hmmm…it’s interesting that almost all the posts here express the same idea-- from people who were very worried about nuclear war. But I wonder if it’s an accurate poll?
Maybe the replies are all from people who felt the trauma, and therefor feel strongly about it, so they take the time to answer. Whereas the majority of people -who were not traumatized- don’t care much, so they don’t post to the thread.
I’m saying this because I was never worried about nuclear war, and none of my friends were either. (And we grew up in the cold war–born 1959-ish). Were me and my friends all so far out of touch with reality, or were we the majority?
We were too young to remember the Cuban missile crisis, but we knew the Russians were the bad guys. We grew cynical over Vietnam, and then as cool teenagers tried to be hippies.
But when we got our first Mcjobs, we saved money for college— because we were expecting a normal future.
Gee, if I had thought the world was gonna end before I finished my teenage years, I wouldn’t have planned for the future.
I followed politics more than the average kid. But I believed that the politicians on both sides were rational people. So the doctrine of mutual assured destruction seemed very re-assuring. . It seemed obvious to me that nukes were all about political posturing–but that nobody would ever want to actually use them. I always assumed MAD would work well enough to keep us all alive
That way , I had more energy to spend on the really important things, like partying.
My friends and I were all convinced it was just a matter of time - I remember talking about it a lot when we were seniors. Why bother making plans for the future? It’s just a matter of time.
There were some music videos on the subject right then, too - Genesis’ “Land of Confusion”, Sting’s “I Hope the Russians Love their Children, Too”. We’d watch them on MTV, a really cool cable channel that existed just for showing music videos!
Concerns over a nuclear exchange during the Brezhnev era of détente pretty much dwindled to the fringe. Curiously, the brushfire conflicts in Southeast Asia and Africa led to an easing of tensions between NATO and the East Bloc, because instead of a dangerous standoff each nation could prod and test the other by proxy. (Never mind the havoc these ideological conflicts were wrecking on their respective “client states”.) By the early 'Seventies, direct conflict kind of ground to a halt; Eurocommunism was moribund as the failures and corruption of Soviet Marxist-Leninist communism became obvious (thanks in no small part to the publication of The Gulag Archipelago), both Soviet and Western economies were stagnating, and the ideological staging that was such a hallmark of 'Fifties and 'Sixties politics seemed badly out of scope given the energy crisis, environmental awareness, et cetera. So, by the time you were in high school, there wasn’t much to worry about, save for an accidental or rogue ICBM launch. It wasn’t so much (Mutually) Assured Destruction (which is, in game theory terms, a very unstable strategy that is highly dependent on a perceived level of parity between forces) was Mutually Shared Apathy. This culimated in the Helsinki Accords, which essentially legitimized (or at least the Western powers conceeded to) the unjustified annexation and subsequent brutal repression (see the Hungarian Uprising and Poland’s Poznań June, both of 1956, and the Soviet reaction to the Prague Spring of 1968, among other) of “client states” of the Warsaw Pact. Once the Soviet Union had obtained legitimacy, like the Corleone family it strived to normalize relations with its neighbors.
Reagan changed that; he was a true Conservative of an honest (if somewhat ignorant and bellicose) bent, and started making the kind of statements in public even Richard Nixon only made in private drunken conniptions. This, combined with the illness and loss of control of Brezhnev (who was a repressive, brutal, dictatorial leader, but had focused Soviet political strategy on retaining the control over the military and economic buffers of the “client states” of the Warsaw Pact per the "Brezhnev Doctrine) to the aged ideologues who responded to Reagan’s prodding with their own aggressive stance in Europe. Both sides–now out of the business of formenting conflict in Southeast Asia, and correctly viewing the states of Africa as willing to mouth the jargon of any ideology in order to get foreign aid–started facing off along the Steel Shade. The Red Army made larger permenent delpoyments in nations that formerly had only modest garrisons, and the deployment of the “tactical” SS-20 medium range IRBM (armed with nuclear and chemical warheads) was met in response by deployment of the modernized Pershing II missiles in Germany, much to the concern of the nations in which the missiles were based. Business as usual became the business of military buildup, the largest Europe had seen since WWII.
