Who here lived the cold war?

I grew up in the 80's when Ronald Regan and Gorbachav were always on TV. I remember watching documentaries on PBS about the Cold War, and reading books about it from the library when I was in school.

The movie The Hunt for Red October came out in 1990 at the end of the Cold War, and I still remember how I felt seeing it in a movie theater near my house, the first movie I saw with Dobly Digital at a movie theater.

What I do remember is a District Convention of Jehovah's Witnesses in 1987. It was on Sunday afternoon and Daniel Sydlik gave the closing prayer. It was a very long and heartfelt prayer. He had a very powerful booming voice. In that prayer he asked Jehovah to please open up the preaching work in the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe, and let the brothers who had been persecuted their for many decades because of their faith to openly worship in freedom.

Soon after that prayer the Berlin Wall fell, Communism ended and the U. S. S. R. dissolved. And most of our brothers whom he had been praying for were given liberty to worship finally, after so many decades of very harsh persecution.

ETA:

Just an FYI, Jehovah's Witnesses believe that a certain part of Daniel chapter 11 foretold the Cold War. It is in these verses:

(Daniel 11:40-43) . . .“In the time of the end the king of the south will engage with him in a pushing, and against him the king of the north will storm with chariots and horsemen and many ships; and he will enter into the lands and sweep through like a flood. 41 He will also enter into the land of the Decoration, and many lands will be made to stumble. But these are the ones that will escape out of his hand: Eʹdom and Moʹab and the main part of the Amʹmon·ites. 42 And he will keep thrusting out his hand against the lands; and as regards the land of Egypt, she will not escape. 43 And he will rule over the hidden treasures of gold and silver and over all the desirable things of Egypt. And the Libʹy·ans and the E·thi·oʹpi·ans will be at his steps.


Regarding that prophecy it was written:

*** dp chap. 16 pp. 276-278 pars. 15-17 The Contending Kings Near Their End *** 15 “In the time of the end the king of the south will engage with him in a pushing,” the angel told Daniel. (Daniel 11:40a) Has the king of the south ‘pushed’ the king of the north during “the time of the end”? (Daniel 12:4, 9) Yes, indeed. After the first world war, the punitive peace treaty imposed upon the then king of the north—Germany—was surely “a pushing,” an incitement to retaliation. After his victory in the second world war, the king of the south targeted fearsome nuclear weapons on his rival and organized against him a powerful military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Concerning NATO’s function, a British historian says: “It was the prime instrument for the ‘containment’ of the USSR, which was now perceived as the principal threat to European peace. Its mission lasted for 40 years, and was carried out with indisputable success.” As the years of the Cold War went by, the “pushing” by the king of the south included high-tech espionage as well as diplomatic and military offensives. 16 How did the king of the north react? “Against him the king of the north will storm with chariots and with horsemen and with many ships; and he will certainly enter into the lands and flood over and pass through.” (Daniel 11:40b) The history of the last days has featured the expansionism of the king of the north. During the second world war, the Nazi “king” flooded over his borders into the surrounding lands. At the end of that war, the successor “king” built a powerful empire. During the Cold War, the king of the north fought his rival in proxy wars and insurgencies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He persecuted genuine Christians, hindering—but by no means stopping—their activity. And his military and political offensives brought a number of lands under his control. This is exactly what the angel had prophesied: “He will also actually enter into the land of the Decoration [the spiritual estate of Jehovah’s people], and there will be many lands that will be made to stumble.”—Daniel 11:41a. 17 Nevertheless, the king of the north did not achieve world conquest. The angel foretold: “These are the ones that will escape out of his hand, Edom and Moab and the main part of the sons of Ammon.” (Daniel 11:41b) In ancient times, Edom, Moab, and Ammon were situated between the domains of the Egyptian king of the south and the Syrian king of the north. In modern times they represent nations and organizations that the king of the north targeted but was unable to bring under his influence.

a reply to: Golantrevize
I was born in the UK in the Fifties and spent half my life notionally "under the shadow of the Bomb".
I came across an article in a family magazine, "Will our children live to grow up?" (or something of that kind). I was mildly intrigued, as one of the children under threat, but not old enough to be made anxious. In fact I obviously did live to grow up, so the fear proved to be unnecessary.

Frankly, I spent the whole of the Cold War NOT worrying about the possibility of war. I suspect the same was true of many ordinary people. It was an abstract possibility, but we pushed it into the backs of our minds while it remained abstract.

