Missing the Cold War? This Sunday, July 13, beginning at 8:00 PM EDT, Turner Classic Movies will be showing a double feature about the risks of unintentional nuclear war, featuring 1964’s “Fail Safe” at 8:00 PM and 1965’s “The Bedford Incident” at 10:00 PM.
— Stephen Schwartz (@atomicanalyst.bsky.social) July 11, 2025 at 1:36 PM
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I'm in my mid-50s and starting to become the littlest bit prone to nostalgia (and I do mean the littlest bit).
As @radiofreetom.bsky.social states in this very worthwhile piece, I'm not being nostalgic when remembering this era–an important read:
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc…— Richard P Clark (@zippyrich.bsky.social) July 10, 2025 at 2:55 PM
Story I’ve told before: When I was in second or third grade, one of my parochial-school classmates asked our nun why we weren’t doing the then-fashionable duck & cover drills. She told us that our proximity to Manhattan meant we’d die before we even saw the light of a nuclear explosion, so our only real defense was to always keep our souls in a state of sinlessness. Even now, I’m not sure she wasn’t correct… Gift link:
Back in the late 2000s, I was teaching a class on nuclear weapons to undergraduates who had mostly come of age after the fall of the Soviet Union. As I tried to explain what it was like to grow up worrying about a sudden apocalypse, a student raised his hand and said: “What were you so afraid of? I mean, sure, nuclear weapons are bad, but …” And here he gave up with a puzzled shake of his head, as if to say: What was the big deal?
I paused to think of a better way to explain that the annihilation of the world was a big deal. People who grew up during the Cold War, as I did, internalized this fear as children. We still tell our campfire tales about hiding under school desks at the sound of air-raid sirens. Such things seemed mysterious, and even irrelevant, to my students in the 21st century. And then it occurred to me: They haven’t seen the movies.
During the Cold War, popular culture provided Americans with images of (and a vocabulary for) nuclear war. Mushroom clouds, DEFCON alerts, exploding buildings, fallout-shelter signs—these visuals popped up in even the frothiest forms of entertainment, including comic books, James Bond movies, and music videos. The possibility of a nuclear holocaust was always lurking in the background, like the figure of Death hiding among revelers in a Bosch triptych, and we could imagine it because it had been shown to us many times on screens big and small.
Ensuing generations have grown up with their own fears: Terrorism, climate change, and now AI are upending life across the globe, and nuclear war might seem more like a historical curiosity than a concrete threat. But at this moment, Russia and the United States each have roughly 1,500 deployed strategic warheads, many of them on alert, with thousands more in their inventories. This is an improvement over the madness of the Cold War, when the superpowers were sitting on tens of thousands of deployed weapons, but the current global stockpile is more than enough to destroy hundreds of cities and kill billions of people. The threat remains, but the public’s fears, along with the movies that explored them, have faded away. Americans need new films to remind new generations, but Cold War–era movies are not just relics. The horrors they depict are still possible…
Testament was the one that gave me nightmares in the 1980s, but nothing compared to the radition-poisoned teddy bear from Judith Merrill’s Shadow on the Hearth when I read it as a precocious third or fourth grader.
I gave a lecture in the early 2000s at the Naval War College on nuclear strategy: MAD, Massive Retaliation, Flexible Response, etc, and an USAF major, early 30s (?) comes up to me and says: Great lecture, sir, I'd never heard any of this stuff.
Me: WTF— Tom Nichols (@radiofreetom.bsky.social) July 10, 2025 at 1:46 PM
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Kathryn Bigelow's new film – "A House of Dynamite" – about a missile attack on the USA will drop in October.
www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie…
— Tom Nichols (@radiofreetom.bsky.social) July 10, 2025 at 12:26 PM
Darkness Has a Hunger That’s Insatiable and Lightness Has a Call That’s Hard To Hear
Baud
I like that were trying to entice Cheryl Rofer to come back.
me
“Where’s Maj Kong?” Yeeehaw!
Ohio Mom
I have a vague memory of crawling under my desk in first grade, puzzled because it was clear Mrs. Lubrow’s heart wasn’t in it. I was too young to understand that even grownups have to do stupid things they don’t want to, for all sorts of reasons.
zhena gogolia
I remember they took us in the basement where the locker rooms were. I looked around at the lockers and knew this was not going to be a solution.
frosty
If you want to get updated, read Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen. TL;DR Synopsis: North Korea launches a nuke at the Pentagon, we retaliate but unfortunately the missiles fly over Siberia, Russia retaliates. China gets involved. War is over in 52 minutes, everything everyone owns gets launched.
Very well researched, both documents of whatever isn’t classified and interviews with people who worked with it. There is no such thing as “limited” nuclear war. Every war game that her interviewees participated in ended the same way. Launch it all.
prostratedragon
A song in a throwback style:
rikyrah
Anyone had chickpea pasta? Just bought some for the protein
jlowe
My vote: It Conquered the World from 1956. Noteworthy to me for being the subject of Cheepnis, the song performed live by the Mothers of Invention during their iconic Roxy & Elsewhere set.
japa21
On The Beach, the book more than the movie, really brought home the potential horror.
Another Scott
🎵🎵 DUCK! And cover. 🎵🎵
🎵🎵 DUCK! And cover. 🎵🎵
Bert the turtle (9:14)
Ah, the good old days… :-/
(I don’t know if I saw that in school, but we did the duck and cover drills a few times.)
