What was living in the Cold War like? (80s, USSR, Russians)
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Can't forget that great movie Red Dawn...check it out, about when the Soviets invaded America and it was up to the average citizens to save the day,etc etc.. kind of predictable, but still a good one...
Even during the cold war, I never had a feeling anyone really wanted to destroy the USSR, and really didn't get the idea they wanted to wipe us out.
Nixon and Khrushchev were just having a friendly discussion there in the kitchen!! Us old ones might remember that....
I remember as a kid (a period when we lived in northern California) sitting with a map and a compass measuring the blast areas of likely targets for the San Francisco Bay Area. Needless to say that when you live in Berkeley and the epicenter is Treasure Island Naval Station I quickly came to the realization that I was going to have to do something more than duck and cover. So I poured over the plans for fallout shelters that were illustrated in Look, Life and Popular Mechanics but I never seemed to be able to convince my mother to dig up the backyard.
By the way, she had the foresight then to say "a should learn Russian but an optimist should learn Chinese."
Periodically there would be school yard rumors (the Fox News of my day) about the Russians nuking San Francisco on Thanksgiving or some other significant date. Of course nothing came of it, so it was just another day in school, fights with the Greaser kid whose brother was suppose to be a Hell's Angel - now that was suppose to be some to really be scared about. We would play army, but strangely the enemy were still the Germans or "Japs" never the Russians.
Like any kid of that era my world view was largely shaped by the movies we saw. We knew that we had nothing to fear from the Russians because Jimmy Stewart ("Strategic Air Command)" and Rock Hudson ("A Gathering of Eagles") were keeping us safe... well at least until we saw "Fail Safe", "Seven Days in May," or "The Bedford Incident." But later when we watched "The Russians are Coming," and "Doctor Strangelove" we began to recognize the absurdity of it all so that by the time John Wayne transformed himself from a commander of the a paratroop battalion in the "Longest Day" into a rip snorting Green Beret we were pretty much fed up with the whole thing.
But the best part of the Cold War were all the abandoned Nike Missile sites that lined the crests of the Berkley hills, climbing through those was a lot of fun.
The Cold War era (1946-1989) is perhaps best divided into two halves. The first is the era of Korea and Vietnam, of duck-and-cover, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Johnson’s flower-petal missile-countdown commercial. It basically ended with Nixon, the withdrawal from Vietnam and cessation of the draft. The second half is the Ford-Carter-Reagan years.
The Cold War ended in 1991 with the August Coup, not in 1989. In my opinion anyways. My logic is that if the coup was a success (it wasn't) the Cold War likely would have continued on and the USSR would have become much more totalitarian than it was in the 1980s.
I agree with you though, the Cold War put a cap on consumer culture and promoted innovation between nations. It's no coincidence that the era of 24/7 digital information overload and globalized consumer capitalism began just a few years after the Cold War ended! I think in many ways the Cold War was a simpler time than the past 20 years - much like the Victorian era was a simpler time than the period following WW1.
From what I understand people didn't really talk about globalization until the very late 80s, because during the depth of the Cold War it was impossible in a bipolar world order. Now the United States and multinationals can project their power anywhere if so pleased.
One morning in the spring of 1964, I was sitting in a ninth-grade English class taught by a frustrated spinster-to-be whom I recall as one of the most miserable educators under whom I was forced to endure. Unfortunately, it was the morning upon which the community decided to test a new fire alarm system with a pitch and modulation none of us had previously encountered. One of the ladies became conviced that an ICBM with the Big Nuke was on the way, broke down in tears, and had to be escorted to the school's dispensary.
Another memory I have is of viewing the "anti-anti-Communist" film Dr. Strangelove at the town's cimema. My home town has a closely-knit enclave of Ukranian-Americans. Some of them had relatives back home who were caught in the "enforced famine" which Josef Statlin engineered as a "lesson" to the peasant kulaks who resistedthe collectivization of Soviet agricuture in the 1930's -- after a while the regular letters from those relatives just dried up.
So in the scene in Dr. Strangelove where George C. Scott tries to convice Peter Sellers that "since the Reds have agreed to let their guard down, let's let 'em have it with all we've got". That sentiment drew outright cheering from some people in my town.
In the 20-20 vision of hindsight, we now know that at the time of the Cuban missle cnfrontation, we actually posessed the technology to clean the Soviet Union's clock -- but good! But even assuming we had done so, and eschewed the destruction of civillian targets and gone exclusively for the (deserved!) obliteration of Soviet military power, we would have had to endure the hatred of a very determined people, and the likely impossible task of occupying and rebuilding another former enemy -- one very unlikely to forgive and cooperate.
By some strange twist of fate, it mostly worked out for the better
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 05-12-2013 at 11:38 AM..
This statement is not entirely accurate. The popularity and longevity of rock 'n roll is due to Baby Boomers, but it is not a product of Baby Boomers. Bill Haley was born in 1925, Chuck Berry in 1926, Fats Domino in 1928, Ike Turner in 1931, Pat Boone was born in 1934 along with Jackie Wilson, Elvis in 1935 as was Jerry Lee Lewis, Bobby Darin and Roy Orbison were both born in 1936. Even people like Ricky Nelson, Fabian, Paul Anka, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, and the Rolling Stones were all born before the Baby Boomer era began. It would seem that rock 'n roll is a product of something else, other than the cold war or WWII. Rock 'n Roll is the product of Depression-era Blues, 40's Big Band music, and Southern Rockabilly.
