Surprisingly, that wasn't the case at all, at least under US and USSR nuclear-use doctrine. The leadership was the last thing you wanted to attack, because once the civilian authority is either literally or effectively destroyed (either dead or so cut off as to be totally incommunicado), there's nobody to talk to about a deescalation or cessation of hostilities. The notion of a "decapitation strike" made it into a ton of fiction, but in reality, nobody thought that was anything remotely close to a good idea under any circumstances. If things had really gone south during the Cold War, the safest places on Earth would have been DC and Moscow, and Omaha and Kuntsevo. The second two are where the strategic military commands were for the US and the USSR, and the first two (obviously) are where you'd find the people with the power to surrender. Those are the last guys you want dead.

The fact that I really nerded it up in the early 90s, when I was in college, and read everything I could get my hands on about US nuclear-use doctrine and policy. When you use the phrase "nuclear strike target," do you know what that really means, in practice? A set of lat-long-alt numbers, and maybe an aerial photograph with a crosshair in the middle of it. That's it. It's not like there were ICBMs sitting in silos with pre-encoded trajectories that would take them to Shanghai at the push of a button. Strategic war plans, of which there were literally thousands, included lists of possible targets, sure. But the list of possible targets accumulated over the decades includes basically every industrial center, population center, power plant, factory, highway intersection, runway, natural or man-made dam and public swimming pool on the planet. The list could basically be described as, "These are the things we know how to attack." To say that "China was targeted" is no more true than saying West Germany was targeted. In fact, West Germany was much more densely targeted — to the extent that a far greater number of potential targets was identified there — because that's where NATO planned to use limited release of strategic nuclear weapons to stop a Warsaw Pact armor incursion through the Fulda Gap. In the event of a large-scale tank invasion, Frankfurt would have been a nuclear casualty in minutes, long before anybody even considered a nuclear use anywhere else on the planet. Such was nuclear-use doctrine in the 70s and 80s; it was seen as far more likely that we'd destroy friendly cities in attacks against invading conventional Warsaw Pact forces than that we'd ever launch strategic attacks against enemy targets. We had a gun pointed at our own heads, telling the Soviets, "Don't come any closer or the white boy gets it."

If you look back on nuclear-use doctrine in the US and allies, at first glance it seems absolutely insane. Then you dig deeper and realize that it actually makes a sort of sense; there's an internal logic there that you can actually wrap your head around. But that's when the real chill sits in. When you understand that plans for nuclear war were that very special kind of insanity that seems less and less insane the closer you look, until you get down to the very bottom and completely forget that the things you're thinking about are fucking incomprehensible.

George C. Scott's lines about not getting our hair mussed and twenty-million-tops are funny. They were funny at the time, and they're funny now. But in the calculus of nuclear war planning, they're also chillingly plausible. Because when you're contemplating scenarios with outcomes on the order of a third of a billion civilian dead, losing half a dozen major cities in the continental US really does seem like a decisive victory. That was the mindset of the men whose jobs it were to think the unthinkable.

The Cold War was a different time.

Oh yeah! Dune! Do Dune! Just last weekend I was thinking that I needed to concoct a flimsy pretense to watch that one again.

(Not that you asked me, Beldar, but my list includes the fucking awesome art direction, the cast's totally serious performances, and believe it or not the cheesy-but-somehow-great soundtrack. My enjoyment is only about ten percent ironic, honest.)

I've got no intention of derailing the thread, but dude, that's simply untrue. While contingency war plans obviously exist — there's a famous oplan called "Basic War Plan Red" that describes precisely where and how the United States would invade Canada, for instance — the only really meaningful plan for nuclear war the United States has ever had has been SIOP, and its antecedent, Plan Totality. Each plan, starting with Totality, listed a number of strategically significant cities in the USSR that would be targeted as part of a retaliatory strike, in the event of war. (I think Totality started with 20 named targets; later plans are obviously still classified.)

China didn't find its way into any version of SIOP until 2003 … where they were part of a joint retaliation contingency plan. In other words, it described the scenario in which the US, Russia and China would release our nuclear weapons cooperatively to retaliate against some other state actor.

The US has never "targeted" China, in any meaningful sense, with nuclear weapons. We've got conventional Taiwan Strait scenarios coming out our ears, but there's no acknowledged plan for nuclear war with China.

If by "made" you mean "assembled," then all iPods are made in China. But the parts that go into them are made by a bunch of different manufacturers, in a bunch of different countries. Welcome to the 21st century economy.

One of those dogs is TOTALLY racist.

That's an awesome metaphor. I'm so totally stealing that.

Also, there should be a singalong in there somewhere. And a case of mistaken identity.

If I went back and added it up, I'd probably find that I've lost years of my life to playing Starcraft. Even more to Diablo II.

I think I saw a porno movie that started this way.

You got me thinkin'. How about this instead?

The prologue of the movie's the same. I think the prologue really works, so don't change a frame of it.

Rework the bit with Kirk as a boy to make it (a) less stupid, and (b) more clear that the premature death of his father has knocked him off his path to destiny. Maybe instead of getting into a bar fight with some ridiculously out-of-place cadets, he gets arrested or whatever and is given the choice between juvie and the Academy. He says juvie, 'cause he hates Starfleet for killing his dad, but Pike talks him into the Academy instead with an expanded "I dare you to do better" speech.