I was in DC on 9/11/2001. It took about 4-5 hours to get home (usually about 20 minutes). It was a reminder that if cities are attacked on a large scale, there’s really not much one can do except hunker down…
:-(
Best wishes,
Scott.
narya
@rikyrah: don’t overcook it.
a few months ago I watched Fail-Safe and Dr Strangelove on successive nights.
piratedan
and the Cold War scenarios morphed into the SuperComputer will save us all (maybe, maybe not) with films like War Games, Colussus: The Forbin Project and the Terminator series of films… which kind of live next door to The Andromeda Strain. As a kid, some dystopian threat was always just a Saturday movie away….
MattF
No one mentioning Herman Kahn? I remember that he personified my fear of nuclear catastrophe.
frosty
@rikyrah: Yes, we use it regularly. Same consistency and flavor as wheat pasta. We’ve used a lot of varieties of chickpea, red lentil, quinoa, and blends and like them all.
Elizabelle
No memory of learning about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Hello? Buehler?
Aside from movies, if you got Life magazine, you saw the radiation sickness and survivors and the destroyed landscapes.
It would seem news used to inform more. Before cable news sped up and dumbed down everything.
Chetan Murthy
@japa21: Seconded.
TaMara
My dad’s USAF service was in Strategic Air Command, which meant we were often stationed in remote locations where they kept watch for !NUKES!
My childhood was one of PHONE TREE (remember those? and also, can you believe that’s how they alerted off-duty soldiers?!) alerts, when we did not know, as my dad left the house in a hurry, if it was real or a drill.
Fun times.
Probably explains a lot about me….LOL
me
@piratedan:
The Day the Earth Stood Still is another nuclear war adjacent movie that came somewhat earlier.
prostratedragon
@MattF: Crazy man. He would occasionally do the talk show circuit. I watched him a couple of times on Merv Griffen, I think, after school. His blandness put me on notice.
Martin
@piratedan: In Japan it was kaiju.
Chetan Murthy
I’m 60, and I remember freshman year 1982, moral philosophy, we studied a book called _The Fate of the Earth_ by Jonathan Schell. I don’t remember too much about the book, but I remember one possible conclusion was that if the entire human race was estinguished, then it wouldn’t be a moral problem, since there would be nobody left to mourn us.
There are many ways of approaching thinking of nuclear war and the ensuing societal shocks. For me, it comes back to the fragility of our society in general, and the many ways in which we’ve engineered it to be exactly that. And ….. my own conclusion is that if there is a nuclear exchange, I want to be as near ground zero as possible. The living will envy the dead.
prostratedragon
@Elizabelle: I remember seeing such magazine stories in several places and repeated periodically over the years. John Hersey’s Hiroshima was in the school library, and I read it in 9th grade I think.
RevRick
Growing up in Stamford, Connecticut I could stand at the end of Shippan Point and on a clear day see the Empire State Building. And being a strange, precocious child, for a 4th grade show-and-tell, I brought a newspaper clipping about Red China shelling Quemoy and Matsu! So, I understood what nuclear weapons meant at an early age. And my heart always skipped a beat on Saturdays at noon when Stamford tested their air raid sirens. I have distinct recollections of how silent the world became in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Fast forward to the Reagan administration and its proposal to deploy Pershing missiles in Europe and Jonathon Schell’s book The Fate of the Earth, and I wondered if I’d live to see age 40.
Miki
My 2nd X and I bought our first house in 1985 from an estate on a contract for deed. (Interest rates were 18% and the heirs were having a hard time selling. We got a CD at 10%, a great deal at the time.)
The house was built in 1949, and occupied by the original buyers until their deaths in the mid 1980s. All three outside doors had Fall-Out-Shelter stickers.
It kind of freaked me out, even though I was a duck and cover alum myself, and the Cold War wasn’t over yet. But the nuclear holocaust, as we called it in the 1980s, never seemed so close until it decorated my new, old house.
Princess
I’m Gen X so our fears were a gun-happy Reagan and The Day After and If You Love this Planet.
SpaceUnit
Aren’t we dealing with enough existential dread at the moment? Sorry, no need to dredge up the Cold War. Yeesh. You folks are gluttons.
Snarki, child of Loki
At least the Cold War kept the GOP from playing kissy-face with KGB guys, unlike now.
Small comfort, but still.
Elizabelle
I mean, Godzilla too. And the mercury poisoning of Minimata Bay. As a kid, I thought that was caused by the nuclear radiation. But it was chemical runoff.
I remember the B&W photo of the Japanese mother tenderly bathing her nude and quite deformed daughter. Life magazine, I would guess.
lowtechcyclist
@frosty:
Problem I have with this is: if everyone who’d be involved knows this already, wouldn’t they change the protocol accordingly? Whatever NK blows up with that nuke is blown up no matter whether or how we retaliate. And presumably we have enough conventional weaponry to destroy NK. So a hypothetical sane U.S. President gets on the phone with Putin or his successor, and says: you saw what just happened – do you want to use conventional weapons to turn North Korea into a cinder, or do you want us to do it? Or would you rather have a nuclear war?
The logic of full retaliation if Russia or China were to nuke us is pretty straightforward. But it just doesn’t seem to make as much sense if NK or Iran fires a nuke.
