No, not the magazine, which I still like.
Nor the TV show, which didn’t exist yet.
Between my two stays in Paris in the spring and summer of 2011, my son
David and I took the drive tour around Enterprise Nature Park on the former
Volunteer Army Ammunition Plant site. As
a side attraction off the main tour route is Bunker Hill Loop. Wondering what that was all about, we took
the detour.
It turned out that the detour is so-named because the bunkers for the
technicians and support personnel in the event of a global thermonuclear war
when the plant was operational lie along that road. As for why the powers-that-be decided these
were needed, the plant, along with TVA headquarters, the dam, and the Sequoyah
nuclear power facility helped place the Chattanooga area in the top ten list of
targets for Soviet missiles.
Most of the bunkers are closed, but at least a couple are open so
visitors can see inside. These even have
mock supplies and stores of “explosives” to show how it was laid out for
real. With conical roofs, the space
inside is not that big and the walls are six feet thick concrete. Upon stepping inside and gaping in
astonishment for several minutes, David exclaimed, “Holy shit! The Cold War was real!”
At which inside my head I replied, “Nah, us and the Soviets, we were just
kidding!” Right?
Most people, including folks who like me were college-age in the early
1980’s, have forgotten or refuse to recognize just how perilous those times
were for us, for the Soviets, and for the whole world. In large part, the wall between a tense but
secure peace and MAD (mutually assured destruction) became paper-thin due to
the phallus-waving, mine-is-bigger-than-yours foreign policy brought to us,
along with his “Voodoo Economics”, by Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan, who has
been aptly nicknamed Ronnie Raygun.
All this came back to mind when I was catching up on FX’s new series “The
Americans”, especially when I was watching the fourth episode. The show stars Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys
as Soviet KGB case officers who have been living in Washington, D.C., for
nearly twenty years as deep cover “illegals” supposedly masquerading as a
middle-class American couple n the suburbs with two kids, etc. I say “masquerading” because after twenty
years of “pretending” the two case officers are finding the lines somewhat
blurred.
Despite the fact that while in the Navy in the late ‘80’s I worked for
its branch of NSA’s Central Security Service (the former Naval Security Group,
now the Information Operations Directorate of the Naval Network Warfare
Command), I find myself rooting for the two KGB case officers as well as the
KGB secretary blackmailed into becoming an agent for the FBI
counterintelligence agent who lives across the street from the deep cover KGB
couple.
A few points of information: KGB was the main foreign intelligence agency
for what was once the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR); KGB is the
initials of the Russian language for Committee of State Security. Roughly, it corresponds to our CIA (Central
Intelligence Agency), and the reason the FBI is their antagonist in the series
is because FBI has responsibility for domestic counterintelligence.
Operatives of intelligence agencies who are actual employees of those
agencies are called “case officers”; the ones from whom they actually get the
information are properly called “agents”.
The FBI is a bit of an anomaly in this regard since their employees are
called “special agents” and those who supply intelligence are confidential
informants (CI’s).
The successor agency in the Russian Federation to the KGB is the FSB, or
Federal Security Service. The ring of
ten agents busted in 2010, including red-headed “bombshell” Anna Chapman whose
picture appeared on the cover of dozens of magazines after the bust, were case
officers for FSB.
In the fourth episode of the above-mentioned TV series, called “In
Control”, the reaction to the attempted assassination of President Reagan is
shown from the perspectives of both the FBI special agents and the KGB case
officers. It was very realistic, as I
can remember some of the same things being speculated about in the media.
Even more dramatic displays of the paranoia revolve around Reagan’s
almost laughable (in hindsight) attempt to build a missile shield, the
Strategic Defense Initiative (dubbed “Star Wars Defense” by its detractors,
which were many).
Thanks to
Ronnie and the other crazies in his administration, all we had to worry about when
I was at UTC (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga) in the early 1980’s was
achieving peace through mutual annihilation via through global thermonuclear
holocaust.
