UKC

Ukraine, Syria, South China Sea, Isis, Libya, climate change, economic crisis, Greece.

Well? Did it feel more worrying in The 1960s?

In reply to MG:

No direct experience of the sixties, but it felt more worrying in the 80's than now to be honest.
As to whether it was actually more or less dangerous than my perception is hard to know - I'm 30 years older now!

I grew up with...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Wind_Blows_(1986_film)

Are they still making public service films about ducking and covering, or protecting and surviving? - in the event that Putin hits the big red button? I don't think so.

youtube.com/watch?v=IKqXu-5jw60&
youtube.com/watch?v=m6U9T3R3EQg&

In reply to interdit:

Yep. I was in my late teens in the early 80s and armageddon always seemed just around the corner. As well as music and getting laid, how to spend the rest of your life when the three minute warning went was a common topic of conversation.

And just when things seemed to have calmed down and/or we grew out of worrying about nuclear annihilation in the mid-80s, AIDS came along and ruined our lives again!

That said, the world is a spectacularly scary place at the moment, especially when the experience of age tells you that the better courses of actions our political decision makers could take rarely make it past the theory stage.

In reply to MG:
When I was a kid in the 70s/80s, what you'd do in the 4 minutes you'd have after the warning was a regular topic of conversation, up there with winning "The Pools". I don't hear that so much these days (never). The world is a bit mad but we don't seem to be on the eve of destruction anymore. Our doom appears to be years off yet.

In reply to MG:

I remember my Dad saying that one night around the Cuban missile crisis they weren't sure as to whether we would be in a Nuclear war the next day. He did say it was one of the scariest nights of his life. He ended up in the RAF in '69 and we hardly saw him for long periods some years as they were constantly on exercise in case of war, was quite odd really as we knew that the bases we were on were on a first strike hit list apparently.

In reply to MG:
I was still only a teenager in the mid/late 70's but, even then, we'd often wake up to hear all the bombers were up during the night and on full alert because of some scare with the USSR. Everyone remembered the Cuban missile crisis, Gary Powers being shot down in a U2 spyplane, hundreds of thousands of NATO Troops stationed in Europe facing off against the Soviet block on the other side of the iron curtain. Constant incursions, on both sides. Proxy wars. Nuclear testing, new missile systems, nuclear subs etc.

Yes, we really did expect the world to end any time.

In reply to Removed User:

I hope you still have a designated fallout room and plans for an inner refuge? lol.
I'd like to see what your missus says when she sees you taking all the doors off the hinges. ;0


It did. No more free-range, unprotected knobbing like our '70s predecessors , but at least jonnies became more available.


It is. As it always was. It ebbs and flows. Hopefully it will reach a calmer phase soon.

In reply to MG:
Gave all my f*cks in the eighties and nineties, these days I'm like Nero when it comes to getting excited over geo-political funny buisness, whatever the equivalent of having wild animals maul you through the bars of the cage. Yeah proper weird.

The thing is so much of its fixated on by our side to further their own reach and goals. Funny isn't it, one enemy is toppled and immediately we discover a new one or an old one that never went away. Convenient. As I said all warn out. Hoary old mid forties.

D

In reply to MG:

+1 for the 80s being far, far more worrying than now
(at least from the threat of international war point of view - the environment is a different issue)

In reply to MG:

My parents wondered about the wisdom of bringing kids into a world that might end at any minute. My dad, because of his job, would have qualified for a place in the local 'secret nuclear bunker', but turned it down on the grounds that he didn't want to abandon the family if the bomb did come.

Definitely more scary then, at least in the short term. The longer term future with climate change does give cause for concern though, and as an archaeologist looking at 2000 year old civilisations, I do sometimes wonder what the archaeology of the future will hold.

In reply to MG:

It did in the early part of the 60s, especially during the Cuban Missile crisis. You also have to remember that ww2 had only finished a relatively short time before and was still fresh in people's minds.

In reply to MG:


Yes it did.

BUT the threat of nuclear war, accidental or otherwise, is still with us.