Tenar Arha
Yep. Same for Boston area. Anywhere between all the tech manufacturers around rte 128 and Boston would’ve been dead. I really internalized that “I’ll likely/hopefully be dead.”
ETA Plus, I had read my father’s copy of Hiroshima by John Hersey before I was even in high school. The shadows burned on the walls stuck.
Martin
@japa21: On The Beach was one of our Politics Through Film and Literature assignments. A book a week. Read it and then watch the movie and then discuss themes, what happened politically to cause the film to depart from the book in the intervening years, etc. That was a tough course, because there are no uplifting books/movies in that genre.
Quaker in a Basement
I was about 8 at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. We lived in Florida. I remember looking at the front page of the afternoon newspaper (Yes! We had two hard copy newspapers delivered every day!) and they had printed a large graphic of the planet above the fold. I don’t remember the exact headline, but it was to the effect of: Take a last look and kiss it goodbye.
frosty
True. Falsely attributed to Khruschev.
prostratedragon
@RevRick: Strange, I remember a silence from that time too. And the tension must have knocked me back a little, because I first see myself back then as in about 3rd grade, but actually had just started 6th.
Betty
@Chetan Murthy: You do know “the living will envy the dead” is language in the Book of Revelations?
Snarki, child of Loki
@prostratedragon: Pretty sure I read John Hersey’s Hiroshima twice, many decades apart.
The second time, what REALLY made an impact is that right before writing Hiroshima, Hershey had reported on the Iwo Jima invasion. So, not so easily shocked.
Chetan Murthy
@frosty: I never knew to whom it was attributed. Googling (you made me look!) I find lots of attributions to Khruschev, and also to Ecclesiastes: “I envy those who are dead and gone; they are better off than those who are still alive.”
Do you know who coined the phrase? Just curious.
hotshoe
Jericho, TV series, 2006.
Since the show is centered on the survival of a little town in central Kansas, there aren’t too many images of the nuclear bombs going off elsewhere. It’s not an all-out war, it’s an inside attack against two dozen US cities, although the townspeople of Jericho KS don’t know that at first, and I don’t recollect that they ever find out the truth after broadcast communications, phones, etc go down.
Several of the episodes make the point about nuclear war “the ones killed instantly were the lucky ones”.
Another Scott
@MattF: Thanks for the link. I remember hearing his name, but didn’t recall why.
I think that’s an important observation, and it applies to other, more recent things. Like, say, the war against Saddam… Politics are important, but people need to have ways to resist being stampeded into taking positions based on name-calling.
:-(
Obviously, there was more going on in Kahn’s case.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
frosty
@lowtechcyclist: The book covered that. As soon as the launch is verified, they whisk the President away in the Doomsday plane and an underling is trying to talk to Putin who insists on talking to the President then hangs up.
IIRC, the President couldn’t get on the phone because he had to parachute out of the Doomsday plane (strapped to a Seal or somesuch) and couldn’t move after he hit the ground.
ETA the conventional bombs and missiles couldn’t destroy the deep tunnels where the Kim and the NK elite would be.
HinTN
@frosty: “The only way to win is not to play.”
Heidi Mom
Slightly off-topic, but I recall reading something to the effect that on 9/11, just after the attacks occurred, Condi Rice called Putin and said “We’re going on full alert, but I want to assure you that this action is not aimed at Russia,” and he replied “We understand. We’ll stand down.” Seems like a very long time ago.
NotMax
The bedeviled flight of Bockscar, the plane that dropped the Nagasaki bomb.
Chetan Murthy
@Betty: Hah, I did not, but googling, I found it.
This reminds me (again) of how much the worldview of even committed atheists like me is based on Christianity. My -entire- intellectual heritage is descended from Christendom; certainly there are parts that were created/invented by other cultures, but more-or-less they all come to me via Christianity.
These Talibangelicals are fucking up big time; they have no idea what enormous gift they have received from their ancestors.
lowtechcyclist
I grew up just two or three miles outside the DC Beltway, so us kids just figured if anything happened, we’d all be dead before we knew about it. So we just shrugged and stopped worrying about it, even though our school did ‘air raid drills’ where we’d go out into the hall, kneel facing the walls, put our heads down where the wall met the floor, and covered our heads with our hands. Like that was gonna do a lot of good.
If nuclear war happened now, such survivors as there would be in the U.S. would be in rural areas or towns too small for Russia to aim a nuke at. They would of course mostly be Rapture-believing Christianists, and would be wondering why they were still here.
frosty
@Chetan Murthy: No idea where the phrase came from. I was going to put it in my comment but I looked it up first and found the same thing you did.
WaterGirl
The only thing that could get me to see that movie is that Idris Elba is starring in it. He will be like the music in Schindler’s list that allows me to make it through the whole movie, which was distressing.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
That’s their scam. Since a lot of good things developed from that heritage, they convince people that progress that they don’t like represents a corruption of that heritage, rather than a continuation of it.
Gin & Tonic
@MattF: I was planning to, but I walked in too late.
bbleh
Worked on the Firebreaks project for Ground Zero back in the Reagan years. I suppose that made the subject more accessible and so less formlessly scary, but it certainly was scarily enlightening.
Lapassionara
@Princess: I remember The Day After. My children were young at the time and the images really stayed with me.
