Welcome to the small nation of Plokhoy Ostrov, located mainly on the small Atlantic island of Plokhoy Ostrov. Now, to work: We are in the midst of an attack by extraterrestrial forces. All contact with artificial satellites has ended, and we assume that they where destroyed. In addition, undersea communication lines appear cut. As such the council has ordered the establishment of the Extraterrestrial Defense Department. You have been chosen to advise this body, established to oversee defense of our fine land. We wish you, and all other members of the department, luck.
Why this is: I enjoy weapon design games and alien defense games, and decided to try running a game that combines both in a cold war era setting.
Island back story: The Russian Empire, deciding that they too needed a overseas colony, and found the near-useless island of Plokhoy Ostrov. As nothing really interesting was on the island it was largely ignored, its population (of below 5000) being mostly farmers scraping a living out of the stony soil and fishermen doing similar in the sea. That is, until the October Revolution, when the hard-pressed White Army remembered that they had a population untapped for military service and the locals, along with the 40-odd troops stationed there decided they would rather not go fight, and decided to stage their own revolution. This was more or less uncontested, and the resulting communist nation was largely ignored by the nations of the world, at least until 1946, when gold was discovered in a local quarry.
The year is now 1986, and the nation is very different from how it was when it was formed. The population is now in the hundreds of thousands, highly educated, and the nation is one of the leaders in technology, helping to lead the way in such fields as particle physics and space exploration.
And now a group of extraterrestrials have rolled in, destroyed most of what humanity has placed into space, and now is threatening Earth itself. Let us hope that humanity survives this trial.