sooner for the navy depending on how close the boomers were, the bombers and tankers had to start moving from their fail safe orbits to take advantage of the confusion on the ground in Russia after the first strike hits.
But up until the president gave the authorization to go, positive control was in effect. If the wrong codes were inserted then the electronics on the plane would not allow the weapons to be armed.
So back when this book was written, bombers were the primary leg of the triad and the weapons only had rudimentry permissive action locks. Communication with the strike force would have only been through radio. What the actual fail deadly qualifications would be, only someone in the loop could tell you, but there was stuff on the internet about the Royal Navy and its nuclear submarines, and a letter that the PM gives the captains, in the event of.
Not exactly fail deadly, but close enough.
Declan
“Now, boys, we got three engines out; we got more holes in us than a horse trader’s mule; the radio’s gone and we’re leakin’ fuel, and if we’s flying any lower, why, we’d need sleigh bells on this thing. But we got one little budge on them Rooskies, at this height, why, they might harpoon us but they dang sure ain’t gonna spot us on no radar screen.”
Oh, sorry, wrong one. Rookie mistake.
The trajectory of the Chelyabinsk meteorite entered in at a much more shallow angle and azimuth that would be highly unlikely for either an attack from the United States or China, nor was it really heading toward a prime strategic target. I would like to think that even in the most paranoic days of the Soviet Union the military leadership would have done at least a minimal sanity check on a single possible attack before going full fleet attack.
The “vapor trail” behind a meteor is actually material vaporizing off of the asteroid. The Orbiter has a trail behind it because it is compressing air in front of it which superheats it via ram compression (which is the source heating into the Orbiter, not “skin friction” as frequently stated) and causes condensation as it cools by expansion aft of the vehicle. RVs are designed to fly through the atmosphere as cleanly as and quickly as possible with mimimal loss to compression; hence, it flies with little condensation behind it.
Stranger
Search on “Project Horizon” and “Project Iceworm”. Remember, back in the early 'Sixties there was a near panic that the Soviet Union would somehow gain strategic advantage to the point of achieving the ability to fire a disarming first strike (never mind that we had real evidence that they were having difficulty actually building and fielding ballistic missile systems and didn’t come even close to achieving parity with the Titan and Minuteman fleets until the late 'Sixties or early 'Seventies, and were even later on achieving parity with our Fleet Ballistic Missile (Polaris/Poseiden/Trident systems) with their SLBM fleets. At several points during the Cold War there was a genuine belief by strategic planners that war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact was a forgone conclusion, which would likely conclude with some scale of nuclear attack and response.
Stranger
And it really must have frosted Ike’s butt to *know *that but be unable to publicly say how he knew - he still had to take crap for the “missile gap”, as if he of all people were soft on defense.
