Hotline: 1985

Whenever Hollywood makes a tense Cold War drama about nuclear annihilation, it was sure to include a scene  with the President of the United States talking to his Soviet counterpart on the Hotline.  What most people don't realise is that there was never an actual telephone.  Instead, the Hotline was a teletype machine and even as late as 1985 was basically e-mail.

That's a pity, because I always imagined that the apocalypse would sound like this.

ICBM away!

I don't care how drunk they were, I like it.

This is either Cold War ingenuity at its finest or a perfect example of world-class cocking about.

Please specify which revolution

Our triumph in space is the hymn to Soviet country!

This bit of Soviet space propaganda looks strangely familiar.

Oh, dear

Oh, yes.  That's it.

An object lesson about why you should always step backwards and take a good look at what your message is actually saying.

15 cool spy gadgets

The Art of Manliness looks at 15 real-life spy gadgets from the Second World War and the Cold War.  Small wonder that the man who was the inspiration for Q was unimpressed by his fictional successor's work.

As a side note, one bit of trivia they missed was that some of the maps printed on silk were made with invisible ink and passed off as handkerchiefs.  The downed pilot could make the map visible using a chemical that he was guaranteed to have with him in unlimited supply.  Though it did make the map smelly.

Soviet Future Past or there's a tractor in your future

Interesting, but a bit too Five Year Planny for my tastes

Red Moon

Curse those running dog Capitalists and their reliable technology!

The BBC's Pallab Ghosh cries in his beer about how if the Soviets had got to the Mon first, we'd have (Red) moonbases and cheap (Red) flights to Mars by now.  Why?  Because,

Had the Soviets got to the Moon first it is unlikely that they would have abandoned it as swiftly as the Americans. Not being a democracy may have enabled the USSR to spend money and marshal the talents of their population in a way that America could not.

Yes, because that whole command economy thing worked out so well!.  If you believe that, I've got a secondhand ZAZ to sell you.  Moonbases? Odds are that if the Communists had got to the Moon first, they'd have spent most of their effort on jamming radio transmissions so the Free World wouldn't hear the poor stranded bastard on the floor of Mare Imbrium using his last remaining breaths of air to curse the swine back home for sending him on a suicide mission.  Not that I'm surprised at such a  Red nostalgia conclusion from this puff piece.  It's wrong on most major points and doesn't even bother to mention Dr Wernher Von Braun.

Oh, and it has this little gem as well:

Of course, we have not been back since. Instead, human exploration of space has been confined to low-Earth orbit.

Eh?   What alternate universe has Mr Ghosh been living in for the past forty years?  We've sent several probes to Moon–not to mention all the planets and an assortment of asteroids and comets.  I'd say we've been a very busy little race and... Oh, I see, he means manned exploration!

The BBC really has to do something about their copy editing.

Red design

Hang on, I had one of these back at Oxford.

Popular Science looks at some of the dafter examples of Soviet design.

Power of Decision

The US Air Force's 1958 vision of an all-out nuclear confrontation with the Soviets.

History still flying

Vulcan XH558, a living reminder of what marvels Britain can produce when she tries, is heading back to the skies this April.

Well done.

Technical diffficulties

When World War III sort of broke out.

Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

Twenty years ago that insult to all free men, the Berlin Wall came crashing down and Communism itself followed shortly after.

I was in Berlin while the wall was still up and it was like someone had jammed an icicle in the clockwork of history. It not only divided one of the world's capitols, but it gave the lie to a murderous system that had to imprison its own citizens from fleeing the "workers' paradise". I remember Berlin as being like a hospital patient forever trying to survive on an IV after being hacked in two with every infection and necrosis imaginable seeping into the wound. The old John le Carré novels weren't that far off. Tell young people today about all those who ran the kill zone, dug tunnels, built balloons or squeezed into all sorts of bizarre hiding places in order to reach the West and freedom and they'd never believe you.

The Wall is gone now. May the memory off all those who defied it and those who struggled so hard to tear it down never be forgotten.

Treason: '70s style

Anatoly Chernyaev’s diaries show the bullet that Britain dodged.

These diaries indicate that, by the 1970s, an alternative government was in place, handpicked by Moscow to take over the apparatus of the British state once the Cold War was lost. There would be a Soviet-style power split: real power would rest in the chairmanship and the bureaucracy, with the politicians simply the front men. Some of the Labour men the Soviets were grooming were paid agents, others fellow travellers. Yet even front-rank politicians were pathetically anxious to reach some kind of understanding with the Soviet regime.

And Mr Gordon Brown recently praised to the rafters the late Jack Jones, a paid up KGB agent who spied on Britain for 45 years.

Ah, well. At least Brown didn't slap a knighthood on Arthur Scargill, a lifelong Stalinist and proud of it, so we can thank Heavens for small favours.

The Atomic Cafe

I got a chance to watch The Atomic Cafe for the first time since it came out in 1982. It's always good to see a film holding up as well today as it did back then. At the time, I thought it was a loaded, dishonest piece of blinkered left-wing bigotry and naivete sailing under the false flag of a documentary. In 2009, I think it's exactly the same–with the exception that now I'd describe it as criminal naivete. Small wonder that Michael Moore, in the days when he merely resembled a barrage balloon, studied at the producers' feet.

