Launch Code

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The end of the world looks like this.

Man creates the means to obliterate the planet: sixteen Poseidon missiles, each with their own ten independent warheads, enough to provoke a massive retaliation from the country at which they are fired. Machines transmit the order. Humans obey.

The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, the doctrine which preserves peace in a nuclear world, demands that humans will obey, and that the enemy knows that they will obey.

Humans like Lieutenant William M. Guth (USN), assistant weapons officer on the USS Alexander Hamilton, loitering one hundred and twenty miles north-east of the Faroe Islands, deep in the cold embrace of the Norwegian Sea.

The Hamilton was Bill Guth’s first nuclear submarine. In the two years since he had joined the crew at the end of 1981, the Cold War had been steadily warming up. The rhetoric from the American president Reagan and the Soviet leader Andropov had become more heated, the Americans and the Russians were deploying intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe and in September a Korean airliner had been shot down having strayed into Soviet airspace over Eastern Siberia.

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