From the Tom Clancy book published 1984. Weirdly, Broderbund Software had a video game that same year, The Ancient Art of War, where one of the AI opponents was also named Crazy Ivan. I guess video game dev cycles were a lot shorter then. EDIT, I'm guessing Red Alert did RIP it off, from the book, if not the movie. The movie was insanely popular at the time, despite being a laugher for the submariners I've talked to. Unlike the book, where they were mostly, "How the f$&k did he know that?!" They did say the movie, Down Periscope! comes a lot closer to the truth of Navy Submarine service than a throwaway Kelsey Grammar comedy vehicle had any right to. Agree with the poster who said that, it's a basketball game, not war.
Interesting. Yeah, it's one of those movies that is on cable every once and awhile that I find entertaining for its own purposes. Admittedly, I don't have the background knowledge of the book, but I assumed Red Alert was popular in the same time period. "the submariners I've talked to", haha I'm jealous. I assumed it wasn't accurate when it came to the actual craft of being a submariner. I was surprised he said when the term was referenced on Wikipedia.
The movie is not; the book came uncomfortably close in some areas. Inferences, since no one I've talked to will admit exactly where he was wrong. Only that it wasn't often enough. Still his best book, IMHO, as he actually had an editor then, though I wonder how much of it Larry Bond ghostwrote for him? Or maybe that relationship didn't start until Red Storm Rising? Interestingly, given the HBO miniseries this year on Chernobyl, way back then in Hunt, he described a reactor accident, using a lot of the same coefficient of reactivity language that the Legisov character used at the inquest at the end of the series. Two years before the reactor accident at Chernobyl actually happened. Clancy was a pretty prescient guy in a lot of things.
Wow. I didn't realize the two were related? That's crazy. I loved the inquest portion of that series. I thought that was the best episode. I think I need to read more Clancy. I just watched the original Jack Ryan, I really enjoyed that too. I think it was called Patriot Games. Was Clancy involved in the writing for Chernobyl?
No, he died a few years ago. But physics is physics. Go read The Hunt For Red October, it's worth your time. Not a big spoiler, but one of the Soviet nuclear submarines chasing the Red October suffers a meltdown. The Soviets had more than a few reactor accidents at sea; Clancy had plenty of publicly available, albeit obscure, info on which to base his scene. Anyway, the sub engineer floods the reactor with cold water, cold water moderates neutrons better, and the pulse of power caused the reactor's reactivity to exceed the damaged reactor's ability to stop the reaction. Then it melted down, despite all of that cold water, and the sub sank. Different than Chernobyl, but similar in how failure to account for neutron moderation's effect on reactivity led to loss of the reactor. And explained sufficiently to impress dumbass lay people like myself.
