Super Creepy!

[rallymodeller]

Excellent alternative history story this month on alternatehistory.net:

Dispatches From Hell: Documents from the War

Alternate take on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Just read it. Gripping stuff...  

[Nick]

Go through the rest of the stories on that site, there's some great stuff there for our backstories.

It (Almost) Happened Here is about the Nazi invasion and the Allied defence of Ireland. This drags the USA into WW2 a year earlier and the Irish Air Corps get to fly more Spitfires, P-40 Warhawks and A-20s and B-25s (but these don't fit the timescale well).

The Oblong Box is a very well told story about a failed invasion.

I'm still browsing the rest of them but it looks good so far!

Nick B)  

[NARSES2]

Watched "13 Days" again the other night - amazing film IMHO

I was a kid during the Cuban Missile Crisis but can still clearly remember my mum talking to her mate and the chilling line went "well looks like war tommorow". It was so matter of fact, but then WWII and the Blitz was still fresh in her memory.

Chris

PS - thanks for the link

[Madoc]

Folks,

Regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis as starting WWIII

/cue Maxwell Smart voice/

Would you believe we missed it by >this< much!

/end Maxwell Smart voice/

Madoc

[bobbo]

Following up, this link from AH.com is on a scenario of the Cuban Missile War . . It's long, but well worth reading. 

http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=65071

bobbo

[Weaver]

Damn that's good: you can feel the hysteria rising as you read it even though you know it's not real. 

When I was a kid I used to have serious nightmares about a nuclear war. Serious ones: sometimes a vivid imagination is not a blessing....

[JayBee]

I was in secondary school at the time. I remember walking to the bus stop and we were talking " It's lucky it is raining to-day that would cut down any Flash and help stop the spread of fall-out" All very cool calm and misinformed from a bunch of young teens!

[Weaver]

One day at school (early 1980s) our popular, slightly loopy biology teacher came in with a bad back because, as it turned out, she'd been digging a fallout shelter in the garden with her husband at the weekend. A hand immediately went up.

"Why?"

She started going over the pros and cons of different types of fallout shelter, but the questioner interrupted her:

"No Miss, I mean why bother? Why do you want to survive a nuclear war? I don't!"

Being a naturally optimistic and positive soul, she was a bit taken aback by that, and conducted a quick poll. It turned out that the whole class strongly agreed with the questioner, and she couldn't shake us either. Twenty-eight 14yr-old boys had all quietly but firmly decided, without discussion, that they'd rather be killed in the initial attack than deal with what came after.

She was a bit quiet for the rest of the day......



Me and my aircraft-geek mate Chris always joked that on receipt of the warning, we'd go into the middle of Manchester and try for the ultimate plane-spot, i.e. to correctly identify the warhead as it came down....

[StephenMiller]

I will have to add the BBC's Threads from 1984 and The War Game from 1965.  Anyone remember those two?  Both still give me the creeps after many years!

[BillSlim]

I will have to add the BBC's Threads from 1984 and The War Game from 1965.  Anyone remember those two?  Both still give me the creeps after many years!

I've got Threads on DVD, it's chilling, but well worth a watch. I'm also a fan of The War Game (if one can be described as such about that sort of film).

Both of those AH stories are good, but IMVHO both over estimate the number of warheads that the USSR could deliver to targets outside Europe. For example the Soviet literally had a handful of working ICBMs (of doubtful reliability) and a small bomber force. The whole reason for putting IRBM and SRBM missiles on Cuba was to turn them into 'virtual' ICBMs.

I think that the novel 'Resurrection Day' has a more realistic target plot. The USA is still badly damaged and reduced to second rank power, but the USSR is totally destroyed, which the Americans did have the capability to do in 1962. Europe chooses to remain neutral and survives.

Assuming a scenario where Europe is involved I think we'd be the one's glowing in the dark along with the Soviets and Canada and the USA would survive, although hurt.

"No Miss, I mean why bother? Why do you want to survive a nuclear war? I don't!"

