Lately, I’ve been feeling a little nostalgic for some good old fashioned Cold War terror. Do you remember growing up half-expecting to see giant mushrooms sprout on the horizon at any moment? I do! Good times.
So, I’ve been thinking about songs that deal with the threat of nuclear annihilation. But I can’t come up with very many. So, help me out before they drop the Big One.
The classic example is probably the English version of Nena’s “99 Lufballons”. Wiki tells me that the original German version is not explicitly about a nuclear war, but the English version is pretty clearly about a defective warning system that mistakes the balloons for incoming missiles, resulting in a war that quickly results in mass destruction.
In “Russians,” Sting wonders how he can save his “little boy / from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy”, and he finds hope in the belief that the “Russians love their children too.”
Billy Joel’s “Leningrad” is not one of my favorite songs. The lyrics are maudlin and the music is boring. But it captures the madness and paranoia of the era in the great lines, “And cold war kids were hard to kill / Under their desks in an air raid drill”.
My favorite Cold War song is probably Weird Al’s masterwork of dark humor, “Christmas at Ground Zero”. I watched the videolast night and couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry.
That’s all I’ve got so far. Help me build a playlist to enjoy in the 30 minutes between the time they push The Button, and we all get vaporized.
and probably about a hundred other late 80s metal songs I can’t think of right now, but it seemed like almost every album had a song about nuclear war or the like back then.
The OP already mentioned my favorite - Russians - so I’ll go with OMD’s Enola Gay . It’s about the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan. I know many of our younger dopers won’t be familiar with it but anyone who came of age in the '80 will probably have heard it.
Now that I think about it, I was all ready to come in here with several songs that I’ve always associated with cold war/ nuclear terror but upon looking at the lyrics turns out they’re not necessarily about that at all.
Europe’s The Final Countdown - apparently about space travel
The Police’s Bombs Away - really just an anti war / poke at puppet regimes
White Lion’s When the Children Cry
“Morning Dew” by Bonnie Dobson, which was covered by numerous artists including the Grateful Dead, is specifically about the aftermath of a nuclear war. The song was inspired by On the Beach.
Heck, the band Nuclear Assault (“After the Holocaust”, “Radiation Sickness”, “Rise from the Ashes”) practically made a career of it.