The Bedford Incident

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    Long before the Hunt for Red October and Das Boot, there was ‘The Bedford Incident.’
    Good submarine movie. Moby Dick meets Dr.Strangelove. Kinda.

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    wiki:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bedford_Incident
    “The Bedford Incident (aka Aux Postes De Combat) is a 1965 British-American Cold War film starring Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier and co-produced by Widmark. The cast also features Eric Portman, James MacArthur, Martin Balsam and Wally Cox, as well as early appearances by Donald Sutherland and Ed Bishop. The screenplay by James Poe is based on the 1963 book by Mark Rascovich, which borrowed from the plot of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; at one point in the film, the captain is advised he is “not chasing whales now”.[1][2][3][4][5] The film was directed by James B. Harris, who, until then, had been best known as Stanley Kubrick’s producer…

    ….The plot reflects several Cold War incidents between the NATO and Soviet navies, including one in 1957 when USS Gudgeon, a submarine, was caught in Soviet waters and chased out to sea by Soviet warships. Although none ended as catastrophically as the Bedford incident, the story illustrated many of the fears of the time…
    ….
    …….In October 1962, shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet submarine B-59 was pursued in the Atlantic Ocean by the U.S. Navy. When the Soviet vessel failed to surface, the destroyers began dropping training depth charges. Unlike in The Bedford Incident, the Americans were not aware that the B-59 was armed with a T-5 nuclear torpedo. The Soviet captain, believing that World War III might have started, wanted to launch the weapon but was over-ruled by his flotilla commander, Vasili Arkhipov, who, by coincidence, was using the boat as his command vessel. After an argument, it was agreed that the submarine would surface and await orders from Moscow. It was not until after the fall of the Soviet Union that the weapon’s existence and how close the world came to nuclear conflict was made known.[7][8…”

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