CKND — Introduction to “Threads” (Docudrama about Nuclear War, 1985) Wednesday, Apr 14 2010
This introduction makes such a big deal about how horrific the movie is, but much of what would have been the worst parts aren’t even shown. I thought the movie was more of a censored sketch than anything truly vivid. (Though I may be judging the movie a bit unfairly due to its dated production techniques.) People who were alive during the Cold War, do you remember this movie?
People who were adults during the 50s-80s, were you at all ready if the worst occurred? I think that the response of society during the Cold War to the risk of nuclear war is pretty indicative of what we can expect from society in preparation for even worse threats that the 21st century has in store, i.e., not much.
Apparently a similar American film was important in Reagan’s embrace of nuclear arms reduction:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After
Here’s the whole movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGEq9aipTAo
I was a teenager in the early 80s and remember an underlying fear of nuclear war in everything I did. I also remember that it was unimaginable as late as 1988 that the threat would go away.
I don’t remember a lot of people being very ready for it. The attitude was pretty fatalistic. I grew up five miles from a primary target (Chicago) and we all just figured that was a good thing – it would be over faster.
Big difference between then and now, though, was that people were not as empowered. We didn’t have the access to information we do today. I have hope for our ability to face existential threats in the future. Frankly, my attitude is that it is some kind of miracle that we didn’t blow ourselves up during the Cold War – if we could survive that, we have the ability to survive what’s on the horizon.
One additional point I would make, though, is that with nuclear war in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, it was a threat that everyone was aware of. A war could only start if somebody DECIDED to start it. With some of the threats we’re facing now (AI, nanotech, biowarfare) it is entirely possible we won’t see it coming or won’t have TIME to react to it.
We had 30 years of living with the bomb that sort of intruded on everyone’s consciousness all the time. It was a known – if horrible – threat. We’re not going to have 30 years to screw around with the existential threats we’re facing in this century. Which is why we need to address them BEFORE they come along.
Even though the bomb was known, no one really did much to prepare. Most adults today who were alive during the Cold War seem to have only a very cursory knowledge of how fallout works. For instance, they might be afraid of inhaling fallout dust, oblivious to the fact that dust particles small enough to float in the air would not pose a radiation hazard.
When I was growing up in the 80s and hearing about nuclear war, everyone was extremely fatalistic, and made it seem like 100% of the area of effect would be vaporized. Just the other day, in the video I posted, I saw Hillary Clinton mock the “duck and cover” drills, but such procedures would have actually been useful to avoid broken glass and debris. Much of the “fatalism” I’ve seen among the Cold War generation appears to derive more from laziness than any real knowledge about nuclear weapons and their effects. The vast majority of nuclear war deaths would be from secondary effects that could be vastly ameliorated with preparation.
Now, when I hear people say, “if there were a nuclear war, I only hope I would be among the dead”, I only hear, “I’m too lazy to pick up a book and learn about the probable effects of nuclear bombs and the ways to avoid death in the aftermath”.
To your last point, Michael, yes, I agree – which goes to my point that it is even easier now to learn these things. Back then you had to go to the library and hunt this information down. Now I google it and learn in 5 minutes what it would take two days to figure out in 1985. A lot of the knowledge we take for granted now was just not out there in the 70s and 80s. I studied a lot about nuclear war as a teen, and I never came across the fallout-particle information until very recently.
That’s no excuse for being ignorant, but it’s a lot easier to learn, today, about how nanotechnology works than it was back then to learn how fallout behaved.
BTW, the MIRV architecture of ballistic missiles actually pretty much DID ensure the complete vaporization of an entire city and its surroundings. Now, impact could have just as easily have been Rockford as O’Hare or Chicago. These things were accurate over continental scales, but not accurate enough to land a MIRV at State and Michigan.
A good subject, though, and timely. It points to just how much the world has changed in 20 years.
“I only hear, “I’m too lazy to pick up a book and learn about the probable effects of nuclear bombs and the ways to avoid death in the aftermath”.”
If you are so focused on your own survival, you are probably unable to function normally in society. It also distracts from political issues. As a concrete example: I remember attending peace demonstrations as a little kid in the 1980s. What would you have done at such an event? Bug everyone with your books on how to survive a nuclear war? Think about that. It’s simply not a practical and sensible way to deal with reality.
Focused enough to read a book?
I bug everyone daily about doom and gloom on this blog and I have 3,200 RSS readers and have had it featured on TV. Seems pretty sensible to me.
“Bug everyone with your books on how to survive a nuclear war?”
Really, I mean, honestly, no one is surviving a nuclear war.
FWIW, I was born in ’46, so my notions of what adults really thought of nuclear war in the 1950′s are pretty slim. There were some films and books that caught attention then, to be sure — but for every ON THE BEACH there were 10 cheesy SF flicks (THEM!) which basically guaranteed that Nuclear Perils weren’t taken too seriously.
By the mid-60′s the Great Fear was basically gone. (True, I was leafing through Glasstone and Herman Kahn’s works, but I was an engineering student in ROTC — not a normal person at all.) Part of it was that by then people generally understood the Nuclear Balance of Terror even if they couldn’t describe it very well, part of it was having lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, part of it was flipping on the TV every evening and watching coverage of a _real_ shooting war. So there were still fun tales of future horror to be told (THE DAY AFTER) in the 1970′s and 1980′s but the great days of panic and fright were long gone by then.
Fist off, nuclear war IS survivable. That is different from saying that civilization as we know it would survive. It would be medieval, but survivable.
Second, Mike: in the 80s we were scared, but we were young and not overly educated. Still, some of the closest calls happened during the 80s. The Korean airliner shoot-down, for one. Also, the chaos when Reagan was shot is a frightening example of how one simple event can spiral – and worth studying. It is a very little-understood event in US history. Basically, the Soviets thought it was a coup, misread the US military alert, and raised their own, causing the US to raise its alter, etc – we came pretty close to open war in those hours and very few realize it.
In any event, I think the older you were the more informed you were – my parents didn’t seem overly concerned in the 80s, but my circle of friends and I were, at times, terrified.
Arnie -
Thanks for your comment — always nice to get understanding of how things look to folks with a different perspective. Amplifying how things seemed to someone who has now become an old fart …
The Reagan assassination attempt was ANNOYING in many respects, but not anywhere as traumatic as the Kennedy assassination. My generation had in act survived a killing of a President; we understood such events were survivable. We had a reasonably trusted Vice President in the form of George H. W. Bush, for one thing. For another, we had a quickly arrested suspect who proved to be a nut rather than a possible KGB agent — we didn’t feel that some Evial World Conspiracy was aimed against us. No doubt there were military concerns which might have escalated unpleasantly, but from the standpoint of most US citizens, things resolved themselves within a few days, and there never was any time at which nuclear war seemed conceivable. I suspect most military commanders took that civilian response into consideration when evaluating their own possible reactionsd and responsibilities.
That said, there was one interval when genuine peril imposed itself on most Americans — the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy gave an address on television, people learned that a nuclear showdown (aka World War III) might be in the cards, they gulped — and then they went on with their lives. My sister was baking brownies that night when Kennedy spoke; when Kennedy was done, she took them out of the oven and we talked for a few minutes about the risk in hushed voices. Then I ate a couple of the hot brownies and walked out of the house and down the streets of the small Ohio town in which we lived to the local high school — there was basketball practice that night and I was an assistant manager, with things to do. And hours later, I walked home and somehow the world continued to exist. A couple hundred million other Americans did pretty much the same and we all lived through it. If you weren’t there, you’ll probably never understand the people who lived in that era.