The media just want to bombard us with scary stories of how we are skint as a person, in horrendous debt as a country, if you drive a car your kids will die of cancer, the Muslim world wants to eat our babies (it used to be Catholics v Protestants but that's on hold now until all the Muslims are dead or we run out of babies), when Isis are quiet, ooh the Russians are in Ukraine, then when it's lunch time there, ooh the Isis are invading Italy.
Dump Newspapers from your life, drop the internet subscription to Ruperts empire and stop being addicted to 24hr news (which lets face it, is usually about 3 scary stories repeated constantly on a loop). Life does get much better.

I spent the 80's in the army, with an apparent life expectancy of 30 seconds if if the shit was to hit the fan........I learned very early to keep my 'Give a shit meter' resting on zero

In reply to MG:

Having said all that, I do worry abut our lack of capability if the shit does hit the fan. History suggests something will happen and, if it does, I doubt we'll have the time to sort ourselves out in the way we did pre WW2.

In reply to Skyfall:

If Russia said sod this, here we go.....our only hope is the Yanks....but they've got to get the majority of their force across the pond. Can't see the Russians tapping their finger nails whilst America gets their self all over here and regrouped.
Like I say, give a shit meter and all that...if, when it ever happened, not much you can do about it....but if anyone comes near my shack up here in the hills, watch out for the mine field and sharp pokey sticks

In reply to MG:
My recollection is that people certainly didn't spend their time worrying themselves silly. Far too many other things to worry about in life. I can remember stuff like seeing Churchill's funeral on TV and hearing that Kennedy had been shot without really knowing what it was all about - cared more about the goings on in the space race and seeing people land on the moon than any cold war - first we hard about Cuba was when it was mentioned by school teachers years afterwards. In the 70s terrorism had a bigger impact - I can remember school buses being checked for bombs and extra care taken at the school armoury over rifles/LMGs etc and a friend at university had members of his unit and their families killed and injured in the M62 bombing but there was too much going on in life to worry too much. Too many strikes and huge inflation were the worry for most adults I think, and the state of the railways if you had to use them. The only bit I remember about the cold war was being shown at school the best way to hit a warsaw pact tank with a WWII bazooka, very useful indeed.

We talked a lot about the ethics of whether you could use the deterrent I seem to remember but in an abstract way. The most visible bit was seeing Vulcans flying over our house coming up out of Weardale which too be frank was quite exciting.

The 80s huge worry was getting a job and staying in it, not the cold war! So many places went out of business you had to keep looking for new work and move around.

The worry can be hugely overstated and life simply wasn't dominated by the cold war unless you were in the military.

In reply to MG:
The late 1950s and early 1960s were very scary particularly the build up to the Cuban crisis.

I really thought we were on the verge of WW3. We still had a large and very overt air force with V Bombers and noisy jet fighters like the Javeline and Hunter constantly flying over the UK. Sonic booms were quite common, so we seemed to be much more on an apparant pre war alert footing than we are now.

During the 1960s the Government warnings about what to do in a Nuclear War were very sobering.

The CND were were very vocal and public at the time with dire warnings being put out by them.

IIRC we were told we would get an 8 min warning of a nuclear strike. We used to discuss what we would do with those 8 mins! It didn't even give you time to get drunk or shag the nearest girl......

A lot of people were seriously considering building underground bunkers and I knew people who kept a stash of tinned food and water in the cuboard under their stairs.

There were a lot of people around with relatively fresh memories of the last War. Someone who had been in their 20s and 40s in WW2 would only have been in their 40s or 50s in the 1960s, so their anxiety was very real to my younger generation in their late teens and early 20s.

Having been through all this before I have learnt that East West relations involve a lot of posturing, and I don't believe that the Russians want war any more than we do. After Cuba it never seemed so bad or imminent again.

I think Islamic extremism coupled with the world being able to continue feeding everyone due to climate change, is a much more serious long term threat, and much more difficult to combat, because there is no effective deterrent. The next war may not be over oil, but food.

All

It seems like the cold war was more worrying then. I remember the 1980s(ish) and while I recall general concern, I don't remember feeling the end of the world was was imminent. Much the same now except that rather than one (vaguely rational) threat, there are a multitude of apparently irrational ones.

In reply to interdit:

Yeah, as a kid in the 80s/early 90s the idea of being nuked did put up a fair bit of fear. I should never have watched Terminator 2 - the nuclear blast scenes in that gave me nightmares for almost as long as when I watched bits of Poltergeist inadvertently[1] at a young age.