Exacerbating this was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This was originally due to terrorist activity by Muslim extremists (the Mujahideen “insurgents” who are, in part, the same people that the US-backed coalition is fighting now). This activity was encouraged and funded by the United States under the Carter Administration, in hopes of further dragging down the Soviet economy. The invasion started as a fairly small operation to bolster the friendly People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan government, and then widened as the Taraki government fell completely. The Soviets were in an analogous situation to the US in Southeast Asia (or the United States today in Iraq); having to devote increasing attention and hardware to the conflict with no exit strategy, but unable to admit to the world that they couldn’t keep peace in a minor backward nation.
By the time all this was going on, chappachula had no doubt discovered girls, beer, and pot. He was too young to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, and too stoned/partied/girl-happy to get terribly concerned about the new thing. But for those of us “coming of age” in the Reagan era, after the malaise of Vietnam wore off and we were all supposed to be frightfully concerned about Commies in Nicaragua (which became “the new Cuba”), shooting down airliners, and so forth, the possibility of total conflict seemed very real and immediate, particularly with ideological Soviet leaders disappearing, then turning up dead and being replaced by another barely warm corpse with startling regularity. It didn’t help that Reagan seemed to treat it all as a big joke. (“My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes.”) Personally, I didn’t find “The Day After” as shocking as some did, I guess, but it certainly gelled in the popular consciousness a conception of the horror of nuclear war. The “Duck and Cover” mentality and Nuclear War Survival Skills were seen as horribly naive in the wake of the probably destruction of every major city and industrial capability in the United States.
And the thing is, it almost happened. I’m not talking of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which would have been destructive but limited. (“Ten to twenty million tops…depending on the breaks,”) but an actual full-up launch, due to accident or misperception. (There are rumors than Andropov attempted to order Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces to the highest alert level after he discovered Chernenko’s group plotting against him and blocking his desire to formalize Gorbechev as his successor.) In such a case, Assured Destruction would have been just that; once your opponent has lobbed enough tonnage at you to “assure” that your forces are disrupted, there’s no reason whatsoever to hold back. Whether you regard concerns about the environmental consequences (nuclear winter) and the possibility of survival in a post-war environment as being undervalued or overblown, it’s certain that the major superpowers would have been completely annihilated economically and industrially, and Europe would be blighted, causing a world-wide recession that would have gone on for decades. And that’s the best-case scenerio.
If you weren’t afraid of nuclear war in the 'Eighties, you weren’t paying attention.
Thanks, stranger, for a well-thought out answer. Maybe I was lucky to be the “in between” generation (after Cuba, before Reagan).
But on the other hand, most of the problems you mentioned were pretty similar to the problems America faced earlier. Except that instead of Nicaragua/Afghanistan, it had been the Berlin Wall, Hungary and Poland. Instead of SS-20 and Pershing missiles it had been the threat of airplane-dropped bombs. Instead of the Europeans resisting American missiles on their territory, it had been the “ban the bomb” movement in England and France. Instead of the movie “the Day After”, it had been the book “Fail-Safe”(in which President Kennedy orders a nuke dropped on New York City, after the US accidently nukes Moscow)
Yet after all those scary events, the world had remained free of nuclear war, and I think the reason was what I mentioned earlier–rational leaders on both sides, who were willing to use brinkmanship, but not willing to use nukes. Because both sides knew it would be suicide. And maybe I’m naive–but I trust the rational leaders of the world not to commit suicide.
(And, ironically, that sets me opposed to so many other Dopers. In threads on terrorism, the Patriot act, etc,… I’m the one who trusts the rational leaders–including GW Bush–but when I state that I fear the terrorists more than you feared the Russians in the 1980’s, I draw reactions of roll-eyes , and accusations of fear-mongering. But that’s a subject for a different thread… )
I think you are way too naive even today although I will try to illustrate why with facts. People have already said some of this over and over but you are missing some fundamentals. Most of us aren’t referring to a fear that one day Reagan would opt for a little world shakeup or that even a Russian President would. The whole problem was that the situation was so volatile and that MAD was both the savior and also the potential destroyer at the same time. A single nuclear launch coming from Russia into the U.S. could trigger the ultimate armed volley as each side executed its MAD protocols and both sides were already committed to that with countless resources dedicated to it every second of every day when the time came to launch. That could come from a rogue Soviet group or simply by accident. Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union had nuclear missiles pointed at each other from every conceivable angle all the time. A security failure on any of them would result in the same result.