Chetan Murthy
@WaterGirl: 100% there with you, but even Idris Elba wouldn’t get me to watch a movie about a nuclear war. Life is dark enough already.
Elizabelle
@Martin: Interesting.
Do you recall any of the other books and films? Would love to try that myself.
Booger
Comment 50+ and no mention of “Threads?”
bbleh
@lowtechcyclist: unfortunately, it’s entirely possible the devastation wouldn’t be confined to targeted areas, plus there’s the climate effects. I think it’s more likely the survivors would be trying to scratch out Stone Age-level survival.
And re OP and other comments, I don’t think it’s true either that proximity to targeted cities necessarily would mean getting caught in initial blasts and so “you’d be dead.” I think rather you’d be crawling around in a wasteland like the aftermath of a hurricane, with no food no water no services no transportation and a lot of other people like you, ie it wouldn’t be quick.
lowtechcyclist
@frosty:
Whatever.
Thing is, when we’re at the point where the only nuke fired is the one NK aims at us, sure, Russia has to be jumpy about what we’re going to do. But if the next thing that happens is that we don’t do anything (besides try to get Russia on the phone), what’s the next thing that happens after that? Especially if (again) everyone knows we’re not going to respond with nukes because we figure that if we do, we will all go together when we go, every Hottentot and every Eskimo.
And what’s left for them to rule over when they finally emerge from the tunnels?
Archon
It literally wasn’t until I watched the movie Oppenheimer where I actually processed the destructive power of nuclear weapons and it was in a simple line of dialogue. It’s when he said “picture a fireball 10,000 feet high”. We see film of those mushroom clouds from high above miles away but I tried to imagine looking at that from ground level and I had a real moment of absolute terror and anxiety.
Now I think you can argue nuclear weapons have actually made the world more peaceful but God help us if they ever get used.
Harrison Wesley
@rikyrah: I’m a fan of it – that and falafel and hummus are the only ways I like chickpeas.
Gin & Tonic
Cheer yourselves up by thinking about what every national leader in the world has learned from the example of Ukraine, which voluntarily relinquished all nuclear weapons on its territory to get some vague and unenforceable assurance of territorial integrity, only to be invaded by its neighbor. Nuclear non-proliferation is deader than John Cleese’s parrot.
bbleh
@Archon: I am more worried about regional use than so-called strategic use. My favorite example is the devastation that climate change and the resulting inundation / infiltration and destruction of extremely densely populated coastal agricultural land is going to wreak on the nations of South Asia, among whom are India and Pakistan who have a bitter rivalry and, um, nuclear weapons.
Chetan Murthy
Good point. Living in Hayward CA isn’t really enough; but I live in Noe Valley, and I’m confident that there will be enough nukes aimed at SF that the overpressure alone will do for us all.
Yet another bonus of living in the urban core!
lowtechcyclist
@bbleh:
Well sure, things would suck for the survivors, no matter where they were. But I was just saying where any survivors would be, and who they would mostly be as a result, and that consequently they’d be going, “weren’t we supposed to be Raptured?” at least in the immediate aftermath, before the demands of sheer survival drove it from their minds.
bbleh
@MattF: read “On Thermonuclear War” when I was in college. Dispassionate to an almost pathological degree imo. And I thought that was a flaw because it implicitly assumed that national actors would act with full rationality, ie there would be no “fog of war.”
Real war-gaming is more illuminating imo.
bbleh
@Chetan Murthy: yeah plus accuracy ain’t exactly pinpoint, and then there’s higher-altitude blasts.
Happy stuff!
hotshoe
@RevRick:
I’m not quite old enough to really remember the Cuban Missile crisis. My parents’ marriage was in trouble: they were trying to avoid divorce and trying to hide their fights from little children.
Then instead they would have had to hide their fears about nuclear war.
Lately I’ve been thinking about a silent interval that I dimly remember, which would have been the right timeline to match the Missile Crisis month. I don’t know why I think it might be connected, might have just been their marriage hit a particular cold patch — but I can just picture my mom not talking because she knew if she said anything at all, her fears would spill over and scare the kids. And my dad, a very-conflicted patriot, maybe had to suppress saying angry things about how much he hated war and a govt that would risk starting another war.
There’s no one left to ask what really happened in our house.
Chetan Murthy
-Intellectually- I’d care; but ….. in reality? As long as it’s quick, I just can’t be bothered. [and I’d want the same for all my relatives and friends] I really mean it when I quote that Bible verse. If there’s an afterlife and I’m looking
downup (who am I kidding?) at the devastation, I’d be telling myself “I’m well out of it”.kalakal
The War Game and Threads were terrifying. The most moving for me was When the Wind Blows, both the book and the film*, had me in tears
On the Beach particularly the book was also very moving. Everyone will die and knows it months in advance yet up till then life goes on. The lady planting spring bulbs she knows she’ll never see bloom but she always plants spring bulbs…
*By Raymond Briggs, The Snowman it isn’t.
Chetan Murthy
@piratedan: War Games ….. funny story. I remember when the movie came out. I went to see it with a girl I was kinda sweet on from my high school. I distinctly remember, partway thru the film, leaning over to her and saying, all serious-like, “this is a communist front!” B/c I’d imbibed that much of the right-wing anti-communist rhetoric. Stuff like in the book _You Can Trust The Communists (To Be Communists)_. I shit you not. I shit you not.