Newspapers worried about it. I remember a cartoon showing two men on a plateau wrestling together near the edge of a cliff. This was supposed to illustrate "brinkmanship". This was a word adapted from "gamesmanship", which was in turn the title of a humorous book parodying the concept of "sportsmanship". Brinkmankship was the very dangerous game of seeing how close you could get to "the brink of war" without actually falling over into it.
There was much talk of a projected Summit Meeting which would be the cure of all ills. I never discovered whether it took place.
I was aware that there was a Cuban Missile Crisis, which was my introduction to international politics.
The most obvious symptom of the Cold War was that it divided Europe into two distinct and isolated worlds, separated by an Iron Curtain carefully marked on National Geographic maps (the line around China was the Bamboo Curtain). It was the existence of these two worlds, the West and Communism, that prompted the concept of the Third World.

Government preparations and warnings did not impinge on us very dramatically. Until it was abolished nationally, being trained under the Civil Defence Corps was one of the Friday afternoon options for senior boys at my school, alongside the Cadet Corps and the Scouts. This was really a survival from the previous war. Our most memorable exercise was putting on gas-masks and being sent one by one through a training-van filled with dangerous gas. The gas-masks worked, any way (or nobody tried calling the trainer's bluff and taking the mask off).
Later I took a vacation job at a riverside bar. The owner showed me an air-raid alarm (Second World War again) behind the counter, and told me that they were supposed to sound that alarm for the benefit of local residents if they received the famous Four Minute Warning. "Then we all go and jump in the river", he added cheerfully.

Apart from the occasional crisis in the newspapers, awareness of the Cold war was really being kept alive by those campaigners who wanted us to adopt a different policy. We should give up our nuclear weapons "unilaterally", thus introducing a new era of world peace or Russian domination, depending on your commentators.
"Ban the Bomb" graffiti. "Ban the Bomb" marches, including the annual Aldermaston version. "Doctor Strangelove" came out of this atmosphere. "The War-game" was a documentary-type exploration of the experience of nuclear war, made for television but banned before it could be shown (I saw it at college, when it was shown as a fund-raiser by a society which I had joined).

On the whole, then, I think the Cold War was probably experienced more by the media than by the average man-in-the-street.

a reply to: Golantrevize

I remember the Cold War , I was a teen in the era of Mutually Assured Destruction.
This pretty much summed up the feeling of the time.


When the Iron Curtain fell the threat receded and we all felt a new era had dawned , the era of Glasnost and Perestroika signaled an end to the fear of M.A.D and the future of the world was saved.

Today I think we live in far more dangerous times , I have more fear for the future than I did back then , the world is being run by crazies and when that happens crazy things can and will happen , I would gladly welcome the fear of then compared to what we have now , there seems to be a certain inevitability that confrontation will occur given the events in Syria which didn't exist back then , both sides were firmly entrenched in their own corners during the Cold War.

All we can do is hope both sides pull their necks in , the alternative is to scary to consider.

a reply to: Golantrevize

I was born in 1970 so missed most of the cold war and was only really a child to a young man in the latter day's of it, that said it was very scary when I was a kid in the early 80's and we all feared that a nuclear war would happen, on one occasion I remember walking through the local town center here in northern England and it was surreal, despite being a Sunday and it being a lot quieter back with much more stringent Sunday trading law's (which meant the town center shop's were closed on Sunday's back then) and fewer people having cars at that time there were usually still a few cars on the road's and a few people milling about using the town center as a short cut but on that day there was not a soul to be seen anywhere and suddenly as I walked home from my friend's whom lived on the other side of the town the air raid siren's started up, I had never heard them before except on old war movies but this was all around me.

It was utterly terrifying, I was about 13 or 14, it took me a while to get home and it was strange because the whole walk of a few miles through the new town where I lived at the time was silent except for those wailing siren's and I did not see a single other person, this was about 2pm in the early afternoon, at the time there had been much tension with russia as well so we did in fact come very close to a war, much closer than most people will ever realize.

When I got home the siren's had finally stopped, as I stepped into my home my mother and sibling's in the house it was like stepping back out of another world but the fright remained with me for a little while, you have to understand that in the UK at the time we had all of about 3 or 4 TV channel's, the BBC did indeed create far superior content to what it does today in educational term's but as such we were all very well informed about the tension's with the soviet union and indeed feared them because we were always told that they had hundreds of nuclear missiles pointed at the uk which of course would have wiped us off the map completely.

a reply to: Golantrevize

I waa a teen in the 80s. A lot of the music, tv and literature of those times dealt with the background fear of a nuclear war.

We didn't sit around talking about the end of the world but there was a feeling amongst my peers that rules didn't matter much because everything was goung to go bang at some point.


There was a lot of violence, drug taking, glue sniffing drinking and random sex going on.

No one cared too much for anything.