I gave a perfectly good cite on page one that showed how nuclear war was averted in 1983 by a mid-level Russian officer who defied protocol when his nuclear detection bunker picked up multiple missile launches from the U.S. and he had to decide to disobey orders and force those under him to stand down. He wasn’t supposed to do that and he lost his career for saving the world. This had nothing to do with your rather odd view of the benevolence and sensibilities of worldwide government leaders. It was simple luck that someone else wasn’t on duty in the Soviet nuclear detection bunker. Those command centers couldn’t just sit there and dick around while they got a consensus of opinion from a wide range of Russian leaders. The problem with MAD is that the time between initial detection and large scale launches of their own is measured in minutes even at 2am on a Sunday and they had to be ready at all times to initiate nuclear war.
None of this has gone away completely. Every American President has a military officer close by 100% of the time that holds the device known as the nuclear football with that day’s launch codes. We also have nuclear subs that stay underwater for weeks or months at a time under arctic pack ice and wherever else they think they might strike from. Cheyenne Mountain among other facilities is busy tracking potential threats right this second and monitoring the ready statuses of our own nuclear assets and they are good to go with 5 minutes notice.
Russia isn’t a huge nuclear threat today but it could become that way again as could Iran, North Korea, possibly China, and others. Looking at that motley crew I fail to see how you think major world leaders are just careful and benevolent by nature. Would you say that about Kim Jong Il? Some of the quick rotation of Russian leaders in the early 80’s weren’t that far off.
In short, we didn’t avoid war because people like you say it could have never happen given human sensibilities. Some of it was tactics like MAD and other parts were just plain luck and could have easily gone the other way. Other countries are likely to experience the same scenario that we went through in the future and I hope it works out the same way.
Born in 1962, and just reading this has made me recall the dread I felt back in the late 70s and early 80s. We were pretty sure it was just a matter of time. I had recurring nightmares about it practically my whole life - standing on the front lawn and saying goodbye to my family as the fireballs rose in the sky. Funnily enough, after 9/11 I never had another.
But yeah, I was fearful.
A few years ago I found a copy of *Threads *on VHS at a used book store. I bought it and still have it - and I find it far more haunting than The Day After (which I have on DVD), because it did seem much more real.
But, to the question: I was born in 1973, and there was a period of time that I was terrified of nuclear war - it was the early 80’s. I can remember laying in bed one night after my older brothers had mentioned, off the cuff, that if a nuclear war started, we’d see the flashes in the east first. Well, there were evening thunderstorms, and I didn’t know which way was east, but I was sure that it was nuclear bombs going off and I was sure I’d be dead by morning - I kept waiting for my parents to admit it to us instead of having us go to sleep as normal.
So yeah, for me, the 80s were pretty scary with the whole threat of nuclear war and such.
Any Canadian who was ever of the impression Canada was “Neutral” was a retard. I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but this is kind of like saying that we were neutral in the First World War. Canada was not some non-aligned country; we were openly opposed to the Soviet Union. Our armed forces was organized, armed and trained specifically to fight World War III against the Soviets. I mean, Canada was a NATO country and for much of that period of time was armed with nuclear weapons. Yes, we were.
The notion of missiles accidentally falling in Canada, or southern Ontario getting fallout from nukes that fell in the USA, or hitting each other in flight :rolleyes: is really quite beside the point. We were the enemies of the Soviets and would have started shooting at them just as fast as they started shooting at us. Canadian bases would have been attacked as a matter of course in a significant nuclear exchange. Southern Ontario would have been hit in Trenton, Meiford, Borden, Kingston, Ottawa, Toronto…
No offense taken, and I’m sure none was intended. I didn’t mean to imply that Canada was neutral, and apologies if it came across that way. We certainly were not neutral, and in spite of what many thought, I’m well aware that we were armed at that time.
Problem was, that there were many who thought we were indeed neutral, or at least would not be retaliate if pushed–aren’t we “peacekeepers” after all? And of course, there were many also who wanted nothing to do with those nasty, warmongering Americans. If they could only be like the peace-loving Soviets, the world would be a better place. These were the kind of people I was referring to in my earlier post–they honestly believed Canada was neutral, or at least, non-belligerent; and it shouldn’t follow the Americans’ lead. Sure they were mistaken, but I well remember their anti-nuclear, Peace-Protests-of-the-Week on my university campus in the early 1980s, where I got to hear their beliefs over and over and over again. :rolleyes:
I was terrified as hell growing up that we’d end up dead from a nuclear war, and watching They Day After didn’t help. Being a nervous, way too imaginative kid, I had all kinds of scenarios and nightmares about it.