OK, so I grew up.
bjacques
@Lapassionara: I saw it. A few years later, the VJ at Houston’s great dance club Numbers did a great montage of Lawrence Kansas getting pasted by nukes, to accompany “Enola Gay” by Orchestral Manoevres In The Dark. Fun times.
After living through the Cold War, I thought the War On Terror was bullshit.
Nukular Biskits
I’m a child of the 80s and I definitely remember the concern about an all-out nuclear exchange.
And back in 2006 or 2007, I had the occasion to work in Nagasaki for a couple of weeks and visited the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum.
Sobering would be a colossal understatement.
Cat Radio
@Baud: Funny man :)
piratedan
@Chetan Murthy: well, I can say that growing up in the 60s and 70s there was something always looking to end us all, usually through our own hubris thru the eyes of many in Hollywood and in the eyes of others, we were just a waiting target to be overtaken by the new axis of evil of those nations in lockstep with the then Soviets (Rocket Attack USA, Wolverines, etc….)
no wonder so many of us got lost in drugs, or blocked away all of the trouble of the world in more early pursuits
Steve LaBonne
@Princess: I still get the shivers if I think of The Day After. The kind of mundane realistic style made it that much more frightening.
Cat Radio
I will say that I am absolutely in no way, shape, or form, nostalgic for the nightmare years of the potential for nuclear war. We had drills. Get under the desk, etc. Our science teacher (I was 13 years old), who had something of a reputation for drinking while teaching, said it would be best to step outside and get it over with.
I was upset at the time, but it’s possible that he had a point. He probably had tenure as well, because he wasn’t fired for his remarks.
Another Scott
I’m suddenly remembering that one of my dad’s hobbies – HAM radio – was tied up with Civil Defense.
MARS:
I’m kinda surprised that it’s (mostly) still active.
I remember once when he was driving us somewhere and he needed to call someone and did it right from his HAM radio in the car (via the magic of the MARS system). In the early 1970s. I thought – “what sorcery is this??!”
Olde timey radio like that would be very important if things get bad enough, so there were people at the Pentagon thinking about seemingly mundane, but actually important, things like that way back then.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
UncleEbeneezer
You don’t even need a Cold War film to dread the possibility of a nuclear war. Just watch the series Chernobyl and now imagine the horrific damage of an actual war with two nations trying to make that happen to as many enemy civilians as possible.
Martin
@Elizabelle: Oh, yeah, it was a great class. Lets see (can’t remember the order of these)
There were a total of 15 I think, so I’m missing quite a few. I remember that Grapes of Wrath didn’t make it in because the instructor assumed everyone would have read it (I hadn’t – but feeling a bit ashamed did after the class.) There was a book/film that takes place inside the Soviet political class that I’ve been searching for but can’t seem to place. If others pop into my memory I’ll post them.
Martin
@UncleEbeneezer: Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were less than a decade apart. That was middle school to early college for me.
bbleh
@Chetan Murthy: oh “the survivors would envy the dead” for sure.
Elizabelle
@Martin: Thank you!!
persistentillusion
@Tenar Arha: I grew up in Omaha, which is where SAC HQ is. We were ground zero minus 1.
(Did you know that in the 60s, a sonic boom which we had often would raise your garage door, if you had an electric opener?)
Miki
@Another Scott: Yes, it’s still active.
Circa 1969 my then bf joined a HAM radio club and a junior civil air patrol club pretty much at the same time. After about a decade plus some of fucking around, he landed on a Chemical Engineering degree that morphed to a military career as a helicopter pilot. Upon retirement he stayed connected to the HAM radio community.
He just turned 70.
kalakal
One thing I remember from the 60’s and 70’s as well as happy thoughts of nuclear obliteration there was the ever present threat of terrorism.
What with the IRA, UVF, ETA, Baader Meinhof, Brigado Rosso, The Red Brigades, PLO, Black September, and others. It seemed every time you read the news a bomb had gone off, an airplane hijacked or someone assassinated. That and wars in the Middle East, Africa, Asia about the only thing to cheer for was a few brave folk going into space
PSQ
One might take note that July 24 marks the 35th anniversary of the date when Strategic Air Command did NOT have at least one nuclear armed bomber in the air. It was quietly announced on that day, but I have never forgotten it.
Miki
@kalakal: Yep, that, too.
The violence of the 1960s and 1970s is indelible.
Tenar Arha
@persistentillusion: nope, but that’s amazing.
NotMax
Gotta mention the 1983 film Testament. (Link is to its Wikipedia page.)
@kalakal
Also too Barefoot Gen, both the original manga series and the anime.
And the 1983 film Testament. (Link is to its Wikipedia page.)
NotMax
Duplicated Testament above inadvertently.
frosty
@lowtechcyclist: The second nuke North Korea fires is at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, causing a meltdown and release of radiation making a huge chunk of California and Nevada uninhabitable for thousands of years. So basically, we have to retaliate or they’ll just keep launching.
I found it interesting that despite all the time, money, and words spent on Star Wars and Golden Domes, etc., it is still nearly impossible to shoot down a ballistic missile. And totally impossible to shoot down 50.
ETA Points for the Tom Lehrer lyric!
Sure Lurkalot
I was in the 2nd grade for the duck and cover drills. We were led out to the hall to crouch along the lockers.
