Dr Strangelove I presume ?

[Diogenes]

A decade and a half later, Stanley Kubrick's satirical masterpiece Dr. Strangelove permanently embedded the idea in the public imagination. In the movie, a rogue US general sends his bomber wing to preemptively strike the USSR. The Soviet ambassador then reveals that his country has just deployed a device that will automatically respond to any nuclear attack by cloaking the planet in deadly "cobalt-thorium-G."

"The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret!" cries Dr. Strangelove. "Why didn't you tell the world?" After all, such a device works as a deterrent only if the enemy is aware of its existence. In the movie, the Soviet ambassador can only lamely respond, "It was to be announced at the party congress on Monday."

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/ ... ntPage=all





Posted by: katana0182
2 days ago1 Point

In the strange game of Global Thermonuclear War, the only winning move is not to play.

[TallDave]

I'm always a bit skeptical of these rumors. My guess is it exists, but if it ever activated the launch officers would just mutter "Что за черт" and dump vodka on the thing.

According to his private diaries and personal letters, he genuinely believed he was bringing about lasting peace

The article makes Reagan sound like an idiot, but fails to note that he did bring about lasting peace, by bankrupting the Soviet Union.

Just wait till those nuts in Iran have nukes. Then the fun really starts. Deterrence is sketchy with zealots who believe death fighting the infidel sends them to glorious Paradise.

[Tom Ligon]

Dave, something must be lost in the translation. I suppose it must be an idiom:

"That after the features"

Maybe "К аду с тем"

[MSimon]

Dave, something must be lost in the translation. I suppose it must be an idiom:

"That after the features"

Maybe "К аду с тем"

Tom,

How are you with technical Russian? My son wants to improve his skills. I can connect you.

Simon

[Tom Ligon]

Simon,

I am familiar with Babelfish.

For a recent story, I needed to make an alien language sound alien. To do this I translated my original English straight into to Russian using the fish, then back to English. The process does to words what a meat grinder does to steak. A little patching up to make the results understandable was needed.

I have not tried Chinese yet, but I suspect it works as well or better.

There was an old Readers Digest tale in which American engineers were trying to understand a Soviet airframe testing document. They understood the purpose of putting sandbags on the wing, but not the purpose of the wet sheep under the wing.

A corrected translation revealed it was a hydraulic ram.

[MSimon]

Simon,

I am familiar with Babelfish.

For a recent story, I needed to make an alien language sound alien. To do this I translated my original English straight into to Russian using the fish, then back to English. The process does to words what a meat grinder does to steak. A little patching up to make the results understandable was needed.

I have not tried Chinese yet, but I suspect it works as well or better.

There was an old Readers Digest tale in which American engineers were trying to understand a Soviet airframe testing document. They understood the purpose of putting sandbags on the wing, but not the purpose of the wet sheep under the wing.

A corrected translation revealed it was a hydraulic ram.

Dang. I was getting my hopes up.

Still - funny story.

[Skipjack]

I love nuclear weapons. They have something very final about them
Just kidding.
I think that Reagan was an awesome pokerplayer. I mean you need a really good actor (and he was an actor after all) to look at someone with a straight face and claim:
"So we will have these hundreds of lasers (or giant metal umbrellas or nuclear guns, or whatever other concepts they were playing with at the time) in orbit and they will shoot down all the incoming soviet warheads."
I was about ten years old at the time and it seemed ridiculous to me back then. Yet Reagan somehow made the Russians believe it.
He also is directly responsible for the reunion of Germany.
So yeah, great president. He was rather popular in Europe, maybe more than in the US.

[D Tibbets]

I remember back at that time , predicting that while the
Soviet Union allowed Poland to stray, they would never allow Germany to reunite, because there were too many still alive who remembered WWII. I was wrong, so who knows what politics will yield!

Dan Tibbets

[Skipjack]

Helmut Kohl took the opportunity to do the reunion when the USSR was to weak to prevent it. It cost Germany a lot of money, but it happened. I doubt that Moscow would have agreed to this so easily a few years later.
Anyway, if you saw the spirit of the days, the separation would have only been on paper anymore anyway. The only way the USSR could have kept them apart anymore would have been with severe force. But the German people were ripe, they would have fought back and hard.

[Munchausen]

"К аду с тем"

To hell with it

[Diogenes]

I'm always a bit skeptical of these rumors. My guess is it exists, but if it ever activated the launch officers would just mutter "Что за черт" and dump vodka on the thing.

Funny you should mention that.


http://www.worldcitizens.org/petrov2.html

Petrov reported the alarm to his superiors and declared it false. Had he been mistaken, the mistake would have become obvious in minutes: the post's detection system had a 15-minute advantage over the ground radars. No missiles rained on Soviet Union in a quarter hour; rather, in an hour, high command descended on the command post.

And the people were very grateful.

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