Deep Thought: The Missiles of Yesteryear
Created | Updated May 4, 2024
Deep Thought: The Missiles of Yesteryear
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A week or two ago, the Gen Xers on Twitter were talking, as they are wont to do, about things that traumatised them in their childhoods. This is an interesting topic, and one I can learn from, especially since the American ones tend to tell me things I didn't know about what was happening in the US in the 1980s. I was elsewhere at the time.
On this occasion, somebody was remembering the nightmares they got in 1983 from seeing The Day After, Nicholas Meyer's blockbuster US television film that famously depicted a nuclear war and its effects on Lawrence, Kansas. Many of the people who lived in Lawrence at that time were in the film. 100 million people saw the show when it was aired: a lot more around the world. It was even shown in the Soviet Union. I saw it projected on a building in an outdoor cinema in Greece. It was just as effective that way.
The occasion for all the talk was the documentary film Television Event, by Australian filmmaker Jeff Daniels, which uses archival footage to piece together the story of the events surrounding the tv show. He makes a good case for 1983 as a pivotal point in the Cold War – and for the idea that The Day After played a significant role in changing the minds of key players in the nuclear drama. In other words, Mr Meyer's film may have saved civilisation. It's a sobering thought.
If you think the assertion is overstated because we never came close to nuclear annihilation, then you've been happily living in a fantasy world. March yourself over to Amazon Prime, please, and look up Deutschland 83, a more recent piece of fiction that's based in the sobering reality that, yes, a couple of weeks before The Day After aired, the Soviets and Americans almost set off World War III over a misunderstanding about a NATO exercise. Or go look up 'Able Archer'.
I wasn't in the US for the film, but I was in Germany in 1983, and I remember the tension. My students in the German air force were particularly unhappy about the medium-range rocket business. The draftees were unhappy because they wanted to join the protestors. I remember the protestors practically closing down Bonn: we were in Bonn that day for another reason, and even with extra trains laid on, it took us hours to get back to Cologne.
Over the years, a lot of people have contributed to saving the planet from nuclear madness. Some unknown, behind-the-scenes people. People like the ones who helped pass information between Kennedy and Khrushchev that helped defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. I was around for that one, too. I was a kid and had weird dreams. I'm thankful to everyone who did things to help, including Mr Rod Serling, who made people thoughtful about fallout shelters and their ethical issues. I'm grateful to Mary Sharmat and Janice Smith, too, for pointing out the absurdity of the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction. You should be, too. I'm grateful to the Russian missile men who refused to respond to false alarms, thus preventing us from dying of computer glitches. I'd also like to thank the spies – not the glamorous ones you like to watch movies about. The real ones, who passed around actual information and made their bosses listen. These people are why we're still here. They are truly the salt of the earth.
While I was thinking all of these thoughts, I remembered something else about the Cold War: the sign on the road that said, 'Nike Site'. The sign on a locked fence that blocked an unprepossessing country road north of Pittsburgh. A road we never went down, but which I remembered seeing, often, from the back seat of the family car. That was back in the 60s, when the US landscape was thick with missile silos, all awaiting the signal to rise up from the ground and end the world. And nobody talked about it – nobody at all. Wonder what happened to that thing?
You know what? We have tools now. With the help of Google maps I can determine that, yes, my memory serves me right: that Nike site was 2.5 miles (4 km) from our church. 5 miles (8 km) from my house, exactly. Five miles means yes, somewhere in Central Asia, there was an equally deadly missile with our names on it.
Do you want to know what that site looks like now? With the help of Youtube, you can watch intrepid (foolhardy?) explorers stumble around in the ruins by the police training grounds. If the war broke out, those elevator doors would open and the missiles would rise from under western Pennsylvania – and Kansas, and everywhere in between. No wonder I had funny dreams.
What's that you say? Isn't it wonderful that they're all rusty ruins now? Oh, yes, absolutely. All except for the almost 4,000 warheads the US has on missiles, ready to fire from somewhere in the West. Oh, and the equal number the Russians have.
Stop and consider how stable you think the leaders of both of those nations are at the moment. Reflect on the fact that they have access to these weapons; weapons generations now have declared to be insane. And then pray to whatever powers you believe in that we still have people around who will do what it takes to make sure those buttons never get pushed. And creative people with the vision to keep shouting at people until they dismantle every single one of the damned things.