(That, and
opposing the apartheid of the regime in South Africa which he and his allies
supported.)
In the
early 1980’s, just before another surge in the arms race began, the United
States and the Soviet Union had roughly 40,000 nuclear warheads aimed at each other.
According to some of the anti-nuke literature of the period, each nation had
the capacity to destroy the entire planet and all life on it 30 to 40 times
over, though after the first five or ten times, does it make a difference?
According
to Soviet sociologists Stanislav Roshchin and Tatiana Kabachenko, after citing
results of similar studies done by American scientists in their own country
during that same period, stated that the results of their own studies showed
that the number one fear of Soviet young people ages 12-22 was dying in a
nuclear war, or surviving one alone.
In the
waning years of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule over the USSR and the installation of a
new administration in the White House, tensions between the two countries began
to rise significantly.
The United
States announced that it was planning to find a way to ensure the survival of
the United States after a nuclear war, making a nuclear war winnable.
The United
States furthermore announced that it was initiating the placement of nuclear-tipped
missiles on Continental Europe, within easy striking distance of the
USSR.
The Soviet
Union announced development of a new line of nuclear weapons offensive
capability.
The United
States began attempting to develop the capability to strike down incoming
ICBM’s with ground-launched missiles, which was in violation of the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972.
Thus began
a period of heightened tensions and escalation in the production and
development of nuclear arms that spread a pall of fear across both Europe and
North America. Every day we, the people of the USA, the USSR, and Europe,
lived in fear that the next incident, the next misunderstanding, between the
two superpowers would lead to the launching of missiles by one side or the other
which would result in a counter-action by the side targeted.
If that
happened, both sides would have launched their entire stockpiles of ICBM’s
(intercontinental ballistic missiles) and SLBM’s (submarine-launched ballistic
missiles) in order that they not be destroyed by those of the opposing
side.
Given the
average time it would have taken all those missiles would have reached their
targets, World War III would have lasted about 45 minutes. After such a
war, according to former Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev, the survivors would
envy the dead, not that they would be living much longer.
The mood
of many people, the ones who were aware of the danger, is best summed up in the
lyrics of a song by a German pop group called Nena, first released in German in
1983 and in English in 1984, called “99 Red Balloons”.
At the
beginning of the song, Nena and a friend buy a bag of 99 red balloons, fill
them up with helium and release them into the sky. A bug in someone’s
early warning system signals that an attack is underway, planes and missiles
are launched, and at the end of the song, she sings,
“It's all over and I'm standing pretty.
In this dust that was a city.
If I could find a souvenir
Just to prove the world was here.
And here is a red balloon
I think of you and let it go.”
The small
hope that this would not happen, and that sanity would prevail, is summed up in
the lyrics of the song “Russians” by the artist Sting, at the end of which he
sings,
“We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
What might save us, me and you
Is that the Russians love their children too.”
Not long
after I arrived at Clark Air Base in December 1987 when I was with the Navy, I
learned from one of my shipmates, who had been the Sixth Fleet was in the
Eastern Mediterranean in support of the Marines in Lebanon, that in September
1982 World War III had almost happened.
Our forces
there went to DefCon 2 along with at least those of Europe, CENTCOM (Central
Command), and NORAD (North American Air Defense Command), a greater number of
forces than were at that level during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And the
heightened threat level remained for nearly two weeks.
The threat
level was raised because of the defensive actions of the Soviets taken due to
the proximity of so many American forces combined with the carelessly
belligerent rhetoric coming from President Raygun and the rest of the White
House crew (many of the same people who later brought us the war in Iraq during
the Bush II administration).
One wrong
move and that would have been it: no them, no us, no more.
I would
have died at age 19, a university sophomore studying political science and at
the time pre-seminary. My son David
never would have been born; in fact, his mother and I never would have met. The Volunteer Army Ammunition Plant would be
an irradiated wasteland instead of Enterprise South. The FX series “The Americans” would never
have been made.
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