The Cold War

[Joey Stewart]

I was just wondering something about the cold war, as there will be people in the forums who were alive in and might recollect the 70s and 80s.
Did people acknowledge it at the time and say "oh there's a war on, you know" or was it just a kind of unspoken tension ?

I only ask because this current era has something of a cold war feel to it as well but nobody publicly states as such, just that there is a general feeling of civil unrest and discontent and lots of posturing by the world superpowers.

[Matt Mackenzie]

The phrase "Cold War" itself was indeed in regular use, and the early 1980s especially had a *lot* of people worried about nuclear war.

(not so unreasonably either, as a quick google for "Stanislav Petrov" or "Operation Able Archer" will soon demonstrate)

[James Plaskett]

I'm sixty-five and I sure recall the Cold War.

BUT THIS is one of only two films I ever saw in a cinema to afterwards find myself rising to my feet to give applause.
(The Return of the King, the third part of Jackson´s trilogy, being the other.)

I cannot recommend it too highly -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War_(2018_film)

[Alistair Campbell]

Are there many of us who can remember as far back as the 80s??

I think to fully appreciate the cold war you have to be a child of the 30s or 40s (or older) when world war and its aftermath was a reality – you would perhaps have first hand knowledge of bombings and deaths and national service and rationing. Cold war would seem an improvement, but with different threats.

For those slightly younger, I guess there was a fear that Communism was on the march –the world was moving from one obvious danger to a different more subtle, insidious one.

For my generation, the term “Cold War” had lost much of its original meaning , instead being one of a number of phrases such as “Iron Curtain” or “Soviet Bloc” or ”Domino Theory” that conveyed a sense of dreary authoritarianism and secret police and labour camps or a vague, faraway threat.

Instead, after the end of the Vietnam war, the world existed in an uneasy equilibrium. There was a tension between the first and second world (the latter a phrase rarely used nowadays in my experience) and the dismantling of the Berlin wall seemed as unlikely as a Scot winning Wimbledon or a Briton competing for the World Chess Championship.

So yes, the threat was distant and absent from day-to-day life, and largely unspoken.

But then we had Watergate and the Iranian revolution and Perestroika and Glasnost and the Global Financial Crisis and CoVid and all the rest. Now the world has changed in many ways: nothing is unspoken – things are voiced constantly on social media - and the threats are many and varied and with a measurable impact on daily life.

In the cold world at least you knew where you stood and who the good guys were meant to be. Now, the good guys have turned bad, and the bad guys are worse. And nuclear threats are back up the agenda.

[Matt Mackenzie]

I think the average poster here is in their 50s or older, so the answer to your initial query is very much "yes".

[MJMcCready]

Try this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22KIQ1Q ... Ck9Zw0dGke