Those are my overriding memories of the time.

It was the time of the first cold war when i was a child.
What i remember most is, at that time you heard every day and night, fighter jets flying around(Germany). Then that stopped almost completely, but now that sounds are increasing again.

I remember watching the exchanges of captured spies on the Glienicker Brücke(known as Bridge of Spies) in the news.

And that in 1986 a real but almost unsung hero saved the world from a nuclear war, it really was one second before twelve!

Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov (Russian: Станисла́в Евгра́фович Петро́в; born 1939 in Vladivostok) is a retired lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces.

On September 26, 1983, just three weeks after the Soviet military had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to five more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm,[2] and his decision is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that could have resulted in large-scale nuclear war. Investigation later confirmed that the Soviet satellite warning system had indeed malfunctioned.

Since the west mentioned, after the fall of the soviet empire(when the russians became useless as bogeyman), that the new bogeyman(the muslim terrorist) is to hard to control, almost uncontrollable and fights back when fooled, "they", the western rulers, try hard to get their old best enemy back, obvisiously.

"They" changed the "winning team"(the best enemies, the west vs the east, the east vs the west, USA vs Russia, Russia vs USA) and learned why one shouldn´t do that!

real life cold war time was when i was very small. i am trying not to link music according to suggestion, pls report if inappropriate.



www.youtube.com...

Thank god, it is over

www.youtube.com...

I grew up in the '60s and 70's (mostly) and I don't remember ever fearing the bomb. There were too many other real things I was afraid of. I don't remember adults trying to scare me with the bomb- I remember the big scares as being over-population and pollution. Also there were my own very real fears of my violent stepdad and the rising crime rates. I had a constant fear of someone breaking into our house or trying to abduct me or hurt me. I would say the Vietnam War being on tv every night was also very scary to me as a child. There was just something unbelievably depressing about the Vietnam War. My childhood seems like a very dark, scary place when I look back on it. So glad it is over because as an adult I don't feel the helpless that I had as a child.

Sal

a reply to: Golantrevize

originally posted by: makemap

originally posted by: Golantrevize
a reply to: seeker1963

They also own land all over Canada. And are everywhere in Africa.

You can blame the Canadians that left the next generation to suffer for that. I heard in school was majority of the real Canadians went to America to make more money and leaving Canada because of Cold weather. I am not very surprised about that to be honest. Canadians abandoned their own land for what? More money. Today, I'm seeing more and more people who are from other countries, mostly brown people in schools(probably ME refugee crisis). Even then Canada lost most of its own companies and airforce(avro).
Canada would have been building their own weapons today if their gov didn't kill their own military complex. You see the LAV APC American army has? It originated from Canada.

I was in Canada, when Hong Kong was handed back to China, there was a big surge in immigrants from Hong Kong to Canada. The Canadian government instructed every company to do all they could to make the new arrivals feel welcome. This basically amounted to letting the graduates cherry-pick what jobs they wanted to do while the real Canadians got the scraps, so the Canadians left for California, Texas and Seattle.

The weather didn't help either. As Toronto became more multicultural, homes became more and more expensive, forcing many to commute by car from surrounding areas. Being close to Lake Ontario, means that there are frequent blizzards causing accidents on the 401 (an East-West freeway) with life-changing injuries.

The Chinese were doing the same in Silicon Valley - there would be 300 graduates applying for every entry-level software development position.

a reply to: Golantrevize

here's another movie you might like, full movie.
A Boy And His Dog (1975) Full HD

Hmmm, I should mention that I grew up in the '80s and the Cold War was still a thing then because of Reagan. So what I said still applies, but it was a weaker thing than it would have been in my mother's day. I also mentioned that. She really lived it with the Cuban Missile crisis.

But the press still tried to scare us kids with fears of nuclear war and fallout although they shifted to acid rain at some point.

The Day After was a thing in my day and it was scary since it was shot in my neck of the woods. I grew up in Kansas and now live in the KC area, so I'd like to thank the poster who put that sequence up for reminding me that if we really do go all in, my family and I are pretty well screwed.

originally posted by: Teikiatsu
My first memories of it were in the mid-80s when I was in Elementary and Junior High. It hit me especially hard when "The Day After" came out. Bonus points because I lived in Kansas City where the TV movie was set. We had the fear spoon-fed to us by teachers who hated Reagan.

I remember crying late at night, waiting for the nukes to go off.

I'd say I was more scared then, but I am still concerned that there could be a limited exchange or radicals transporting nukes across ground instead of rockets, or dirty bombs with nuclear fallout blowing in the wind.

It was not all I talked about with my friends. My family did not think about moving.

