I do realize such folks existed (they call themselves the NDP) and wasn’t implying you were one of them.
That said, there’s a lot to be said for pacifism. I don’t think most people in the States and Canada know this, but for most of the Cold War, it was the West that was pushing the nuclear arms race. The Soviets spent most of that time catching up, and it was NATO policy, until the late 1970s/early 1980s, to use nukes first in the event of general war, and use the threat of nukes to exert pressure on the Soviets. I find it fascinating that people are already babbling about Reagan as a cowboy who wanted to wave nukes around; that policy predated Reagan’s administration by 34 years.
Well, I’m a few decades older than Gen X-ers, but can remember the grammar school procedures in San Francisco, a natural and easy target for atomic attack.
We got under our desks.
We knew (it was drilled into us) about the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which at that time were fairly recent, and we knew that the Evil Communists were out to get us Catholic school kids, but really, it wasn’t a big deal. The nuns didn’t dramatize it, we kids thought it was great to get under our desks and away from whatever we were being taught.
As a kid, the thought of atomic attack was much the same as nuclear attack was to my daughter years and years later. The thought was always there but neither of us lost sleep over it.
Earthquakes were and are still far more threatening, but I don’t worry much about them either.
All of this is true; however, Reagan was the first President who was so publically freewheeling about threatening to use nukes. Between that, and his “peculiar” sense of humor about the whole thing, it made for a pretty frightening time for everybody involved, compounded by the fact that we really couldn’t figure out who was running the Soviet Union at any given day and what their agenda was.
Sorry, Stranger, I didn’t actually read your posts (I stay out of GD for a reason); I just picked up on that phrase that stood out. Maybe if you could give a two sentence summary before a thousand word post outside of GD for us slack-asses?
Am I incorrect in interpreting your words here as testament that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were the principle personalities responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War? It appears to me–and you’ll have to excuse me as English is only my first language–that it is your thesis that the policies of the Reagan and Thatcher administrations, including the costly and widely regarded as unnecessary war between Great Britain and Argentina over the Falklands, South Georgia, and South Sandwich islands, were primarily responsible for undermining the political stability of the Communist regimes of the Warsaw Pact, which in turn led to the collapse of Soviet authorithy and ultimately the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. You have asserted–and again, my apologies if in my lack of command of the language I’ve missed the true core of your argument–that the creation and support of English socialism, and the results of its failure in application in the 'Fifites and 'Sixties, was at the sponsorship of the Soviet Union. Is my interpretation of your statements incorrect, or do these represesnt your beliefs in regard to the denouement of the Soviet Union.
English, born 1960. Never lost five minutes’ sleep over it. Despite sabre-rattling I never truly believed anyone in charge on either side actually wanted to be the man who pushed the button that turned the world into a radioactive cinder. Mind you, I found Down To A Sunless Sea kinda scary, but no more so than any other end-of-the-world fiction.