[1] Couldn't sleep so ended up coming downstairs to sit with my parents who were watching it and didn't think to turn it off. It didn't exactly *help*

Neil

In reply to MG:

During the 70s and 80s I can remember being pretty horrified by all the stuff that was going on in the Middle East, particularly the Lebanon, like Sabbra and Shatila for instance.

Of course that was the other big thing in the 70s - the Oil Crisis brought about by the 1973 war and the 3 day week, power cuts - homework by candlelight, 50mph limit on motorways to save fuel. Then the Turks invaded Cyprus.

I think the Cold war wasn't even a distraction from real life for most by then - though I can remember the undertones and chilling implications of the 1970s Dr Who story Genesis of the Daleks about the consequences of a long war involving weapons of total destruction which must have been influenced by it.

In reply to Removed User:


My father has a similar story. He was away form home on business and he phoned my mother in the evening, not knowing if he'd ever see her again.

I don't know if it's a question of news management or if nuclear war really was imminent, but even in the 80s, I haven't experienced anything quite so frightening.

In reply to MG:

I wasn't very old in the 60s so don't remember much about Cuba (but I remember the Beatles first appearance on TV though...)

The early 70s was a bit Dunquerque-ish with sugar shortages, 3 day weeks and all the rest, though it didn't feel much like Armageddon - it might just have been me, but the Cold War seemed to have settled down into something of an elaborate charade, with a lot of posturing going on.

However when my eldest son was born in 1979 things had definitely taken a turn for the worse - Russia invading Afghanistan was a big deal, Thatcher and Reagan had been elected and were pretty gung-ho and for the first time in ages the Cold War seemed to be hotting up again, seriously so.

In reply to MG:

Now look!

http://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/t.php?t=617628

In reply to MG:

When the threat of armageddon turns into an illustrated best seller, you know it's on a lot of people's minds. Get hold of a copy of Raymond Briggs' "When the wind blows" and you'll see what I mean. Brilliant and terrifying at the same time.

In reply to MG:
60s is a bit before my time, but in the 70s and 80s nuclear war felt only a step away. There was even open discussion in the military about 'limited' nuclear war in central Europe. It was definitely scary, more so than now, IMHO.

A mate of mine was serving on a destroyer in the South Atlantic at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. He said the alarm went off and the captain announced that they were on the brink of war and were altering course for Cuba. He said it was terrifying.

In reply to MG:

It's not directly related to the cold war, but this, especially toward the end, is very relevant. Take 15 minutes out your day at some point to watch it.

http://www.fallen.io/ww2/

In reply to interdit:

I was an extra in Threads. I went from being a demonstrator, to being locked in a tennis court for being an agitator, to then being a victim with burns in the infirmary. Quite depressing really, especially filming the chaotic hospital scenes imagining what it might be like for real. My sister screamed when I arrived back home in bandages with severe burns to my face. Top marks to the make-up crew!

In reply to MG:


I remember chatting to my gran in 2008 about the economic crash (which I had found pretty worrying). She was mid 90s at the time and I asked if she thought it was serious. She turned to me with a calm expression. "Well", she replied, "When you get to my age, you really will have seen it all - wars, disease, economic crashes. But the human spirit always finds a way through."

She had lived through two world wars and countless smaller wars, the Cold War and a nuclear threat, SARS, MERS, AIDS, super-bugs, influenza, pneumonia, tuberculosis, Diphtheria, boom and busts in the economy - recessions and depression, asset bubbles, the Oil crisis, the threat of the next ice age (yes this was a 'thing' in the 1970s), global warming and sea level rise, and latterly religious menace.

It is never The End. The end of 'something' perhaps.

I recommend you watch 'V for Vendetta'.

In reply to MG:

Yeah, I don't know if I'm old yet at 50 but as well as the nuclear thing there was the IRA bombing campains. I remember my dad, who was a cabbie talking about roads being closed and hearing bombs going off in the west end. I heard the bomb going off in Wimbledon wgen they bombed Havers house. What's going on is terrible but it is elsewhere, not forgetting the 2005 bombings of course.

