So Many Books... - May 20th, 2009

12:33 pm - Feeling depressed about OUR Times?

Have a listen to this programme and be happy if you weren't aware of the danger at the time! In case that doesn't tempt you (it's only a half-hour Radio 4 programme), which I can completely understand, it tells of a Russian military commander who happened to be in charge the day in 1983 they got notice from their early warning system that the US had launched a missile strike on the Soviet Union, and it was up to him to decide whether to pass the info on to the upper-level guys. With consequences you can guess.

Most people on my flist are probably too young - all right, *far* too young - to remember what things were like at the time, but I was just married and living in Ithaca, NY. We were very involved in the Freeze Movement and there was a lot of activity in and around Cornell and I can well remember the hopeless fury we felt about the arms race and the rhetoric - that was when Reagan had recently started the 'Evil Empire' stuff - and we subscribed to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and saw the Doomsday Clock so close to midnight. The show - aside from being a dramatic story of a nuclear war that thankfully didn't happen - was a fascinating reminder of the massive potential problems inherent in the use of language when you're talking about two very different cultures with very different understandings of the motivations behind rhetoric in its varied forms.

The other thing I'd forgotten was hearing that the American early warning systems were at first all computerized, but hadn't taken into account wildlife. So a large flock of birds, for example, looked just like a missile attacking. (Presumably this was figured out when missiles attacking - oh, maybe Iceland? were spotted!)

I comforted myself from such a chilling dip with thoughts of the little extra stuck in among the credits after Monsters vs. Aliens, with the president down in his war room hitting the wrong red button when trying to get a cup of latte...