Born in '76. Went cheerfully to my first anti-nuke rally in '83. Thanks, parents! I lived in terror of MAD, and then hope and admiration for Gorbachev. I went to see the piece of the Wall that they brought to our town - for some reason displayed in the local department store. Subsequent to the collapse of the Soviet Union I got really into cold war history for a while, and really dug into Cuba. (Thanks, dad, for that big-ass biography of Fidel!)
I couldn’t stand reading those awful post-apocalyptic novels for young readers. I still stay away from nuclear winter stuff. It just upsets me too much.
Location: Between Indian Point, West Point, and NYC. Born: '74.
Had Duck and Cover drills till middle school, on and off.
Was reasonably sure it’d happen at some point and that I was going to die. But it’s not like I could do something about it. If it so happened I survived, I was going to be ready to help keep things together.
Pretty much the same way I feel about terrorist incidents now. They happen, deal appropriately, and don’t eff up my life about them.
Same way I feel about earthquakes, come to think about it.
I think you need to read more deeply into the history of the Cold War. Eisenhower was quite ready to use nuclear weapons to prevent North Korean/Chinese incursion south of the hardwon 38th Parallel; had North Korea not signed the armistice, there would very likely have been deployment of nuclear weapons in a “tactical” fashion.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was even more absurd, with the members of Kennedy’s Cabinet discussing not if a nuclear exchange would occur but when and how, and indeed, if the United States should strike preemtively. (General Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay–the primary influence for the character of General Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love The Bomb–expressed the desire to pave over Cuba with nuclear weapons.) According to several sources, including then SecDef Robert McNamara, Kennedy received two messages from Krushchev on 27 October, the first offering a trade (removal of a the squadran of Jupiter IRBMs in Turkey in exchange for removal from missiles in Cuba), and the second, received while Robert Kennedy was feeling out the integrity of the Soviet proposal and response of NATO allies) and EXCOMM discussed the implications of such a trade, was a message apparently dictacted by the military, essentially inviting a nuclear exchange if the United States continued its blocade of Cuba. It was the former (and again future) US Ambassador, Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson (no relation to the Wisconsin Governor and SecHHS under Bush Jr.) who suggested ignoring the second message and responding to the first, urging Kennedy to “empathize” with the Soviets. This lead to the public and secret agreements that involved the removal of missile bases from Cuba and (some months thereafter) the deactivation of intermediate range missile squadrons in Southern Europe.
“Empathy” was right; it was what was missing from the business from the very beginning. There was absolutely not reason whatsoever for the showdown, which in retrospect could have been resolved behind the scenes without any public fanfare. This wasn’t the style of Kennedy, however, whom despite the popular reputation he did and still mostly does enjoy, was one of the most ill-suited and incompetent leaders in the area of foreign relations this nation has had the lack of privildge to be led by. The Americans already enjoyed a significant numerical advantage (a fact discovered and publicized by McNamara shortly after he took up his office) and had a geographically favorable situation, able to base missiles within 90 minutes strike of Moscow from several locations in Europe, and bombers even closer. The Russian missiles (SS-4 and SS-5) deployed in Cuba were not accurate enough at the time to reliably strike Washington, so the credibility of the threat as a disarming strike weapon is highly questionable. And of course, the IRBM forces based in Europe were simply a stopgap measure while Atlas and Titan ICBMs neared operational status; the agreed removal date for Jupiters in Turkey was only a couple of months from when they’d been planned to stand down operationally, anyway.
The aftermath of the CMC–in which Krushchev was forced to publically back down–made him lose face and ultimately his position, which was a bad move for everyone involved; despite his boorish manners and lack of diplomatic sense, Krushchev was a legimate reformer, having engaged in a campaign of “destalization” to bloodlessly purge the government and military of more dogmatic elements and clearly willing to liberalize Soviet control over the Warsaw Pact states. His removal lead to undermining is successor Alexey Kosygin’s attempts at economic reform and fueled the Party apparatchiks like Brezhnev and Anastas Mikoyan, who while not ideologues guided the Soviet Union toward a more insular, paranoid position which likely extended the Cold War.