In reply to MG:
One thing I can remember in the late 80s was a talk from site security about incidents where Eastern Bloc aircraft had deviated from normal apparently to fly low over our site to take pictures of what may or may not have been visible on lorries coming and going and of course another installation not so far away where the completed items could be seen in the open.

And we had to tell them of any travel to Eastern Europe and be debriefed on return. We used to joke about one of our colleagues being married to someone from E. Germany ...

In reply to MG:
I remember in 1965 driving down through Europe in a Frog Eyed Sprite with a mate to the then Yugoslavia which was Communist under Tito. It was quite a palava getting visas. My dad worked for the Ministry of Defence at the time and was really worried about my mate and I entering a Communist country. He gave us a lecture about the dangers of getting ourselves into a compromising situation with Yugoslav girls. Truth be known for two 21 year old guys that was our main objective!

We did have a few adventures including the car breaking down due to one of the carburetta float chamber needles getting jammed. We needed a bit of wire to fix it and found a T34 Army tank parked outside a bar. The crew had gone into the bar for a drink and we had noticed a coil of wire on it so climbed up onto it and cut off a bit with which we managed to temporarily fix the carburetta.

There wasn't much anti British feeling amongst the locals so long as they realised we were British and not German. They hated the Germans, and feelings from WW2 ran very high.

The camp sites were like concentration camps. We had to surrender our passports and were locked in every night.

We did manage to get a pass one night to go into a local village where they were holding an open air dance. The Yugoslav girls were very friendly and we got on fine despite the language barrier.

In reply to MG:

Apparently my mum was trained to give the "1 in 5" talks for the WRVS in the 60s/70s. Signed the official secrets act and everything, but I never really found out exactly what that entailed - suspect it was the protect and survive/ paint your windows white stuff.

http://www.royalvoluntaryservice.org.uk/Uploads/Documents/About%20us/one_in...

In reply to Trangia:

Nice story! I can't see anything similar happening in any of Ukraine, Iraq, Syria these days though, which illustrates my concern. For all the cold war posturing, no one really wanted a war, and foreigners were mostly treated acceptably in both east and west. The situation was manageable. I'm not sure the current state of the world is, really.

In reply to MG:

I lived in Carlisle, my mum told me she awaited call from my father (who worked at Windscale) to have me and my sister ready with bags packed to jump in car to escape this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire In 1968 John Welsh in my school class died of leukemia on last day of term before summer holidays.

Being sent home from infant school during the Cuban missile crisis.

Getting back from climbing in spain to discover this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83

Just found out about this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident , "and the nuclear weapons command suitcase was brought to Russian president Boris Yeltsin".

In reply to MG:
Don´t know about the 60s, but when I was in the German army at the arse end of the cold war (late ´80s) we went on full blown alerts several times, loading up our tactical nuclear artillery shells and racing to the marked artillery positions near the Czech or GDR borders. Not all of these alerts were drills, several times the families of the American servicemen were already boarding evacuation planes at Nuremberg airport. In one case we later learned that the alarm was triggered by a line of East German combine harvesters working a field close to the border at night, but for some bizarre reason with their lights dimmed.

The Russians were just as nervous. Only a few years earlier, Operation Able Archer almost got us all killed, when some clever planning put a joint staff exercise involving the NATO heads of state right after the annual ReForGer exercise. The Russians were so convinced that a NATO surprise attack was imminent that they had bombers carrying nukes waiting at the end of the runway, replacing them regularly when they ran out of fuel as they had their engines already running!

In case the cold war had turned hot, Soviet plans published a couple of years ago involved taking out 168 targets in West Germany using tactical nukes in the first 24 h alone. Not much left worth fighting over, especially if one adds our own nukes.

Compared to this I am left relatively underwhelmed by the current situation.

CB

edit see link to Able Archer in rka´s post above, makes for scary reading!

In reply to cb294:

Our paths may have crossed, although not on Archer. I was a young sprog then, in training but they flung us in Otterburn for our first taste of a real war scenario.

There was quite a few big NATO exercises back then, always culminating in us dropping the bomb and then all heading home for tea and tiffin.

