Doomsday Ships Were Ready to Ride Out Nuclear Armageddon Before Doomsday Planes
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
It amazes me that I like even though it requires a huge suspension of disbelief when the military is brought up.
The book is also the only zombie fiction that really covers, somewhat realistically, the period between case zero and the break down of society. All other shows just show the early outbreak and then jump right into the post apocalyptic anarchy.
One good historical precedent to build this kind of fiction upon would be the Black Death in Europe. Good sources, real apocalyptic pandemic without counter measures. And yet society didn't completely disintegrate. World War Z is the only work I know of that comes close.
I think the book would be better as a series.
Think of it this way, if the lord of the rings films had kept the idea of a powerful ring and orcs, but changed the pacing, plot and characters, most people who liked the books would be understandably pissed.
Sadly it seems to be an on going trend with cherished books.
First WWZ, then Artemis Fowl, and soon, Discworld's The Watch....
To me the last 20 years has been the true Golden Age of Television because streaming has enabled the rise of serialized TV as the best medium to adapt long form written content.
Movies are for comics, short stories and literary works (because they tend to be incredibly short). TV is for novels.
Like Game of Thrones would never have worked as a movie (or even a series of movies). It's just such a shame it mysteriously ended after season 6.
Back in 2006 I actually had a conversation with someone after seeing Deadwood (fantastic show BTW) where I literally said that the GRRM books should be a TV show and it would probably take the likes of HBO to do it. IIRC HBO optioned the books in 2007.
I haven't read WWZ but yeah, the movie... was not great. Like 3 things happened.
I agree with your basic point that streaming has somewhat freed video from the confines of either having a ~2 hour film or a generally episodic TV series that runs for as long as people will continue to watch it. There have obviously been various exceptions but 2 hour film or Law and Order was pretty much the norm.
The only let-down about WWZ was the lack of a convincing biology or physics model for the zombies. The Girl With All The Gifts does it better IMHO (only read the book, not seen the film).
Too bad that movie was terrible, terrible, terrible. Worst movie in the franchise IMHO.
Politicians didn't like it. the US never renounced first strike.
I still struggle with how "hard" a hardened C&C jet can be, and I think there is a general principle, that the EMP pulse you can defend against is not as big as the one the enemy can produce.
I read that defector provided soviet jets at one point had tiny weeny valves, which were not indications of how backward their electrical engineering was: they were capable of being rad-hardened more than the IC's of the time. I'm not sure this is true.
For MAD to be effective you need to convince people you’re both able and willing to vindictively kill off large swaths of the worlds population. As such you do want to come off as just slightly unhinged which having first strike capability projects.
First strike was needed in order to slow things down and do some damage, in theory to a) give the US time to rush conventional forces to Europe, b) bloody the nose of WP enough to make them think twice and c) destroy as much as possible of the WP rear areas and reinforcements. If the WP had gone through the Fulda Gap or the South option near Switzerland -tactical nuclear mines, Special Operations nuclear devices, tactical nuclear artillery, tactical aircraft attacks etc would have been used pretty quickly on them.
In reality it probably would have escalated to far worse than that pretty quickly I'm guessing.
Basically, first-strike was a posture in public. The real question was "who commanded it"
Which is kind of an oral history of the development of the current command and control systems (includes some great notes on things like "how unlikely the air force thought a mid-air collision of nuclear armed bombers was" - the spoiler is surprisingly more likely then it was thought after the second one happened).
https://www.amazon.com/Doomsday-Machine-Confessions-Nuclear-...
Although it's not nuclear war, a better example in the same vein is Special Bulletin.
and here in this PBS documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlPEBROvR9w
Edit 1: I think that's the one (in German): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ3vkqDaPdg
Edit 2: It is set before the fall of the USSR and the German reunification, classic cold war stuff. Just watching it. Forgot the details, but damn the fall of the iron curtan could really have ended differently. Basically, Gorbatshev was forced to step down and military hawks took over.
Both the French and the English decided to maintain their own nuclear deterrent for this reason.
Viktor Belenko's defection to Japan w/ a MiG-25 is a fascinating story unto itself. But, yes, the MiG-25 had vacuum tubes and other design elements that seemed like anachronisms @ first glance.
> The use of vacuum tubes also made the aircraft's systems resistant to an electromagnetic pulse, for example after a nuclear blast. They were also presumably used to provide radiation hardening for the avionics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25#Wester...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiG_Pilot:_The_Final_Escape_of...
For US readers, a "valve" (in the context of electrionics) is known as a vacuum tube on this side of the pond. It's called "valve" in British english because it controls electricity like a valve does water.
[1]: https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-59-the-destroyer-...
One of the minor plots is a submarine equipped to handle thermonuclear war being further fitted to survive the several thousand years to ride out the event. I wont spoil it further.
It's a very good novel on the same theme, and thus relevant. Highly recommended.
Never heard of the TV show. I'm sort of afraid of watching it, kinda like the Timeline movie based on the Crichton novel.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Creek_Naval_Radio_Statio...
(The Home Secretary was there to allow quorate meetings of the Privy Council, including to appoint a new Prime Minister).
Later on, a class of car ferries were built with airtight doors that could seal the car deck, as well as other features allowing them to be used as floating nuclear bunkers.
A few minutes later Elizabeth and Margaret arrived with their dogs - an obligatory conversation about the weather and respective dog breeds was had before all the visitors piled back into their boats.
But still, radio triangulation was a known technic and submarines did exist and should have been expected to be build by the sovjets, so I am still wondering a bit, why the dedection issue was not mentioned.