During Nixon’s tenure there are stories, some apocryphal and some less so, of the perenially drunken and notoriously paranoid executive screaming bloody murder about the Soviets. In one case, Kissinger claims to have instructed the Joint Chiefs to ignore any orders coming from Nixon. We find similar stories with various degrees of substantiation regarding Soviet leaders and subleaders, particularly in the post-Brezhnev era. So much for level-headed sanity among world leaders. If there is any moderation, it comes from the fact that even criminal dictatorships like the Soviet Union are not ruled exclusively at the whims of a single zealot. That’s a thin comfort to rely upon as protection against temporary insanity at command of a nuclear arsenal, though.
The problem with the comparisons you mention in the 'Fifties and 'Sixties as compared to those in the Reagan Era is that in the latter, warfare became quicker and more automated. Whereas in the 'Sixties preparing for a full-on strike took weeks of logistical preparation, and even a missile launch took a couple hours of fueling and erection, by the 'Seventies with the mass deployment of second generation solid fuel ICBMs (Minuteman II) and accurate submarine-based SLBMs, significant nuclear devistation was hardly more than a single launch code away. By the 'Eighties, with the deployment of heavy MIRV boosters in both hardened ground silos and ballistic missile submarines, it was quite reasonable to believe, even aside of the questionable premise of nuclear winter, that any exchange would lead to a situation in which hundreds of millions would be dead and both superpowers and many of their allies would be industrially devestated. A single LGM-118A ‘Peacekeeper’ or SS-18 ‘Satan’ could destroy a handful of major cities. A small mistake would leave no room for explanation or negotiation.
Reagan’s particular brand of insanity, fed by an almost total ignorance of anything technical, came at a particularly inopportune time in the transition of Soviet leadership. We never really understood who was in de facto authority of the Soviet Union late in Brezhnev’s reign through to Gorbachev, and Reagan (never one to fuss about details) opted simply to bully and bombast as if he were a hero in a B-grade war movie. This sent the Soviets into a frenzy; such was Reagan’s humor that one could never tell just how serious he was, and it stoked the dying embers of Stalinist ideology for one final burst of conflict. The years from 1981 through 1985 were bad ones for everyone involved; the Soviets were convinced that Reagan was a total nutter (not far from the truth) and the ideologues a leader that both would not unilaterally take the reigns of power but who would follow their agenda, including pursuing an increasingly desperate war in Afghanistan. The US was still reeling from the aftermath of the Iranian revolution and loss of influence in the Middle East, plus fears of Commies worming their way through Latin America.
One thing I haven’t mentioned so far is missile defense, specifically the Strategic Defense Inititive. Regarded by its opponents as a technical absurdity (and certainly in the original guise of a system largely based on projected energy weapons, it was more cartoon than capability), and even by the technically-literate advocates as a limited system to prevent a debilitating first strike, Reagan publically promoted it as a protective umbrella that would protect the United States and its allies from harm. This was beyond foolish optimism; even if the individual components were capable of disabling a booster in flight, the notion that the entire command, communication, control, and integration systems of the day would function so flawlessly as to negate the numerical capabililty of incoming weapons is laughably, childishly absurd. During development of the Nike-X/Sentinel/Safeguard system, it had been concluded by both internal and external analyses that it would provide only limited coverage at vast expense that could be readily overwhelmed by increasing incoming RVs and/or decoys. It did, however, contribution to destabilizing the long-standing equivilence of US and USSR capabilities; even if it didn’t work, the threat that it might is enough to make an opponent consider a disabling strike before the system is implemented, and on a longer scale, develop countermeasures to obliviate the viability of the system. To this day we haven’t been able to make anything like even a scaled down version of “Star Wars” work in an operational environment.
The real solution to US-USSR conflict was what occured after 1985, when the leaders of the two powers developed an amenible relationship, resulting in reform (and eventual dissolution) in the Soviet Union. Up to that point, it was quite possible for one small event to become inflated to a point of causing an exchange, the supposed sanity–and willingness of world leaders not to “commit suicide”–notwithstanding.
