This sub-blog on atomic and nuclear weapons and the preparations for atomic holocaust on Longstreet. The author, John F. Ptak, has a good nose for finding now declassified US plans for and reports on nuclear warfare, then finding the most embarassing phrases in them. Ptak has a good sense of moral outrage, not tempered by the distance in time from when these documents were written, or by the technocratic language of these documents. It’s a goldmine for nuclear war “enthusiasts”, those who like me, grew up during the Cold War and have been obsessed with it since.
I was just old enough in the early eighties to understand how dangerous the world had become, how close we were to nuclear war, much closer than any other time during the Cold War except perhaps the Cuban Missile Crisis. A belligerent senile fool in charge of one nuclear power, a succession of senile, paranoid walking corpses in charge of the other and while the first was busy pumping up the threat of the second, they in turn were terrified that all this talk about a winnable nuclear war was genuine. It was a time when a NATO exercise was interpreted by the USSR as the preparations for a first strike and it was pure luck that they didn’t panic. Even ten year old school girls knew enough to be scared shitless and write to the USSR president about why he wanted to blow up the world.
No wonder I had regular nightmares. Some people can watch films like Threads or The Day After as escapism; I can’t even read the Wikipedia pages about them… There are only two things I’m really, genuinely scared shitless about and one of them is nuclear war. So I can’t really read this blog, but don’t let that stop you.