I don’t remember being particularly frightened by the exercise. What gave me nightmares were volcanos, having been shown a film clip about Mt Vesuvius and the victims turned to stone. One was hypothetical, the other actually happened, I assume was my 8 year old logic.
In high school, one themed reading module was books about the end of the world. I remember reading Fail Safe, On the Beach and Cat’’s Cradle.
Martin
@Another Scott:
Our city is encouraging some residents through CERT to get their radio license and at least a minimal setup to serve as local points of contact in neighborhoods in case of emergency – considering an earthquake sufficiently powerful that it cuts power/internet/phone. They’re trying to cover ranges of 20 miles or so, not hundreds. I think that was one of the lessons out of Helene when communities got cut off for quite some time.
jowriter
@NotMax: We had our first kid in 1982, and Testament was terrifying. Low key compared to The Day After, but I felt it was more devastating. I have not forgotten it.
Matt McIrvin
I always wince when people talk about the 70s or 80s as a “simpler, more innocent time”.
Dude, I was there. The murder rate was staggering. There was REAL inflation. Borderline pedophilia was weirdly normalized compared to today. Fascism was maybe less overt but actually much more popular. All kinds of skeevy stuff was happening.
ColoradoGuy
The dawn of the Sixties was incredibly intense. Democrats cheered the end of the stultifying Eisenhower years, but the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion immediately followed, with its disastrous and embarrassing outcome.
Tensions rose, Khrushchev was bellicose and threatening, and the Cuban Missile Crisis happened a short time later. We were all a hairsbreadth away from total annihilation, and Kennedy accurately told Khrushchev the USA was days away from a military coup (he was not exaggerating).
Khrushchev realized that things were getting out of hand very fast, and Castro was quite willing to destroy the world to preserve his revolution. So the Russian missiles were removed, and USA secretly removed the obsolete missiles in Turkey.
Not long after, JFK was shot dead in broad daylight in Dallas, a notoriously far-right town at the time, and then LBJ escalated the little-known Vietnam War by an order of magnitude, and kept doing so, despite the advice of The Old China Hands in the State Department not to do so. The Old China Hands were nearly wiped out by the Joe McCarthy/Nixon/Roy Cohn “Red Scare” only ten years before, so they were ignored, to the eventual cost of 60,000 American and 500,000 Vietnamese lives.
I read “On the Beach” as a twelve-year-old and the horror never left me. The Australian racing-car enthusiast putting his beloved car up on blocks (forever) was the scene that did me in. It didn’t help when my Dad and I saw “Dr. Strangelove” and he told me he personally met Air Force generals just like the bodily-purity lunatic in the film. I was stunned that adults just accepted that we might all die because of a simple miscommunication between Soviet Russia and the USA.
frosty
@Miki: I got a ham license at 16, then renewed it and bought a transceiver in 1999 just in case I needed it for Y2K. I didn’t. I haven’t used it since then and it’s time I put it up on eBay.
hells littlest angel
When the world was on the brink of nuclear armageddon — you know, the good old days.
Cliosfanboy
I hope Cameron’s movie isn’t a bunch of “They had already surrendered!” BS.
NotMax
@Sure Lurkalot
We were paraded to the elementary school basement so that if we did survive chances were we’d be buried under burning rubble (too many windows which could hurl shards of glass in the classrooms).
NotMax
Leave it to the Brits to make a post-nuclear farce like The Bed Sitting Room.
;)
Cliosfanboy
@Cliosfanboy:
Started my edit too late. At any rate, historians have enough to deal with, given pseudo-historical trash like Mel Gibson’s “historical” epics, Oliver Stone, and Lost Cause-adjacent movies like Gettysburg and Gods and Generals.
And growing up in Dayton, we had Wright-Pat the SAC base on one side, and the Miamisburg Mound, where they made warheads on the other. We were pretty much screwed. Still did Suck n Cover as a kid though.
Matt McIrvin
The first time I remember being really cognizant of any of it was during, not a duck-and-cover drill (we didn’t do those), but a tornado drill–my second-grade teacher mentioned that *she* had done air-raid drills, but “the nuclear weapons got so powerful, there’s no point any more”
prostratedragon
@Harrison Wesley: Can make a polenta from the flour that does quite well as refried cakes.
Archon
@UncleEbeneezer: The scene in Chernobyl where the female nuclear scientist almost matter of factly describes to the Soviet leadership what would happen if the core meltdown reaches the bubbler pools filled with water is absolutely terrifying.
Cliosfanboy
@Archon:
Imagine trying to explain that to this administration. (shudder)
Martin
@frosty: Yeah, nukes don’t follow the trajectory they illustrate in movies. ICBMS go to very high altitude, up to a few thousand miles (ISS is about 250mi) so they can re-enter at very high speed – about 5mi/s. This has the effect of masking to some degree what their target is because they can make that determination later, shortens the intercept time because of the high rate of speed, and makes the intercept harder because of that. Basically the intercepter needs to be below the missile because it won’t be able to close the distance from the side. Hypersonic missile go mach 5 or faster, and these are entering at mach 25. Upper atmosphere/re-entry to target is about 5 seconds. We’re accustomed to visualizing shallow and relatively slow reentries because we not trying to kill the thing/person being reentered. An ICBM is the opposite – about 5s from first visual sighting to flash. That is a very hard task for an interceptor, and you need a LOT of them.