The 'Purple' exercises were better. A bit more 'real' feel about them. Purple Warrior in Scotland and then Purple Venture in Cyprus.
Mainly Airborne and Booty but all I remember about Cyprus, was doing a few sport jumps, a U2 spy plane, having a cafuffle with an officer who ended up in the middle of the Mark thatcher Africa scandal thingy.....and disappearing for a month and renting an apartment in Ayia Napa.
Ah, happy days......and then it all changed to desert...which was nice :-/

In reply to MG:

My parents generation were traumatised by the war. Having real experience of the horrors of total war haunted them. They didn't talk about it much but even at a young age I could tell the treat of nuclear war in the sixties was all too real to them.

God only knows the damage being wrought on the children of the Middle East as one conflict seemlessly follows another.

Despite the omnipresent threat of a return to global conflict the 60s and 70s where a good time to be brought up in this country. There were less devisions in society and more to bind us together.

The grass was greener and the light was brighter.

In reply to cb294:

Just talking to my wife about this - she grew up not so far from the Czech border and went walking in the Fichtelgebirge where she saw the listening posts etc. Her experience was obviously different as she talked of going to anti missile protests with friends and having more worry than we were aware of (early 80s I think), her father saying to them he wasn't sure it was a safe world for kids any more.

In reply to Trangia:

Yugoslavia is a very odd case. I have a pdf of the full technical manual for a Clansman radio from Plessey but in Yugoslav, dating from the 1970s when they were "leading edge" technology. they were being produced there under licence from Plessey before the British army were fully equipped, so much for "Restricted" documents.

In reply to wercat:

I grew up not that far from there, 80 km or so to the Czech border, and know these facilities in the Fichtelgebirge and Bayerischer Wald quite well. There was also plenty of airborne espionage. Most evenings you would have a long column (10 or so) Hercules aircraft with weird external antenna setups fly slowly east and then return an hour or so later.

As a schoolboy I was also attending the demonstrations against the Pershing II deployment in the early 80s (needless increase of pressure, why establish clear first strike capability while pushing for missile defence? No wonder the Russians felt threatened!), but then decided to do military service in 87/88 rather than object and do civil service as I would always fight to defend myself.
CB

In reply to wercat:

Clansman, now there's a blast from the past!! I remember having to lug the 320, with spare batteries on top of all your regular kit......so much for lightweight!
320, 321, 349, 353 with a DMU

In reply to MG:

I grew up in the sixties and seventies and the stories of my parents and grandparents, along with the progress in education, safety law, employment protection and more did more to make it an age of hope than any amount of inflation, cold war pessimism and industrial action could dispell.

Right now, I'd have the seventies back any day rather than this downward spiral of social exclusion, state intrusion, terrorism and lies.

In reply to MG:

It seems that many of the worrying incidents listed above were not public knowledge until (long) after the event. I wonder how many will come to light in later years, concering incidents from now and the last two decades: cases probabably involving North Korea, China, Iran, India & Pakistan (an area of conflict that often gets looked over when considering potential nuclear war!*). A conflict could have spilled out from here, even very recently (from wikipedia). Both countires have nuclear weapons.

*2001–2002 India–Pakistan standoff: The terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament on 13 December 2001, which India blamed on the Pakistan-based terrorist organisations, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, prompted the 2001–2002 India–Pakistan standoff and brought both sides close to war.[33]
2008 India Pakistan standoff: a stand-off between the two nations following the 2008 Mumbai attacks which was defused by diplomatic efforts. Following ten coordinated shooting and bombing attacks across Mumbai, India's largest city, tensions heightened between the two countries since India claimed interrogation results alleging[34][35] Pakistan's ISI supporting the attackers while Pakistan denied it.[36][37][38] Pakistan placed its air force on alert and moved troops to the Indian border, voicing concerns about proactive movements of Indian Army[39] and the Indian government's possible plans to launch attacks on Pakistani soil.[40] The tension defused in short time and Pakistan moved its troops away from border.

In reply to aultguish:

What was the scandal? Scuttled his co driver, rather than lost in the desert?

D

In reply to Removed User:

My dad said the same. he said he was terrified- the world was on the brink of nuclear war.

Early 1980s in particular was a frightening time. Lots of talk of "first strike" and hints that MAD was breaking down. Lots of cultural echoes in the music and books of the time.
I did not plan long term.