I would be interested in how you correlate Rock with 40's Big Band music.
One morning in the spring of 1964, I was sitting in a ninth-grade English class taught by a frustrated spinster-to-be whom I recall as one of the most miserable educators under whom I was forced to endure. Unfortunately, it was the morning upon which the community decided to test a new fire alarm system with a pitch and modulation none of us had previously encountered. One of the ladies became conviced that an ICBM with the Big Nuke was on the way, broke down in tears, and had to be escorted to the school's dispensary.
Another memory I have is of viewing the "anti-anti-Communist" film Dr. Strangelove at the town's cimema. My home town has a closely-knit enclave of Ukranian-Americans. Some of them had relatives back home who were caught in the "enforced famine" which Josef Statlin engineered as a "lesson" to the peasant kulaks who resistedthe collectivization of Soviet agricuture in the 1930's -- after a while the regular letters from those relatives just dried up.
So in the scene in Dr. Strangelove where George C. Scott tries to convice Peter Sellers that "since the Reds have agreed to let their guard down, let's let 'em have it with all we've got". That sentiment drew outright cheering from some people in my town.
In the 20-20 vision of hindsight, we now know that at the time of the Cuban missle cnfrontation, we actually posessed the technology to clean the Soviet Union's clock -- but good! But even assuming we had done so, and eschewed the destruction of civillian targets and gone exclusively for the (deserved!) obliteration of Soviet military power, we would have had to endure the hatred of a very determined people, and the likely impossible task of occupying and rebuilding another former enemy -- one very unlikely to forgive and cooperate.
By some strange twist of fate, it mostly worked out for the better
I think it was a very good thing we didn't have 'tactical nukes' then. We all knew to be scared of the Bomb, but smaller versions wouldn't sound so bad half across the world. Remember the neutron bomb? The idea that it was okay to kill every living thing but once it dispelled you could move in the buildings is especially cold. By the time they were a reality, we'd come to see that a war with nukes was going to be lost by both sides. If we had it would have been much the same as if we'd 'contained' Germany since the survivors would know who to blame and politics would be cast aside.
And to take down the mass of the Soviet Union would have poisoned a lot of other places, from Eastern Europe to the far east. And we'd have lots of hot zones still with no go signs.
I remember figuring out once in the 80's that I lived blocks from one of the prime targets in a strageic takedown and deciding it would be good to just be gone and have it over with. But when we were waiting to see if the Soviets would blink over Cuba, that day I stayed home from school. Dad stayed home from work. I was ten but old enough to figure we'd all be dead soon if they didn't. Then when they did, I remember we went out to dinner, middle of the week which was unusual. Restraunts were packed. I think that is the moment we figured out that we had been very very lucky. We didn't know how much. There is a documentary about a Russian sub commander who had been ordered to fire a missle at US ships in another incident occuring at the same time. He refused. His refusal saved the world from nuclear war. (the command came from a superior, not any central authority. How scary would it have been if we'd known that ship commanders could be ordered to fire nukes by Soviet rules by their immediate superiors.)
That final scene in Dr. Strangelove is so memorable, the sentimental music over the destruction of the earth.... The German scientist who has to keep holding down his arm too. Mom and Dad were in Washington after the war and Von Braun was refered to as 'our nazi'.
But too may have forgotten Failsafe, which was more chilling since it was quite realistic in what could have happened.
Well, in Chicago the air raid sirens were tested every Tuesday or Wedensday around Noon....you could set your clock to it.
Well, guess what? The Cubs, Sox, Bears...one of the local pro teams....won a big game or a championship or something, and the head of the Fire Department decided to celebrate by ordering the Air Raid sirens to sound (the sirens were controlled or at the fire stations).....people just freaked!!!! ROFTL!
Also in Chicago they had this anti-missle system called the Nike system. The city was ringed by these "Nike Site" missle basis, with their silos, geodesic domes, circling antennas, etc....out on the lake off of Lake Shore Drive...out in the cornfields and subdivisions of Dupage County (suburbia), etc. Something that was just part of the scenery.
There was also the Civil Defense "Air Raid Shelter' signs....the 'tests' on radio and TV "This is a test, This is Only A Test. In the Event of An Actual Emergency...etc"....then that high piched...beeeeeeeep...tone.
I remember as a kid (a period when we lived in northern California) sitting with a map and a compass measuring the blast areas of likely targets for the San Francisco Bay Area. Needless to say that when you live in Berkeley and the epicenter is Treasure Island Naval Station I quickly came to the realization that I was going to have to do something more than duck and cover. So I poured over the plans for fallout shelters that were illustrated in Look, Life and Popular Mechanics but I never seemed to be able to convince my mother to dig up the backyard.
What era was this, exactly? My older cousins and a brother grew up in Berkeley in the 50's/60's, and there were no air raid sirens/testing, no knowledge of likely blast targets (?! How would a child find that out?), no duck-and-cover exercises in school, no backyard bomb shelters or any concern about where the neighborhood bomb shelter might be (there weren't any. Cal Berkeley had built some, I never heard about any others). None of that cliche stuff was on kids' minds, that I heard about. Maybe it depended on the parents, and what they chose to share with kids. There was some general awareness that Russians were "the enemy" and were potentially "spies", but that seemed to be the extent of the Cold War mindset for kids in my extended family. Kids were busy being kids--building go-carts and tree forts, and enjoying their childhood without adult concerns.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
