viets to keep their hands off the nations of this hemisphere, and ultimately the Soviets did back down. Ever since that time, there have been arguments as to precisely what happened, how these events occurred, and how close the world came to nuclear war. The filmmakers would not have known about the missile crisis when they made this film, though fortuitously the crisis occurred once the film was in release and so may have caused many people to go see it.
The background to the story includes references to the Korean War, the conflict in which the soldiers were engaged when they were captured and brainwashed. American involvement in that conflict would have been readily understood by the audience of the time, a conflict in which American troops had been sent to assist the South, a conflict that was not fully resolved then and remains a concern to this day. Tensions in the world were apparent in more places than just Korea, and the United States at the time was encountering increased challenges from other quarters. The Russians had exploded their first atomic bomb--the United States was no longer the only power in the world to posses this weapon of mass destruction. In China, Mao Tse-Tung and his forces had taken over the country and were in the process of establishing a Communist state. The "free" Chinese had fled to Taiwan, but there was concern that the Red Chinese would invade Formosa and thus destroy the Nationalist Chinese (Blair 24-25).
The Korean question was just one of the issues facing the world, but it was being addressed by various international bodies as well as by the direct participants. The United Nations had set up a permanent commission to try to unify the country at about the time that the Americans ended their military government and agreed to provide advisers and training for defense forces. The Russian occupation forces then left the north. In both cases the retreating powers left behind a governme...