And of course a rogue state like NK would just not do that? Put a nuke on a fishing boat, sail into LA harbor and detonate. Much easier.
NotMax
@Cliosfanboy
“Fake news!”
//
Matt McIrvin
@kalakal: The September 11th, 2001 attacks kind of erased collective memory of how much terrorism there was in the US decades earlier.
Ruckus
@Cliosfanboy:
That should be explain anything to this maladministration.
@Archon:
When trying to explain anything to people that don’t really get any part of it on their own, you will often get to a point where you want to scream, because you have to explain every single step of whatever it is. And sometimes repeat entire segments. So it’s better to start slow and stay slow and speak not in advanced concepts. There is much in this current world that many people have zero idea how whatever it is works and often what it takes to actually make it work. Modern life can be more complicated than many think.
no body no name
@lowtechcyclist:
Ain’t nobody nuking shit. We went from kiloton weapons to megaton weapons quick and even a gigaton weapon or larger is possible. Nobody with that ability is launching anything as at that point we all die.
Some rogue actor like say NK who did do the entire “hold my beer and watch this” would get so quickly fly swatted off the face of the planet by the actual powers it would be comical. NK knows this. NKs biggest issue wouldn’t be the US it would be China.
Nukes are, for better and worse, a don’t invade us card. It only worked when we did it as nobody else had them. It’s not going to happen again. The first joke nation that tried it would be turned into dust. A fully strong nation that did it would trigger the end of life as we know it. MAD works as nobody wants to have multiple suns created in their back yard and be blown to shit.
no body no name
@Martin:
The rockets are harder tech than the actual nuke. Modern ICBMs are often MIRV (bunch of warheads on one rocket) to make things more complicated. Interceptors don’t work.
Burrowing Owl
@TaMara: My dad too. I was young enough when we lived on base in the ‘70s that I didn’t understand the role of those bases. Terrified enough of nuclear war as a teen in the ‘80 even off base. I didn’t watch the TV shows about it.
Steve Paradis
Here’s a link to Peter Watkins’ The War Game, the original film in the genre–and canceled by the BBC after they saw it.
m.ok.ru/video/4756897270523
Threads, 20 years later.
youtu.be/IUmUz8ol9Ow?si=9xLyMoFVodmZlXJ7
Testament, the US take.
youtu.be/-9cKi6f9nEE?si=vu1qKwdGMqPnwIXi
Might shake up what’s the big deal man.
TONYG
For roughly the past 60 years there’s been a sort of permanent nostalgia for the “Happy Days’ of the 1950’s and early 1960’s. (Even though I’m an old geezer, I have no memory of the fifties and only a childish memory of the early 60’s.). But those “Happy Days” must have been a time of real terror of nuclear war. The terror has subsided since then, even though the risk is at least as great as it ever was. A weird thing of human psychology. We’ve made it through almost 80 years without nuclear warfare, so it’s no longer in the front of people’s minds.
Steve Paradis
@Cliosfanboy:
After Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker I have little faith in Bigelow’s ability to tell a story honestly, and even fiction can lie–and she’ll lie to make a box office hit.
TONYG
@no body no name: Yes. And MIRV technology is not new at all. The U.S. first deployed MIRVs in 1970.
TONYG
@no body no name: Given the inherent stupidity of the human species, it’s pretty amazing that there HASN’T been a nuclear war since 1945.
Chip Daniels
I was a firm Reagan Republican, but Testament was maybe the first chink in the armor that caused me to reconsider my views.
By focusing in the intimate rather than the epic, it brought the horror home in a way that countless videos of mushroom clouds couldn’t.
Geminid
@kalakal: Besides the violent European terrorist groups of the 1970s that you describe, Turkiye saw a low level civil war between right and left from 1976 to 1980. Some 5,500 people were murdered; a Wikipedia article attributed ~3,000 of the murders to right-wing groups, ~1200 to leftwing groups, with the remainder of unknown origen. In 1980, the Turkish military ended the violence with after a coup.
Abdullah Ocalan formed the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or PKK during this period. It’s ideology was Marxist-Leninist with a Kurdish nationalist impetus (Ocalan has since developed his own political theories). According to the article Ocalan’s organization was in on the violence of the 1970s.
Then Ocalan declared war on the Turkish state in 1984. That war cost 40,000 more lives, most in the period 1984-2000.
Now, 41 years later, Ocalan has called for peace and reconciliation, and the Turkish government has responded with a peace process that could guarantee political and cultural rights for Turkiye’s 20 million Kurds. If this peace process succeds, it will be a huge development for the 102 year-old Turkish Republic. It will also mark the end of the most durable armed left-wing movement from the 1970s.
kalakal
In hindsight I realize that as a child I had a first hand index to the disintegration of Lebanon into civil war. We lived in the Middle East between 1965 & 75, mostly in Qatar and the BOAC VC10s used to refuel in Beirut.
At the beginning and end of English School holidays there were flights that were mostly school kids an the refuelling stop was about 1am. We’d all walk down the steps, across the tarmac and into a section of the airport terminal where we could get refreshments, wait an hour or so and get back on the plane. The airport was closed except for us. In the mid ’60s there’d be a couple of bored security guards, as the years went on the security beefed up each year. By the early 70s half the Lebanese army seemed to be guarding the place, AFVs all over the tarmac, troops on every roof, and a double line of troops forming a corridor we walked through to the terminal, all facing out. I guess the thought of having to explain a plane load of european kids being slaughtered in a terrorist attack was the reason
Matt McIrvin
@no body no name:
So far.