In reply to Dauphin:

A little matter of a coup...

In reply to MG:
Me: born 1951 so I missed WW2. My dad didn't, he was on standby to go to the Far East in preparation for a invasion of Japan at the point when they dropped the Bomb. His take on it was that it probably saved 3/4 of a million lives, both Allied and Japanese.
Pre-school, I remember school playground chants of "we won the war" and a lot of bullish war play. So the normalisation of widespread sudden death, even a few years removed, cast a long shadow. So apart from the Cuban missile crisis, the general feeling of threat wasn't that different despite the different technology and if you took the trouble to read about the Russian perspective, you could accommodate in your mind the idea that no one would actually want to start a nuclear war.
A bigger worry is some of the flakes mentioned by the OP actually getting hold of the technology.

In reply to MG:

Funnily enough heard about "The War Game" on the radio the other night so watched it. Very grim indeed. Thankfully I was too young (born 78) to be fully aware of the imminent end of the world, it was one of those things that adults talked about while we got on with tree climbing, star wars and lego!

In reply to aultguish:

Ah that one. Thought you were referring to the other one where his mum had all assets hunting him down, allegedly lost in the Sahara.

D

In reply to MG:

I know of a few people that were pulled out of the classrooms, the whole school gathered in the playground and told a nuclear war was imminent at the time of the Cuban missile crisis.
I served in the British Army from 80-86 and Russia was very definitely public enemy number one. Having said that I spent most of my four years in Osnabruck getting pissed on cheap and very good quality German beer and chasing the Frauleins!!

In reply to MG:

Both sides were rational, or as rational as they could be when they thought they had 3 minutes to decide if it was a false alarm or the real thing.

But both sides were operating with poor assumptions*, incorrect information and made wrong conclusions so a few times were allmost one trigger happy squaddy away from escalation into armageddon.

*fear of invasion far exceeded intention of the other side to invade?

In reply to MG:
On further reflection, my recollection of the 1960s is that since at least half the male teaching population had PTSD (WW2, Korea, Malaya, etc) and were completely bonkers, I was in more danger from their abusive behaviour than Russian nuclear weapons. Those poor c0ck5uckers who suffered private education would probably have welcomed a tactical nuke to put an end to their suffering and of course prosecutions continue, in this county, as elsewhere.

[I'm sorry for any offence but clearly that should have read "rich c0ck5uckers".]

In reply to MG:
I remember having to spend 3 weeks one summer in a full noddy suit (NBC - Nuclear, Biological, Chemical).
The results of the test, were as a soldier, you were very inefficient. You lacked the energy to carry full kit, needed too much water, you couldn't fight properly, we were never issued enough kit for decontamination that was required just for the daily functions of eating, changing canisters, changing suits, going to the loo etc (remember fullers earth?). I lost a lot of weight in those 3 weeks and the general consensus was that if it were real, you'd be just better off putting a bullet in your head as all we were doing, was delaying the inevitable radiation sickness.

In reply to aultguish:

Think you could apply the same razor to civilian contingency, it was there to keep the gullible from mutiny, in reality nothing would happen. All state functions would be either dead or catastrophically overwhelmed. I was in Dehli in 2001 when the nuclear sabre rattling between them and Pakistan was happening brought plenty of flashbacks from my childhood and youth. Senseless stupidity and worldwide waste of money.

D

In reply to Shani:

I recommend you don't watch 'V for Vendetta' as it's a travesty of a bastardisation of its source.

I recommend reading 'V for Vendetta' instead.

In reply to MG:

When I was very young, I remember watching Nationwide or something similar in the 70s and a CND representative explaining that the current situation was comparable to two generals in a cellar, waist high in petrol. It didn't really matter who had the most matches.

In reply to interdit:


I was born in '74 so was only 10 when Threads was broadcast. (Obviously,) I didn't see it at the time but I do have vague memories of it. Similar for When the Wind Blows - I would have been 12 so have slightly better recollections of things in it like cleaning plates using sand rather than water and the couple becoming ill without understanding why.

Reading through the reviews for Threads ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/reviews ) makes me want to both watch it and run in terror from it.

In reply to zebidee:



Is that the graphic novel? If so, I would agree with your recommendation, but I do like the film as well.