As for fear of dying to a nuke, I'd say I'm just as concerned about the Yellowstone Super Volcano or an Asteroid.

Wow, I could have written this one myself, except for the Reagan-hating teachers. I spent many nights as a kid crying myself to sleep, terrorized by 'knowing' eventually the nukes would fly and it would all be over. The monthly siren test wasn't the storm sirem, it was the air raid siren, and if it happened anuother time, it meant Russian jets broke our defenses and would be firing missiles on us.

Not sure why, at 7, my parents let me watch The Day After, but I wanted to watch it again. I wrote papers in high school about the effects of nuclear war, the diplomacy of Mutually Assured Destruction, etc. Every movie or book involving nuke I could get my hands on. I waited for nuclear meltdowns to happen all over the place after Chernobyl, expecting a world of 3-headed mutants to emerge.

Nowadays, my biggest worry is that another brainless moron will be facebookering amd driving and run into my fence.

How I managed a generally happy amd joyful childhood with nuclear armageddon hanging over my head, I have no idea.

Given the tensions at the time, can only imagine what my parents were thinking in 1964 when a dynamite truck exploded and even though it was a few miles away, it still blew all the doors open in their house. They didn't find out until the next day what really happened.

a reply to: TheRedneck

oh yeah.
the doomsday clock is at 2.5 minutes to midnight. it has only been closer once and that was 1953 i think at 2 minutes to midnight.

i remember the end of the cold war.
all the duck and cover drills.
the memories are getting foggy but i do remember people were legit scared. like the big bomb drop was really expected to happen.
much different vibe from now.

i just hope if the nukes fly one of them land on my house. im very much afraid of death but i dont want to suffer and try and survive through nuclear winter.

a reply to: Golantrevize

I was born in '58, so yes, I lived through all of that stuff. For a while my fam lived in Wichita, my dad worked for LearJet, and we were in the brand new subdivision nearest the airfield. Constant sonic booms and such.

We did the out-in-the-hallway-squat routine. We then moved to Lawrence, and that's where I grew up during the 70s.

Riots and fires on campus, related to the Vietnam War protests. The town was 'closed' - at one point my dad was held up at the entry point (the tollbooth on the exit from the Interstate), and they wouldn't let him in. My mom and we kids were at home....he finally got past the tollbooth and was allowed to come home.

I remember the air-raid sirens (drills) from when I was really little, they always made the hair on my arms stand up...now the same sirens are used as tornado warnings, and go off at 11am every Wednesday.

I recall worrying that my younger brothers would get drafted for Vietnam, but the draft ended before they came of age. Lots of my classmates had older siblings who went to Vietnam, and came back traumatized. I got sick of hearing about it.

I don't remember really being "afraid" - just aware that it was something that might happen, and we knew where the fall-out shelters were, and I trusted that I would be kept safe. What scared me the most was my dad would stand out on the front porch during actual tornado sirens - the sky would always be green, the thunder rumbling angrily, and we were grabbing the pets and running downstairs and hiding.

I was terrified that my dad would be killed by a tornado; and maybe all of us.

/shrug

something i haven't seen anyone mention was Glasnost and Perestroika, which on the USSR's side was the turning point in the cold war.

Born in 57 remember a lot but lived hundreds of miles from anything important enough to destroy. No drills other than tornado and the Vietnam body count on TV every night. Riots in the cities and the garbage strike in Flint that we saved boxes for our cousins to put their garbage in then wrap it like Christmas presents put it in the back of their pickup and park it for an hour till somebody stole all the garbage.

Funny memories. Our cabin was going to be the safe gathering place till dad realized it was less than 20 miles from Wirthsmith B52 base

I was born in Europe in the late 50's, grew up in Canada through the 60's and in the States since the early 70's. I don't recall ever being afraid of nukes. What I remember most disturbing were the assassinations in the 60's. JFK, MLK and Bobby Kennedy. Those were very real and what made me cynical of government and people in general.

To this day, I believe that's what's wrong with the world. How someone could hate so much or want power so badly they would eliminate another human being. Extrapolate that to countries and you have people wanting to eliminate an entire region.

Even here on ATS, people, while probably peaceful by nature, demonstrate a lot of hate. Me too sometimes but I guess that's what makes us human. If my years make me wise, then I can only say live your life to the fullest, don't be afraid of "the end of the world" and do something productive that will be your legacy.

And don't whine about every little thing!

originally posted by: mikell
we saved boxes for our cousins to put their garbage in then wrap it like Christmas presents put it in the back of their pickup and park it for an hour till somebody stole all the garbage.

That's absolutely hilarious! American ingenuity at its finest!