Since then, Cold War yarns have almost gone the way of the dodo — except Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell who continues to dogfight against an unnamed enemy with US-supplied F-14s in the recent Top Gun sequel. Similarly, the Daniel Craig era of James Bond movies fought not against state-sponsored evil behind the Great Wall or the Iron Curtain but industrialists, technologists, megalomaniacs and other non-state threats.
The 1990 movie The Hunt for Red October was based on the 1984 debut novel by Tom Clancy. Sean Connery, who plays a Soviet submarine captain in the movie, defected to the US, bringing with him his Mother Russia’s most advanced underwater nuclear missile platform.
The movie took more than US$200 million at the box office worldwide, entertaining moviegoers who were living through a fair bit of Cold War history at that time, with Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost, the breakup of the Soviet Union and China’s great opening after the Tiananmen Square incident.