In reply to Shani:


Yup - Alan Moore has a tendency for imagining some pretty sinister dystopias.

The film's okay, say 5 or 6 out of 10; whereas the book is a definite 9 or 10 out of 10.

In reply to MG:

An interesting question. I think the global perspectives are totally different. The Cold War was certainly a major preoccupation and when I was doing National Service in Germany in the early 50s all our big exercises were concerned with delaying a Russian advance. But in retrospect I think the essential relationship was established by the Berlin Airlift when the West showed it was not yielding. The nuclear threat was something different. Personally I believed that it was in neither side's interest to strike first and that was confirmed by Cuba. In any case, it is rather like climbing under a sérac. It either has your name on it or it hasn't. And I certainly didn't want to be a survivor in a post-nuclear age.
Many of the concerns expressed in replies in this thread rather naturally centre on our own country and its past economic woes and leadership etc. But such a parochial perspective today illustrate a failure to grasp the wider situation that is developing. My own view is that Russia is a menace, but not a real threat except to destabilizing its ex-USSR neighbours and hence raising tensions in Europe, in particular. Brexits and Grexits likewise. The real threats of today lie not in our own backyard but above all in the fall-out from the Middle East situation which risks becoming our front garden, long before climate change has major impact! It is not a subject I care to develop here, but for me it represents the real threat to the very fabric of our society and values. That is the really scary situation as far as I am concerned.

In reply to jcw:



Yes.

In reply to MG:

I was eleven in 1968 and can remember hearing the news that Russia had invaded Czechoslovakia to end the "Prague Spring"; I really thought that WW3 was going to breakout that day.

In reply to Jim Fraser:

Not buying it. Same old cold warrior paranoia. What can they really do and who started it again this time? No friend of authoritarian autocratic regimes here, but we need to take a long hard look in the mirror here also.

D

In reply to Dauphin:



That's a bit 20th Century.

You have to get into the Russian mindset. Think Northern Ireland but much much worse and going back much further. The sacking of Moscow was only yesterday and centuries of Tatar and Turkish invasion, cruelty and slavery are burned deep into the collective Russian soul. Everybody has been out to get them since the first Viking rowed down the Dnieper.

In reply to Jim Fraser:

Sure I get that. This stuff is old. As is 'their' empire. Something we seem to ignore in the west, or at least in media explanations / analysis.

D

In reply to Jim Fraser:

The US and Western Europe has never appreciated the deep psychic horror of WW2 (and WW1, for that matter) for the Eastern block countries. It's no wonder at all that they are deeply paranoid and it's only partly excused by their deeply paranoid leader during the start of the cold war.

When I was a young lad, the big news for me was the arab-israeli conflict of 1969. However, I do know that my parents were quite scared by the Cuban Missile crisis, although they never discussed it with us.

I don't think it was ever really about one side starting a war - it was always about being worried that the other side would start a war and so having to respond quickly to retaliate. Which, of course, then might be retaliation to a mistake - a mistake like the US playing chicken with the USSR defense system. And then the USSR playing chicken with the US in retaliation. "Ooh you really scared us! We'll scare you even more". Children in the school playground.

In reply to MG:

Of course. 50s, 60s, 70s there were rockets aimed at me with nuclear weapons on them. But the way Iran is going, we may be back to this in Europe.

In reply to MikeTS:


That's still true today.

In reply to abseil:

Don´t think so. AFAIK one of the few bits of peace dividend we currently enjoy is that the target coordinates have been removed from at least most of the US and Russian missile stock. Takes only a few minutes to upload them again, but these minutes are a valuable buffer against accidental nuclear war or trigger happy local commanders.

CB

In reply to cb294:


I am extremely happy to hear that - honestly thanks for posting that, I didn't know. You made my day, I'm not kidding.

In reply to Jim Fraser:


Too true.

But I did get a fascinating lesson on how to do a jungle ambush after the teacher lost it with us and our adolescent angst.

'You f...ing b*stards want to know what I was doing when I was 17?'

There followed 45 minutes of silently received graphic horror. (get a spade, sharpen it....) ). He never had any trouble with us after that.

In reply to aultguish:

lightweight compared with what went before perhaps?