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A Nuclear Error (view source)

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== [[Anime]] & [[Manga]] ==
* In ''[[Future War 198 X198X]]'', the inventor of America's new Missile Defense System is kidnapped by Soviet spies. When the Americans realize that he is being taken back to Russia by submarine, they figure that it would be better to kill their greatest inventor than to let his creations fall into enemy hands. They send out a sea-based nuclear warhead to destroy the boat, thinking that it will be a small enough accident that it can be blamed on an accident aboard. The result is far more enormous than anticipated, setting off the entire [[World War III|horrific war]] the rest of the movie narrates.
 
== [[Film]] ==
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{{quote| '''Jordan Tate: '''If the sub blows, won't the nukes go?<br />
'''Casey Ryback:''' No. They won't detonate. Just sink with the sub. }}
* ''[[Superman (Filmfilm)|Superman]]'' (1978). The United States would '''never''' test launch missiles with nuclear warheads (armed or not), for exactly the reason shown in the film: any accident could cause vast destruction. Dummy warheads are always used. Even worse, a newspaper headline before the test mentions that live warheads would be used. So the U.S. military said publicly that they were going to pull this harebrained stunt, which violated the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, and ''no one objected''.
** They did, actually, with the nukes set to detonate at apogee. Obviously in the atolls, not in reach of CONUS. That's how the EMP phenomenon was discovered. These tests occurred before the 1963 treaty.
* ''[[Film/The Last War|The Last War]]'' averts several tropes by making the sides the Federation and Alliance, and not pointing fingers at any countries in the nuclear attack at the end.
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** Of course this was already [[After the End]], with "The Great Wars" having already destroyed the majority of civilization (in fact it was during these wars that the normal safe guards were removed that allowed one person to launch the entire U.S. ICBM stockpile, that's how bad they got), so instead of starting a war like most of the other examples did/almost did this one just finished up the destruction, basically causing so much cataclysmic damage it set a reset switch, allowing the survivors (who were magically shielded), to start over from scratch.
* A scary, scary SF short story that this troper cannot remember (but see the compilation "Destination Universe!") describes a robotic nuclear weapon landed on Earth from a long-ago war which is fired on by humans. It explodes, thrusting the Earth into the Sun, because it doesn't know it's not the same war and would have had no choice even if it had.
* In ''[[Animorphs (Literature)|Animorphs]] #46: The Deception'', the villainous admiral's [[Batman Gambit]] involves faking a nuclear attack by the Chinese on a United States aircraft carrier, giving him an excuse to have a submarine under his command "retaliate," which would actually involve the Chinese and kickstart World War III. The goal is to weaken the entire world enough for the Yeerks to switch from infiltration to open invasion of Earth.
* It is claimed that [[Tom Clancy]] revealed the details of the "Looking Glass" policy in his novel ''[[The Sum of All Fears]]'', but for obvious reasons this has never been officially confirmed (or denied).
 
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