Sealed Orders

A military trope where a unit is ordered to go out somewhere, with the Captain only being informed of his or her orders after they have left. This is to ensure security- so the crew have no chance to tell enemy spies in port.

Examples of Sealed Orders include:

Film

• The film Push centers around Sealed Orders to get around the mind reading capabilities of a psychic. The one who came up with the plan also has his memory of coming up with it wiped to further ensure its success.
• In Doctor Strangelove and Fail Safe the bomber crews only unseal their targeting orders after the attack command is given. In the latter, they consist of one word- "MOSCOW".
• Captain Horatio Hornblower. At the beginning, the narrator says that Hornblower's ship sailed "under the most secret of sealed orders".
• 2001: A Space Odyssey: HAL's sealed orders, and the anxiety over having to lie, are what causes him to go psychotic and murder the crew.
• WALL-E: AUTO has sealed orders to not return to Earth, one of many Shout Outs to 2001.
• The Hunt for Red October has Captain Ramius and Political Officer Putin pulling the sealed orders out of a dual-keyed wall safe, and reading them in private. A major plot point as Ramius crushes Putin's windpipe ("There's been a terrible accident"), and then burns the orders, allowing him to maintain the ruse that they were ordered to go to America.

Literature

• The Hunt for Red October
• The Star Trek novel Mission to Horatius. Enterprise's mission (to investigate a distress signal) is in this form.
• The novelization of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Encounter at Farpoint" had Captain Picard being given Sealed Orders about what he was to do when Enterprise reached Farpoint Station.
• It doesn't involve a ship setting sail, but in Princeps' Fury, Tavi foils the Vord's ability to read minds by setting up whole strings of sealed orders given to several people with strict instructions to open each one only when told to by the preceding order.
• When King David slept with the wife of Uriah, David eventually murdered him through this method: he sent sealed orders through Uriah to the general, which instructed the army to pull back and let Uriah die in the heat of the battle.
• In 1633, Cardinal Richelieu has become fond of using sealed orders after reading about them in an up-time book.
• Sealed Orders is an alternate title for Retief of the Red-Tape Mountain, where Retief has sealed orders for how to handle a diplomatic dispute on the planet Adobe. Since he knows his superior doesn't know a hawk from a Groaci nose flute, he plays the whole affair by ear and after succeeding admirably, dumps the still-unopened orders into an incinerator.

Live Action TV

• Parodied in Dads Army, where Captain Mainwaring is given not only sealed orders but also "Sealed Instructions for Opening Sealed Orders"; when their seal is broken, they read "Break the seal on the sealed orders and then destroy these instructions".
• Star Trek: The Original Series, "The Enterprise Incident".
• Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea episode "Sealed Orders". The orders are to dispose of a Neutron Bomb.

Video Games

• The Kobayashi Alternative. Captain Kirk receives Sealed Orders to locate Lieutenant Sulu's missing ship and neutralize whatever caused it to disappear.
• In Half Life: Opposing Force, the incoming Marines are given their alternate orders just before arriving at Black Mesa. Shepherd's squad, of course, gets shot down before they receive their new orders.

Real Life

• The Knights Templar went down so fast partly because Philip IV of France's orders to arrest the Templars were issued sealed, so nobody (not even the omnipresent Templars) knew what's inside them until they were all opened simultaneously on Friday, 13 October 1307.
• The captains of the Royal Navy's four Vanguard class ballistic missile submarines are each given a sealed handwritten letter by the Prime Minister when he or she enters office before they leave port detailing what they should do in the event of a nuclear attack on the UK. These letters are destroyed unopened when the PM steps down.