Armenian Radio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Yerevan_jokes) was asked: "what do to if a nuclear attack is imminent?"
Armenian Radio responded: "wrap yourself in a linen sheet and slowly, in organized fashion, without creating any panic, crawl to a cemetery."
To paraphrase War Games (a classic which I watched only after coming to the US), the winning move is not to play."
Before this exercise Reagan actually believed that the USSR thought the US was too good and wholesome to ever launch a first strike.
Except in movies. There, we get to see and experience it all.
Well, movies often get the facts and the characters wrong (on purpose). Movies usually are adapted to fit to audiences who have no real understanding of History so things are made simple for them.
This being said, K-19 was a decent movie (despite the inaccuracies) and I'd recommend anyone to watch it AND read what actually happened.
Like pretty much any superhero movie, no one knows who spiderman or Clark Kent are. In the first spiderman movie, at the very end he "gets the girl" but has to walk away from her, because of his obligation to help the world and keep the girl out of trouble. So his sacrifice is known by the movie audience, but not the in-movie characters.
Incidentally, I think that's what good parenting looks like.
Opportunity for a playwright to write a really tight two scene piece there. Doubt if we could get it up to 50,000 words[1] even if we did the 'follow three scenarios with multiple endings' trick, and even if we had the Bobby Kennedy/LBJ dynamic in the committee going.
Edit: The K-19 'incident' would have made a major psychological impression on anyone, even allowing for the high threshold that I imagine Soviet navy commanders of that era had.[2]
Has the charts, photos, signals and some wonderfully unreliable reminiscences by crew members. (edit link has gone hence reply to my own post).
Is it only in retrospect that this seems poorly thought through?
In the aftermath, the U.S. military executes air strikes on Cuba followed by an invasion. The Soviet forces obliterate Guantanamo with a nuclear strike, send nuclear cruise missiles at the incoming invasion force,and, most seriously, manage to launch two of the SS-4 missiles...one of which hits Washington D.C. and wipes out the entire National Command Authority. In response, U.S. forces execute the entire SIOP against the Soviet Union, an effort which gives "overkill" a new name.
The aftermath of "The Two Days' War" includes the near-extermination of the Soviet Union, radiation issues in large parts of the world, and a "nuclear twilight" causing worldwide food shortages and famine. Ultimately, the United States was viewed as the aggressor by the rest of the world, compounded by the actions of President Richard Nixon (elected in 1964, replacing Acting President John McCormack). The U.S. stood alone in refusing to join the Geneva Convention for the Abolition of Nuclear Armaments in 1966, and renounced UN membership in 1968, ordering the organization out of New York City. The American public felt Nixon had taken the wrong turn, and elected Eugene McCarthy to succeed him in 1972.
The essay is written as the report of an investigative commission written in 1972 and finally declassified in 2002, in part by the actions of U.S. Archivist Newton Leroy Gingrich (who never went into politics in this timeline) at the New Capital District in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
