I think it's in Generation X that one character describes "waiting for the flash". The idea that the sudden destruction of everything was an ever present background thought. In the book Coupland defines the term "Mental Ground Zero" for where you imagined you'd be when it happened. For me it was always on a train traveling between two cities that no longer exist.
e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Leg
For those interested in UK government cold war planning I can strongly recommend Peter Hennessy's book "The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst 1945-2010":
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Secret-State-Whitehall-Cold/dp/0...
One particularly chilling part describes how early UK estimates thought that it would only take a small number of H-bombs to destroy the UK as a functioning society, resulting in the following:
"Hennessy tells the story of a jokey 1961 encounter between Khrushchev and the British Ambassador, Frank Roberts. The Soviet leader asked how many H-bombs Roberts thought would be needed to wipe out the UK. ‘Six’, he replied. Khrushchev chided him for his pessimism. He said that ‘optimists’ estimated it would take nine — but reassured him with a twinkle that the Soviet General Staff… had earmarked several scores of bombs for use against the UK so that the Soviet Union had a higher opinion of the UK’s resistance capacity than the UK itself."
For anyone with a morbid curiosity over nuclear war, THREADS is worth a watch too. I didn't learn about it until very recently but supposedly it was on prime time British TV in 1984 and scared the bejeezus out of everyone in its rendition of what might happen to the UK in the case of nuclear war. It's also on YouTube! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MCbTvoNrAg
I think it shook up the teachers more than us, but I guess that's to be expected. We were too young to really have felt the paranoia of the times.
(Then I went to university in London. Enough said.)
It's interesting how much of the art and music of the 1980s was influenced by this existential terror of sudden annihilation, and how little resonance songs like "The Final Countdown" (by Europe) or "Dancing with Tears in my Eyes" (Ultravox) and similar have for folks aged under 30.
The film itself is terribly bleak, I'm glad to have not consciously lived through always worrying of nuclear war.
I tell people this, and the younger ones never believe me, but I genuinely believed that I would never live to be an adult.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testament_(film)
I don't expect to live past my twenties. It isn't hard to believe that somebody on one side of a two sided prelude to a nuclear war could be nervous about their survival prospects.
I used to get sudden moments of fear that the 'flash' could happen at that particular moment when it struck. I can vividly remember these happening when I was a teenager.
Looking back it was a terrible thing to grow up with, a constant fear of immediate death without warning.
Somehow while the danger is still present the immediacy of the fear has waned as I have gotten older. Although now I worry about my children it's more of a vague worry about their future than a immediate pressing fear of a the 'flash'.
I wasn't afraid of dying; I was afraid of surviving.
But the Cold War was real. Real life has a quality that's hard to appreciate unless you've lived through it.
A "dot with math" is unlikely to also have the ability to make a machine that can move.
Everyone is worried about unfriendly AI - all you have to do is put that unfriendly AI in a computer without the ability to affect the physical world. (Also no network.)
Give it only a screen, and a video camera. It can be as unfriendly as it likes.
[Edit: Strong general recommendation for that book, by the way. If it were not in a low-status genre, parts of it would be taught in high schools.]
I went through a vehement anti-monarchy phase when I was younger, since then I'm starting to appreciate the idea of a head of state who isn't a career politician that campaigned or even bought their way into office.
If we were all loaners things would be much worse. You might not have war, but you would have lots of individual killing, and very little progress.
Your best option is not to fight it, but rather to use it: Get people in various countries to consider themself all part of one group. (One of the reasons I think the Olympics is a huge impediment to world peace. I almost never think of MY country as better than YOUR country - except during the Olympics.)
Bit of a selection bias there. Those of us who don't care just tend not to talk about it.
"The speech, devised by Whitehall officials at one of the most fraught Cold War periods..."
To be a bit more on-topic, that this speech was even considered necessary gives me a bit of hope. We see it as a bit antiquated, fears of a time that is now largely behind us, when our rulers were willing to sacrifice most of us in their global power game.
No, not really, see
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/how-i-learnt-to-s...
You can watch it for free on youtube.[3]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads
