What if one of the sleepers attended a Robert Frost poetry reading?

You missed something. They needed their real names to be spoken for the hypnosis to take effect. Seeing as how nobody in the States knew their real names, there wasn't any real danger of any of them accidentally being activated.

S13326,

Actually PHS doesn't usually work well over time as the engrammatic imprints fade with the twisting of short term memory into longer term 'deep storage'.

The brain remembers sequences of events and correspondent actions that go with as a contiguous whole only as a function of a very limited 'RAM' memory. Everything else is stored, molecularly, as a series of quantum coordinates by which you remember associations by symbolic function as much as direct X became Y and then Z.

Which is critically important when you consider the kinds of detailed actions someone would have to undertake to hide, refurbish, retrieve and prepare weapons and explosives for delivery to a specific target along a specific route which would change, markedly, over years and decades. I frankly have a hard time imagining even something as simple as dynamite and blasting caps being safe to use over more than a few years in a temperature controlled environment.

You also have to consider the type of person who would willingly sacrifice _everything_ to undertake such a mission, losing, not a few years (prison sentence) but the rest of their life, away from family and culture, essentially becoming what they feared or held in sufficient moral contempt to want to sabotage.

This kind of ultra nationalist belief hardly matches with someone who would need to be PHS treated to instill subconscious behaviors. Indeed, if you want to look at it that way, it almost makes more sense that it would be a child or a prisoner who didn't remember enough of his/her homeland or hated it sufficiently that the flight to exile was honest and the gheas compulsion was the externally forced behavior.

Finally, consider the likely period in which this would be happening. If most of the people involved are in their mid 40s to early 50s, we are talking about periods of time corresponding to a _useful_ (adult) coverage no earlier than post-1945 through 1955.

Which means that they would be targeted at an America whose Red Menace paranoia was extreme and whose acceptance of Russian émigré populations unlikely. Which means that these people had to have alternate identities from before they left the Soviet Union (or be chosen from POWs or the like, kidnapped from abroad) which just makes it more dangerous that someone will have a cognitive dissonance moment when the post hypnotics break down just enough to start giving discontiguous personality interrupts rather akin to psychotic breaks shown by schizophrenic personalities. This would be an immediate "Uh oh..." give away to the much more closely knit neighborhood communities and work environment of the period.

The 1950s was also the last time the U.S. really relied on massive 'Big Stick' bomber forces to prosecute a potential nuclear war. And these (B-36, B-47, B-52) jets were anything but quick to prepare for a mission, a typical Peacemaker sortie requiring up to 3 days to ready on a restricted ramp area, one at a time.

This leads to several scenarios in which the U.S., fearing Russian actions in Europe like the two Berlin crises, would 'cock'n'lock' their SIOP birds on the sly and then do a 'training mission dispersal' similar to that which actually happened in 1961 or so. Where the government shut down the entire ATC network, grounding all civilian flights to allow SAC bombers to test the Air Defense Command's response times.

Except that it wouldn't be a test. It would be a flush. As a few birds went north over Canada or East over the Atlantic, and did not turn back around.

And Russia, with her long borders and limited period radar coverage, wouldn't recognize the ruse until the first bomb from a low level ingressing aircraft slammed down into the Kremlin on a 5 minute timer. At which point the rest of the USAF would be a mere 10-15 hours out.

It's this kind of nasty surprise from the then overwhelming USAF strategic bomber capability that the Russians would want to put a stopper in. And that means working ON airbases. Or at least close enough nearby to monitor them and be ready, at a moment's notice, to intercede. Now we're talking about identities sufficient to pass the deepest scrutiny of an FBI background check.

IMO, if they want to do the film over again (as a period piece because it only really works with bombers, ICBMs are too remote, fast reacting and hardened) the likeliest route to go with is using a suitcase nuclear device which the Germans actually developed towards the end of the war using the same Swann principle we later copied for the W54 warhead on the 'Davey Crocket' mini nuke.

Now, all's you have to do is get within about 1,000m and both the direct blast and the gamma/thermal pulse would either rip a big bomber to shreds or poison the nuclear payload of the big Mk.15/16/17/21 weapons which were common at the time, making them unable to fuse at more than a fizzle of true yield (dirty bomb).

Such an approach would dramatically curtail the USAF strategic interdiction ability at the one point where you KNOW the aircraft can be found: home base and possibly even look like an accident.

Whereas taking a few sticks of dynamite to a telephone exchange or a power station makes no sense at -any- period in the Cold War.

More importantly, would you want some PHS Zombie Bot who may or may not be a loyal Soviet to be playing with nukes in their sleep? I wouldn't. If the U.S. -ever- caught on to this, it would have diplomatic fallout the likes of which would make Pearl Harbor seem like a drunk at a wedding. The USSR would seem like the new Anarchists and McCarthyism would gain a tenfold boost in appeal.

As we doomed the Russians to massive economic isolation as essentially all Western trade (including critical agro) was boycott stopped.

It might even precipitate the very war it was designed to forestall, as a new campaign in Europe to disenfranchise the USSR of it's Warsaw Pact buffer states at a time when we had 200 nuclear weapons to the USSRs 10. This fractional percentage 'lead' in atomic stockpiles being one we would maintain and even expand (_15 Minutes_, Keeney), right through the early 60s.

Under such a scenario, it would have to be active sleeper agents who knew full well what they were doing and the PHS would have to be something that -overrode- any sense of 'gone native' shifting loyalties.

The ideal way to recover/reactivate the assets being through a broadcast advertising (television) or exclusively ethnic (Canton Club or similar, via the internet) society to which the agents were unwittingly subject to desiring membership via a PHS suggestion which was far simpler to implement because it followed a natural longing for home.

With this in mind, let me add one other thing:

Nikolai, The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I've got promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep.

Николай и очаровательный, темных и глубокую, но
у меня есть обещания держать
мили и прежде чем я спать

If you can't read Cyrillic, the phonetic translation is very roughly:

Nee-ko/lai, ee ocharovahtelniy, temniyx ee gloobokooyoo no oo menya obyeshtaneeya derzhaht meelee ee prezhdye chem ya spaht.

You are not going to hear -that- version of 'Stopping By The Woods' in many Americana poetry readings. Do we know that Donald Pleasance' character was in fact using American English or was it simply a plot device to ease the repetition for a non-Russian speaking audience?

I would have thought the poem might have been recited in the original English. After all, they are undercover in the USA and someone suddenly speaking over the phone to apparent all-Americans in Russian might arouse suspicion. When the lines are addressed to them over the phone, they suddenly take on a glazed-over look although it is not until their Russian names are spoken that they are really triggered. Perhaps if they heard the trigger poem they might take on that far-away look, but not actually execute their mission because they have not actually heard the words "remember (Russian name), miles to go before you sleep." And people might just think they are really deep into poetry appreciation.

"Chicken soup - with a *beep* straw."