“The terrorists” have, worldwide, in the last decade, managed to kill about 10% of the number of people who die in automobile accidents in the United States every year. The September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center Towers and Pentagon were flashy, practically drawn straight out of a Tom Clancy novel, but in any operational sense they were low-hanging fruit. My major surprise was that it hadn’t happened before, and it has proven easy enough to prevent similar attacks from having happened again. Despite all of the press given to these attacks and subsequent followups, including a large number of “credible but unspecified threats” that seem to occur inordinately around the time of anniversaries and holidays, these attacks have done virtually nothing to disrupt the lives of average citizens of Western nations beyond the level of minor inconvenience.
The current trend of referring to every attack on soliders and faciliities in Iraq as steming from “al Quada in Iraq” smacks of nothing more than boogymanism, more akin to exploding ductwork in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil than a threat to international security. “The terrorists”, nameless, faceless, with an apparent agenda against anything civilized, productive, or patriotic (including anything one conveniently wishes to brand under these labels for one’s on purposes) don’t seem to be too active these days; they appear to have “shot their wad,” so to speak. We certainly have no reasonable expectation of having whole cities destroyed, a society pushed back into pre-Industrialism, or anysuch destruction comperable to an exchange between superpowers.
And lest we forget, some of the enemies we face now were former, shall we say, clients for whom we funded their “insurgency” when it was to our benefit. In intelligence terms, this is called “backlash”; it’s what happens when the force you support bites back at you, because said support was based on passingly coincident goals rather than shared values and objectives.
I wouldn’t pay two bits for the supposed rationalism of the current CIC, engaged, as he is, in an egotistical penis-measuring contest with Putin over deployment of an unproven missile defense “shield” in one of a number of former East Bloc countries uncomfortably close to Russia which will neither intercept advanced RusFed missiles, nor (likely) be of much use against hypothetical IRMB/ICBMs that Iran may or may not be operating a decade or more from now. The whole issue is an utter bit of nonsense that both makes Putin look strong to the Russian public–which is now funding development of new missile systems for a Cold War Redux–and gives the Russian Federation all the justification in the world for cancelling their participation in treaties and agreements as a “tit-for-tat” response. These guys are two of the most obtuse assholes to hold prime executive authority in major industrial nations in the last fifty years (de Gaulle notwithstanding), and have the capability of doing a hell of a lot more harm than any band of terrorists, real or imagined.
Well, I’m glad someone actually read that thing, at least. Sometimes I fear I’m sending messages to /dev/null.
I should point out that I don’t disbelieve ** chappachula**'s premise that the majority of respondents to this topic are biased toward an acute awareness and fear of late Cold War tensions. Even among those born in the late 'Sixties and early 'Seventies, whose adolescence spanned the dark “Evil Empire” years of regularly expiring Soviet leaders and Reagan’s first term, I think the predominant attitude was one of apathy, particularly in comparison to the early 'Sixties. War in the 'Sixites would have arguable been winnable, or at least survivable, at least as argued by Herman Kahn in On Thermonuclear War and elsewhere (parodied in Dr. Strangelove with the hilarious “Mineshaft Gap” scene); by the 'Eighties, it was almost universally accepted that the level of destruction resulting from a nuclear exchange would bring North America, the Soviet Union, and the European allies of both nations to a level of pre-Industrial society if not less, and the notion of survival or defense was such a joke that it became the topic of computer games and a genre of hack novels. Reading Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon in 1984, even with the limited understanding I had then, seemed horribly anachronistic. There was no mass demonstration as in the Vietnam era, and even those who opposed military buildup and SDI garnered little collective support; either you fell into the camp of unaviodable fear, or one of the disinterested hopelessness of the “Me” decade.
And given the lack of interest and publicity given to the current Russian buildup, it seems those who lived through the 'Eighties have either forgotten their fears, or the bulk were as apathetic then as now. I submit that chappachula’s disinterest and faith (whether appropriate or misplaced) in the rationality of world leaders not to “tie the knots of war into a rope we’re pulling at each end of” (as Krushchev argued Kennedy had done) is characteristic of the so-called Generation-X and those preceding it. (And while I may be crotchety, it seems the younger set that have succeeded it have almost no interest in the topic of foreign affairs whatsoever, preferring concern about the sex lives of media senationibrities…but perhaps I’m giving too much credit to my contemporaries.) Personally, I think the whole deal of facing off with nuclear arsenals–regardless of the concept of Assured Destrcution–is a seriously bad idea, and my background makes me very circumspect about claims of the technical viability of any defense to such, extant or proposed.
