Whiskey on the Rocks plot
In January 1981, Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the 40th president of the United States. He quickly established himself as an intense communist hater. Reagan's Soviet counterpart, Leonid Brezhnev, was in his eighteenth year as secretary general. One was eager to bring about change. The other was old, tired, stressed, angry and erratic. The Cold War grew colder as the year progressed. What the world needed least in October 1981 was a spark, comparable to the Sarajevo shootings that left ten million dead. What the world got was a stranded Soviet submarine in a Swedish military protection area in the Blekinge Archipelago in southern Sweden.