things i don't miss.

[rmd]

things i don't miss:
the cold war.

I just watched "threads", a bbc docudrama about what would happen if the cold war turned hot, focusing on sheffeild, england. i never did see "the day after", but apparently this is even bleaker. i can't say for sure, but it's pretty fucking bleak. it's out on google video and is a bit under two hours long.

I'll take the risk of a terrorist attack that might kill a few thousand people over having to rely on people like stanislav petrov and vasili arkhipov to save the world. (these were not the only near misses)

peace on earth, good will towards men.

Comments

[cz_unit]

I know. What interests me about the whole "terrorist" thing is it points up the generations.

People go waah about killing a few thousand people with a plane or a "dirty bomb" that will um maybe reduce property values for a few weeks? I grew up 6 miles from NYC, and grew up knowing that my world could *end* in 11 minutes from a sub launched ICBM.

Compared to that, OSB is a piker. A "backpack nuke"? At .1kt that would hardly even foam my lattee...

CZ

[xthread.livejournal.com]

Yes. There's, um, a bit of a sense of scale that's out of whack.

[cz_unit]

And of course today Washington Post has an article about the building spike in Winchester VA because at 75 miles from DC it's "out of the blast radius".

Of WHAT? That's a 40mt bomb kids, and I hate to say it but it's a real bitch in heat to build a fusion bomb.

*shakes head* People are stupid herd animals, I saw this over the weekend. I really should take more advantage of this.

[lil-brown-bat.livejournal.com]

You know, it's so hard to even talk about the cold war to people who didn't experience it first-hand. If there's any awareness of it at all -- and mostly there isn't -- it's a one-dimensional notion of a generation of paranoics. There's definitely a generation gap, and moreover, there seem to be a lot of people whose memory wipes itself out after about ten years -- there are people of cold-war age who seem to have lost their former perspective and fallen into the whole war on terror thing. I understand exactly what you mean, but I bet you many people would be highly indignant and feel that you are minimizing "the terrorist threat" or terrorist casualties. The objective reality is that, while in many ways the threat was much more stable, it was a threat of much greater destruction. Yet the building of bunkers went out of style in the early '60s, and people went about their lives, had kids, bought houses, planted gardens, and did all kinds of things that said in one way or another, "I believe there will be a future."

I don't know, though, that really learning about the cold war would diminish this impulse that much. Because of the nature of my work and life -- I have a full-time job with a software company in Boston, I live in an anything-but-affluent rural community, and on weekends I work a service job for a little over minimum wage -- I rub elbows with a wide range of the spectrum of American prosperity and security. What I've observed is that some people seem to have a wish to amplify or manufacture threats in order to justify taking steps to make themselves more safe or comfortable -- and that the people who do so are generally not those who face the most threat or insecurity in their daily lives. Poor people don't worry about terrorist attacks; they worry about whether they can heat their homes. They don't fret about the possibility of subway bombers; they ride the subway to work because they have to. It's the people who are more well off and who don't have so much real threat in their lives, who seem to feel this "hunker in the bunker" mentality. It's frankly insulting to the real challenges that others face.

[evwhore.livejournal.com]

The only thing I remember about The Day After was that my mom wouldn't let me watch it (I was 11).

[marith.livejournal.com]

Ohh, I remember seeing the ads for Threads when it aired. Definitely not something I'd ever dare watch.

Here's the incident I mentioned yesterday over the kitchen table:

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

From http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/19.43.html#subj2, 29 Oct 1997:

"Peter G. Neumann" <neumann@csl.sri.com>Wed, 29 Oct 97 10:24:00 PST
In his book, ``Caging the Nuclear Genie'', Admiral Stansfield Turner,
describes an incident that occurred on 3 June 1980 when he was President
Carter's CIA director. Colonel William Odom alerted Zbigniew Brzezinski at
2:26 a.m. that the warning system was predicting a 220-missile nuclear
attack on the U.S. It was revised shortly thereafter to be an all-out
attack of 2200 missiles. Just before Brzezinski was about to wake up the
President, it was learned that the ``attack'' was an illusion -- which
Turner says was caused by ``a computer error in the system.'' His book
makes various suggestions that would greatly reduce the threats of
accidental nuclear war. ``We have had thousands of false alarms of
impending missile attacks on the United States, and a few could have spun
out of control.'' [Source: Keay Davidson, *San Francisco Examiner*, in the
*San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle*, 19 Oct 1997, p. A-17.]