Q:Build a movie plot around this: How many hours does Sunderstrom have ashore? Three hours
A:
The USS Charleston (SSN-704) is equipped with a caterpillar drive and is on station following a nuclear exchange, under the command of Dwight Towers.The nuclear war which contaminated the northern hemisphere was preceded by a standoff between the United States and China after the latter blockaded and later invaded Taiwan. Both countries are destroyed, as is most of the world. The submarine crew finds refuge in Melbourne, Australia, which the radioactive fallout has not yet reached (though radio communications with several radio operators farther north than Australia indicate that radiation has reached their countries and will be in Australia in a few months). Towers places his vessel under the command of the Royal Australian Navy and is summoned to attend a briefing.When Towers (Armand Assante), Australian scientist Julian Osborne (Bryan Brown) and Australian liaison officer Peter Holmes (Grant Bowler) find out there is an automated digital broadcast coming from Alaska in the Northern Hemisphere, the submarine is sent to investigate. En route, the submarine surfaces in San Francisco, where the Golden Gate Bridge has collapsed and the city shoreline is in ruins. A crew member who is from San Francisco abandons ship, planning on dying in his home city, and is left by his shipmates after it is argued that the length of time he has spent outside has already made him sick with radiation sickness.Upon reaching Alaska, Towers and his executive officer go ashore to find no survivors. Entering a house and seeing a dead family huddled on a bed, Towers thinks of his own family and what they must have gone through. The source of the automated digital broadcast is traced to a television station whose broadcast, Towers and his executive officer discover, comes from a solar powered laptop trying to broadcast a documentary via satellite.Towers returns to Melbourne, where Moira Davidson (Rachel Ward) is waiting for him. Realizing the inevitable nuclear cloud will reach Australia, their impending doom begins to unravel the...