Ask Brian, he mentioned it on Apollo 13, saying that they lit the charges after the ship had broken up to be sure no huge pieces destroyed neighborhoods in Texas on the fall back down.

Also, welcome to the forum Keith!

I would be really obliged if you'd write down what it says for the eleven steps, or at least summarize. That sounds interesting.

It was an interesting mindset to have, even near the end (I graduated high school in '87). You figured it was just going to happen at some point, and kind of hoped it was limited in some respect, but given there was nothing you could do about it you tended to think about it more abstractly.

But, given we did think about it, it's harder to take shows like Jericho seriously

A fascinating book my dad had on the shelf (next to the chess, Tom Swift, and Hornblower books) was The Third World War: August 1985 by Sir John Hackett. Written in 1978, it tried to give a realistic reason for and waging of World War III. The war starts out conventionally and only a couple nukes are used, so it's an optimistic tale trying to say the West should continue the conventional arms build up started by Carter as we CAN win that way. He did a 1982 rewrite called The Untold Story to account for all the changes in the last couple years (for example, he had Carter serving two terms and the war starting because the Soviets wanted to test the new untried Republican President)