Fair dues, The Atomic Cafe was an innovative piece of filmmaking for its time. Producers Pierce Rafferty, Kevin Rafferty and Jayne Loader knew that there was no way that they could get their CND-friendly message across directly without sounding like a load of pedantic scolds, so they dumped the narrative and went for using clips and soundtracks derived from stock footage. The result is genuinely funny in places, it does flow well for its 88 minutes running time, and seeing stock footage that was almost impossible to find before the Internet was fascinating back in '82, but none of this saves Cafe from emerging as a product of the Berkeley, Birkenstocks, and bong water set who talk smugly over their fair trade lattes about what a load of rubes infest the United States who won't do as their self-appointed betters tell them.

Cafe is one of those films that only thrives when the audience shares a huge cargo of shared assumptions with the filmmakers. There is, of course, the usual snobbery: White people are racists, people who dress neatly in suits or pressed skirts and have proper grooming must be conformist nitwits, and rural working-class people are hillbillies. All this is self-evident because poor production values and bad acting in the stock footage is objective proof of low intelligence and probable inbreeding. This is especially true if the fimmakers decide to replace the original soundtrack with a country western novelty song.

Cafe is supposed to chronicle the development of atomic weapons and the Cold War, but there is no context given for any of it. When it aims at satire, it strikes the very propaganda it allegedly mocks. The film opens with the bombing of Hiroshima, which is made to look like an act of gratuitous sadism without an inch of footage given to the atrocities and fanaticism of Imperial Japan that brought them to this pass. The threat of Communism is treated as nothing more than paranoia on the part of the simplistic, consumerist Americans that lead to such obvious (to the filmmakers) injustices as the McCarthy hearings (that Senator McCarthy had nothing to do with) and the execution of the Rosenbergs for trading atomic secrets to the Soviets. Cafe gives a full five minutes of screen time to the latter and implies that the Rosenbergs were innocent victims of mob justice. Never mind that they were couldn't have been more guilty if they'd worn hats with neon "I'm guilty" signs. Sad music and footage of orphaned Rosenberg children carried the day and made a nice, albeit pointless, segue to footage of a soulless Levittown that shows what a barren lie the American Dream was. Lenny Bruce, where art thou!

From there, the message is that Americans in the 1950s were ultraconformist drones who all voted for Eisenhower and were to a man uptight and frustrated because sex wouldn't be invented until 1962. There's no indication that Americans had recently come out of a bloody war before which was a great depression where people not only feared poverty, but also the threat of something akin to a fascist takeover lead by their own reformist government flapping in the wings for nearly a decade. Never mind a weary people enjoying postwar prosperity, Americans back then were just a childish, pampered lot; trivial, oblivious to human suffering, fearful of a non-existent Communist threat and incurious about the horrors perpetrated by their government in their name. Small wonder when Rafferty et al show a hypothetical atomic attack on the US, it's almost with a sense of satisfaction as if these silly Americans are getting what they deserve. Naturally, it isn't a Soviet bomber that drops The Bomb, but the Enola Gay on full irony alert. To quote the infamous Reverend wright, America's chickens were coming home to roost.

Then, in the real world, Reagan, Thatcher, and the Pope came along, ended the threat of all-out nuclear war by consigning Communism to the dustbin of history, and spoiled all their fun.

Some people have no consideration.

Rehearsing the end of the world

Not a job I would have wanted. Probably would have involved ever so much fuss on the day.

Lightly Grilled Sir Bernard

The Soviets tried to assassinate Sir Bernard Lovell, the man behind the Jodrell Bank radio telescope and unsung hero of the Cold War, using the world's largest death ray.

Well, according to the Times article, he is one of the world's most eminent astrologers.

Ground Zero

Are you safe from nuclear attack? Check out how you'd do with this handy Ground Zero map generator.

I take great comfort in knowing that even if the nearest small town was insanely targeted by the Red Chinese (the only credible H-bomb threat. Iran et al are all sub-Hiroshima size), Chez Szondy would still be well outside the blast zone.

Ice Station Zebra

Somebody asked the other day what Ice Station Zebra is.

Three answers:

1. Howard Hughes's favourite film, which he watched over 500 times
2. One of Patrick McGoohan's finest performances
3. 148 minutes of pure entertainment
   

The Pionen

A Swedish Cold War nuclear bunker converted into an ultra-modern data centre.

Now if it just had a nuclear reactor, a pool of piranhas, an obvious self-destruct button, and a dress code that required black turtle necks, it would be perfect.

Major Boothroyd, Call Your Service

Minox announces that they are releasing a digital version of their famous Riga miniature camera.

How they will produce reels of digital microfilm that can be used as plot devices in cheap B movies has yet to be determined.

Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Call Your Service

An old Atlas missile silo converted into a luxury home complete with private airstrip.

Not as good as a volcano, but with a death ray and a a pool full of piranhas, I'm sure it will do.