I disagree with you. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan stopped the rot - and the descent into socialism which the Soviet Union funded - which enabled us to step up the economic angle.
I was there. I saw Britain change from the power cuts of the Heath era to the Callaghan’s Winter of Discontent to Thatcher winning back the Falklands and breaking the power of the unions. I saw Britain stop being the ‘sick man of Europe’.
Maybe that’s right. I don’t feel that way, but so it goes.
I was born in '70. One of my favorite books – not as classic literature, mind you, but one that I re-read for pleasure every couple years or so – is Coupland’s Generation X. The only part that doesn’t ring true for me is when one of the characters (Andy’s brother? Maybe Dag or Claire? I approach it as more of a montage, kind of “awash in sensations” book than as one having a storyline, so I can’t always keep the characters straight) freaks out about the possibility of nuclear war.
Bwhuh? Sure it was out there. I even remember trying to get myself worked up about it. Especially after The Day After aired and lots of people in school was chattering about it. Nope; didn’t affect me at all. I find the whole thing rather odd. I suppose I was just too wrapped up in my own teen angst.
Issues of the late '70s/early '80s that are much more prominent in my mind were inflation, the oil crisis, the ERA, the hostage crisis, voodoo economics, the PMRC, Reagan’s fucked up take on AIDS, and women moving into the workplace.
Plenty of things closer to home to worry about, IMHO. Nuclear war? Barely a concern.
No, I read it, as well as your other excellent posts in this thread. I have nothing to contribute at this time, but just wanted to pop in and say “thanks” for some interesting and educational posts. Hey, I lived through those years and followed the news regularly, but I still learned something from your efforts here. Thanks again!
Cite what? That the Falklands Conflict didn’t influence the Soviets to some manifest degree? I’m still waiting to see some qualified claim–beyond a nebulous appeal to the “psychological boost” it allegedly gained Britain–that establishes that it had any impact whatsoever on Soviet policy or politics.
You make is sounds as if Ronnie and Maggie went marching through Berlin arm in arm and pushed down The Wall by the might of their collected Conservative will alone. This isn’t just wrong; it’s offensively, obtusely wrong, a complete repudiation of all of the people who literally put their lives on the line to ease the grip of the Soviet Union on the nations of Eastern Europe; people who didn’t sit back and make speeches to an adoring public thousands of miles away from border guards and chekists, but put themselves out front and center, behind the Curtain, in the middle of it, where they could easily have been jailed, broken, or shot. It also misses the fact that the Soviet Union had long been in the throngs of a prolonged, persistant recession, that it had kept going not on the strength of its political might, or even by the impetus of the malignant ideology that gave birth to it, but by shear bureaucratic inertia.
English Socialism had a long history extending far back beyond the inception of the Soviet Union, and aside from daliances with Marxism like that of the Gaslighters, the boosters of socialism and unions in Britain never saw any significant financial support from the Soviet Union, particularly not post-WWII. Trying to link English Socialism to Soviet Communism is a transparent ruse. Aside from building a couple of notorious spy networks in England–as it did in other nations, including the United States, a country that never had a significant post-war Communist political presence–the Soviet Union had little direct contact with English politics, and by the time of the 'Seventies and the nadir of the British economy (which was admittedly in a very sorry state) the Soviets had become so insular and protectionist its hard to imagine how anyone could seriously belive that there were “Reds under the beds” and all that goes along with it.
As for what effect the Falklands had on domestic morale, I have no particular insight or indeed interest, but it, but to claim this had some dramatic effect on the internal Soviet politics which brought the reformist Gorbechev to power without a stitch of supporting integument is bare naked Thatcherism, a belief that all things pertaining to the Thatcher Administration were positive and significant to Great Britain and the world at large, which is akin to believing that aliens will attempt to contact Whitehall because they always invade the British Isles in Dr. Who serials. Thatcher may have cured “the sick man of Europe” as you put it, but there are many in line before her (and Reagan) to receive honors for having hammered a nail into the coffin of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.
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