Cold War Dekatron and Nixie Tube Clock

"When it comes to hobby projects, clocks have always been one of my favorites. I've made them with LEDs, planar neon displays, monodigichrons, some with microprocessors, FPGAs, TTL logic, etc, but this time I wanted to make a dekatron and nixie tube clock with a minimum of solid state components, except for maybe a few germanium diodes. As I thought through the design, the cold war theme developed along with some specific goals I had for the project ... "
Operation: Hourglass.