Word: ramius
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Back in 1983, before Gorbachev, before glasnost, before perestroika, there was, it seems, Captain Marko Alexandrovich Ramius, commander of the Soviet Typhoon-class submarine Red October. Since he is played by the estimable Sean Connery in this movie version of Tom Clancy's hurricane-class best seller, you know he can't be a hard-liner -- a stern-liner, maybe, but never a hard-liner...
Even so, it may come as a surprise to find a career submariner in any navy, let alone the Soviet fleet, as determined as Ramius is to preserve the peaceful status quo. His vessel -- larger than a World War II aircraft carrier -- has been modified so that it can run faster and more quietly than any other submersible, which means it has something no solo submarine has ever had: first-strike capability. It can glide in close to the U.S. Eastern seaboard, undetected, and start lobbing nuclear missiles at major population centers. Or threaten to. Being the sort...
Connery, the actor to whom everyone most eagerly surrenders disbelief, quickly renders the movie's central implausibility plausible. And a man named Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) makes Ramius' mission impossible possible. In a way, Ryan is the Soviet officer's double. A CIA intelligence analyst, he too is an apparatchik who has retained the capacity to think for himself. And he too is a man who embarks on a lonely and perilous course...
Ryan must convince the President's security adviser and the Joint Chiefs of Staff that Ramius is neither a rogue lunatic nor an officer grimly carrying out a scheme to upset the cold war balance of terror. Then he must somehow manage to get himself aboard the U.S.S. Dallas, the American sub that has located Red October in the vastness of the Atlantic, and persuade its tough, dubious skipper (Scott Glenn) to help Ramius elude his Soviet pursuers...
Exploits at sea are complemented by onshore skulduggery. A mole in the Kremlin tips off the CIA to Ramius' intentions. The agency, the Navy and the White House then concoct a scheme to deceive the Kremlin into thinking that Red October has exploded in a nuclear accident when in fact the U.S. has blown up one of its own obsolete boomers. The denouement has Soviet and American nuclear subs playing a game of chicken that stops just short of unleashing World...