I’ve never been convinced that that works forever. Some people really do want all that. All it takes is for the same kind of person who would pilot an airplane into a skyscraper to be in control of the arsenal.
Martin
@no body no name: Yep to all that. And good point on the MIRV – that separation happens at apogee so trying to intercept to the launch trajectory will miss when the 4th(?) stage MIRV rockets kick in and change that trajectory, which often also increases reentry speed. So you don’t even know where the nuke is specifically targeting until at least halfway through the launch, cutting your response time down.
And the rocket is the harder part. Well, the miniaturization to enable the MIRV is pretty hard. But if you just want to lob a basic nuke, the nuke isn’t that hard to make, but getting the rocket past defenses is. That’s why I didn’t think the Iranian attack made any sense. They already have the rocket and have for a decade. They don’t have the nuke because it wasn’t in their interest to complete it. I worry it now is.
Matt McIrvin
@frosty:
So long, Mom,
I’m off to drop the Bomb
So don’t wait up for me…
But though I may roam
I’ll come back to my home
Although it may be
A pile of debris
Remember, Mommy,
I’m off to get a Commie,
So send me a salami,
And try to smile somehow:
I’ll look for you when the war is over……
An hour and a half from now
Martin
@Matt McIrvin: MAD works at the state scale – US vs USSR or NK because nations are fixed targets. It doesn’t work against non-state actors because they can and will relocate to places we are unwilling to bomb, and take their chances on not getting caught. Non-state actors can nuke and rely on not getting nuked in return.
If a nation develops a sufficiently reliable countermeasure, then MAD breaks down again because presumably you can stop the counterattack. That’s why the triad is important – countering ICBMs, bombers, and subs simultaneously is way harder than any of those individually, and way harder to hide from detection as well. We would have a sense that the doctrine was failing and find our own way to counter it (add a new leg to the triad, for instance – space, or drones or whatever).
Timill
@kalakal: Friend of mine was born in Beirut, to expat parents. Now when he needs a clearance he has to explain that Kim Philby was his babysitter…
Bill Arnold
@Archon:
5 Largest Nuclear Tests Caught On Camera (YouTube, 13:53)
First three:
Ivy Mike (10MT)
Castle Romeo (?)
Castle Yankee
Bill Arnold
A few more from that video:
Castle Bravo (15MT)
Tsar Bomba (58MT)
Just the Tsar Bomba detonation
If one watches the sun, at least one current sunspot is active with “Ellerman bombs” (similar energy to those tests), which are barely visible – solar flares are much bigger.
Satanley (aka weasel)
Think it was 9th grade that I did a comparative book report on Alas Babylon and On The Beach. That did it for me, even though things were about to start winding down by then (little did we know, circa ’85!)
Deborah
@japa21: Alas Babylon was the one that scared me the most: the book yes, but more so the TV production, which must have been live and not recorded.
Kayla Rudbek
@rikyrah: yes, it works pretty well in my opinion (better than some of the other bean-based pasta out there)
Jim Brown
MI6 spooks Graham Greene and Bill Fairclough would have been sad and sickened to witness the lawless violence going on in Haiti today and the destruction of Hôtel Oloffson on 6 July 2025, a hotel they both stayed at on several occasions. After all it was one of their favourite Caribbean beauty spots.
Haiti is indeed such a beautiful country and we have so many fond memories of visiting Haiti. Talking of Port au Prince, Graham Greene and the Hôtel Oloffson, Haiti may be a shocking place to live now but not everyone thinks Haiti is Hell and that sentiment would not just be limited to Graham Greene were he alive. Of course, Graham was one of the great writers of the 20th Century and an MI6 spook.
Bill Fairclough, one other ex-spook, also used to love Haiti until the TonTon Macoute hunted him down like a wild animal. Maybe he deserved it? Was he front running the real CIA Haitian equivalent to the Cuban Bay of Pigs?
If you relish and yearn for Haitian spy thrillers as curiously and bizarrely compelling as Graham Greene’s Comedians, crave for the cruel stability of the Duvaliers and have frequented Hôtel Oloffson you’re never going to put down Bill Fairclough’s fact based spy thriller Beyond Enkription in The Burlington Files series. His Haitian experiences may have been gruesome but they make for intriguing reading compared with today’s grim news.
Beyond Enkription is an intriguing unadulterated factual thriller and a super read as long as you don’t expect John le Carré’s delicate diction, sophisticated syntax and placid plots. Nevertheless, it has been heralded by one US critic as “being up there with My Silent War by Kim Philby and No Other Choice by George Blake”. Little wonder Beyond Enkription is mandatory reading on some countries’ intelligence induction programs.
Beyond Enkription is so real you may have nightmares of being back in Port au Prince anguishing over being a spy on the run. The trouble is, if you were a white spook being chased by the TonTon Macoute in the seventies you were usually cornered and … well best leave it to your imagination or simply read Beyond Enkription.
Interestingly Fairclough was one of Pemberton’s People in MI6 (see a brief intriguing News Article dated 3 May 2024 in TheBurlingtonFiles website). If you have any questions about Ungentlemanly Warfare after reading that do remember the best quote from The Burlington Files to date is “Don’t ask me, I’m British”.