Flash forward four years. (We're about twenty minutes into the movie at this point, if that.) We're on the bridge of a starship. It's small, dark and cramped. As we dolly around the aft section, we see a silhouette against the viewscreen: It's Kirk.

"Captain, we're receiving a distress call," comes the voice from the communications station. Kirk's expecting this. "Kobyashi Maru, neutral zone," he says cockily. "Uh, no," says the communications officer on duty. "I mean, Captain, we're really receiving a distress call."

"Lights," says a gravely voice off-screen. The bridge lights come up, and the real captain walks into view. He's played by … hmm … Tom Waits, let's say. "Station, cadet," he barks as he passes the chair, and Kirk scampers. "Dammit," we hear Kirk say as he takes his assigned position. "I was gonna beat it that time." The officer next to him scoffs. "Sure you were, kid." Kirk spreads a grin you just wanna punch. "No, really," he says. He leans in. "See, I"—

"Helm, emergency speed to Vulcan!" shouts the captain from the other side of the tiny bridge. "Mr. Kirk, your repeat performance will have to wait." He thumbs one of those switch thingies in the armrest and gives the all-hands speech: planetary distress call, blah blah, ordered to respond, blah blah. We cut to an exterior shot as we see the small, old, unimpressive USS (I dunno) Parrot pivot, then streak off at warp speed.

Around Vulcan, it's chaos. The Parrot drops out of warp in the middle of a debris field, and in the distance we see explosions and flashes of light around the immense Narada. Cause the Parrot's so small it goes unnoticed at first, as the Narada targets the Essex and the Kiev and the Oberon and whatever the hell else. Captain Waits and his crew scramble frantically to get their bearings, and you can just see Kirk itching to get into it. He's not even scared, just wide-eyed with excitement. But Captain Waits wants none of it. "Helm, get us out of this mess and away from that ship!" he orders. The Parrot comes about and starts puttering away, trying to get over the horizon from the big fight. Kirk hates this, but he bites his lip. Meanwhile, the captain's giving orders to try to reach the Vulcan equivalent of FEMA or whatever so they can start rescuing civilians.

Just then, a missile from the Narada goes wide and slams into the Parrot's lower hull, tearing a huge hole in it and vaporizing dozens of compartments. The captain calls for reports from below decks, but communications are out. He orders Kirk to get down there and bring him back a sitrep, soonest.

Kirk bolts for the lift, but that's out too. So he ducks into the ladderway and slides down the (oh, let's say) four decks to the lower spaces of the little ship. He finds somebody, an engineer's mate or something (point being, an enlisted man, who are the only people aboard Kirk outranks), covered in soot and coughing. Maybe he does something heroic, like pulling him out of a burning compartment before dogging the hatch or something. The man tells Kirk that the hull's been breached, but the engines and life support are still operating. As he says this, the ship rocks again, and the lights flicker. "At least they were!" the man says. Kirk sprints back up the ladder to the bridge to report … only to find it smashed. The Parrot took a direct hit. The captain's dead, the bridge officers are dead or dying, the bridge is filled with smoke, the viewscreen is screaming red warnings at him. Kirk stands there for a beat, in shock … then he turns and runs for the ladder.

Below, he grabs the first person he can find. "Abandon ship," he says. "Pass the word!" "What?!" yells the enlisted man, disbelieving. "Get to the lifeboats, all hands!" Kirk repeats. Then after a second, "Captain's orders!" We see the enlisted man run for it, stopping along the way to pass the order, and Kirk heads back up the ladder to the bridge. There he clears the debris out of the way of the helm console and mashes buttons. The Parrot comes about, and the Narada looms large in the viewscreen. Little notifications start to pop up on the screen, one for each lifeboat away. When the sixth one pops up, Kirk sits back in his seat, a wry look on his face. "Yeah, well," he says to himself softly. "Like father, like son." He mashes buttons, and the Parrot lurches forward, on a collision course at flank speed.

We cut to a very wide exterior shot. The Narada is medium-sized in the frame, surrounded by clouds of fiery debris and burning disabled ships, but the Parrot is just a tiny speck. As the music swells, we watch the Parrot crawl forward, forward, forward … and disappear in a flash against the Narada's shields or hull or whatever.

And we hold on that shot for an eternity. Like three, maybe even four seconds.

Then the martial drums kick in, and we smash cut to a brightly lit and more to the point not-at-all-on-fire transporter room, where Kirk is just materializing. For a beat, everything is silent except for the fading hum of the transporter, and the drum-and-bagpipe thing on the score, and then a wall of noise explodes. We cut to Kirk's point of view. The room is filled with people in various degrees of disability, some limping, some laid out on stretchers. A female officer is screaming: "Clear the fucking pad!" (She probably doesn't say "fucking," but I love the image.) Kirk, utterly disoriented, gets out of the way just as another load of survivors starts to beam in. Another officer grabs him, demands to know his name, rank and section. "Kirk, midshipman first—I mean third lieutenant," he stammers. The officer ups-and-downs him, doesn't spot any arterial blood or protruding bones, and orders him to report to the bridge. (Does it really make sense to send him to the bridge? Of course not. But we need him there for the rest of the movie.)

And then … you know. Et cetera.