Decapitation Strike - in Fiction

In Fiction

• In the movie Dr. Strangelove, Senator Buford complains that the US nuclear deterrent lacks credibility. If the President were killed in a decapitation strike, retaliation would be impossible. Wing Attack Plan R is devised to close this loophole.

• In the essay The Cuban Missile Crisis: Second Holocaust, an alternate history in which the 1962 crisis developed into war, the Soviets manage to destroy Washington, D.C. and kill President John F. Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, and most of their political and military advisors. This coup, however, works disastrously against the Soviet Union. Had Kennedy survived, he might have ordered a measured response. Since he didn't, surviving American generals order a total attack, which continues long past the breaking of any Soviet military capacity and results in killing some 80% of the entire Soviet population, and later results in the United States being accused of genocide.
• In the 1994 Tom Clancy novel Debt of Honor, a Japan Airlines pilot flies a fully fueled, passengerless Boeing 747 into the U.S. Capitol during a joint session of Congress: The pilot was distraught after watching the deaths of his brother and his son in a short-lived war between the United States and Japan. This is not an attack by a government, but it has the effect of removing the top tier of each branch of the United States Government: all of Congress, the President, the Cabinet, the Supreme Court, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The only survivors are two men each claiming the vice presidency, and thus the presidency by succession. The dispute is resolved in the next novel, Executive Orders.
• In the 1983 film WarGames, the master computer WOPR is programmed to interpret a sudden power loss as the result of a decapitation strike and automatically launch all weapons in retaliation. During the crisis in which the computer mistakenly thinks it is engaged in an actual nuclear war, this feature makes simply depowering the system an obviously unacceptable option and the computer must be made to stop in a different way.
• In the made-for-cable film By Dawn's Early Light, the Soviet Union launches nuclear strikes against key U.S. targets including a failed decapitation strike at Andrews Air Force Base which would presumably have been the departure point for the President and his advisors.
• In the 2002 film The Sum of All Fears, neo-Nazi terrorists attempt to start a war between the United States and the Russian Federation by (among other things) detonating a nuclear device during a football game at which the American President is in attendance.