Where there's life there is always hope. So long as you are not at Ground Zero there are a lot of ways of protecting oneself from the effects of a nuclear initiation, some quite simple.

Despite having grown up in the '80s nuclear war was not something I ever worried about.

[Weaver]

"No Miss, I mean why bother? Why do you want to survive a nuclear war? I don't!"

Where there's life there is always hope. So long as you are not at Ground Zero there are a lot of ways of protecting oneself from the effects of a nuclear initiation, some quite simple.

Despite having grown up in the '80s nuclear war was not something I ever worried about.

That's an adult perspective, but remember, we are talking about 14 yr olds here. I had nightmares about it when I was a little kid, but by secondary school I understood enough to realise that it was actually very unlikely. It wasn't something that we talked about or worried about every day at 14, this was just the response when confronted with the hypothetical and asked to choose.




Threads was shot around the North West, with some of the refugee scenes being done up at Buxton. I remember an interview with the director where he said that the thing that creeped him out was how quickly the non-professional extras playing the refugees adopted the correct manner and appearance without much direction, almost as though it was already inside them somewhere.

[rickshaw]

I did nuclear strategy as part of my Master of Defence studies in 1986.  It was a surreal experience, to say the least.  You'd be quite easily talking about "megadeaths" and arguing the merits of a first strike strategy and when the seminar had finished you'd walk outside and have to shake yourself hard to realise what you'd been discussing.   As I did it at ADFA (Australian Defence Force Academy) and I was the token lefty, it was an interesting experience.  I still have a big library devoted to nuclear strategy.  I picked up dozens of books very cheaply at remainder sales when the Cold War ended.  Most of them make very interesting reading, if for nothing else because they really do illustrate a completely different paradigm of thinking.

Who remembers "Fail Safe" (the original version) and "Dr. Strangelove"?  Both were based on the same book, "Red Alert".  Both came to very different conclusions and in many ways, Strangelove was IMHO the more realistic of the two, despite being intended as a satire.  Its humour was rather closer to the truth than we realise.

Growing up downunder, it all though, seemed terribly remote and unreal.  Has anybody painted their V-bomber crews with black eye-patches?

[Weaver]

I did nuclear strategy as part of my Master of Defence studies in 1986.  It was a surreal experience, to say the least.  You'd be quite easily talking about "megadeaths" and arguing the merits of a first strike strategy and when the seminar had finished you'd walk outside and have to shake yourself hard to realise what you'd been discussing.   

My ex-girlfriend had a job (before I met her) working for the civil defense planning department of Manchester City Council. She was involved in things like plotting fallout patterns, calculating casualty rates, surviving resources etc... She couldn't talk about it in detail for obvious reasons, but she had absolutely NO tolerance for ideas about what to do after a nuclear war. Whenever somebody would start waffling on about how they'd survive and what they'd do, she'd just look at them and say "no, you won't" and then leave the room. She eventually quit the job because it depressed her so much.

Growing up downunder, it all though, seemed terribly remote and unreal.  Has anybody painted their V-bomber crews with black eye-patches?

I well remember the look on my young freind Lisa's face as we sat in the Vulcan cockpit at Woodford airshow having that particular bit of nastiness explained to us....

[rickshaw]

I did nuclear strategy as part of my Master of Defence studies in 1986.  It was a surreal experience, to say the least.  You'd be quite easily talking about "megadeaths" and arguing the merits of a first strike strategy and when the seminar had finished you'd walk outside and have to shake yourself hard to realise what you'd been discussing.   

My ex-girlfriend had a job (before I met her) working for the civil defense planning department of Manchester City Council. She was involved in things like plotting fallout patterns, calculating casualty rates, surviving resources etc... She couldn't talk about it in detail for obvious reasons, but she had absolutely NO tolerance for ideas about what to do after a nuclear war. Whenever somebody would start waffling on about how they'd survive and what they'd do, she'd just look at them and say "no, you won't" and then leave the room. She eventually quit the job because it depressed her so much.

It is a depressing subject.  I think even Threads, for all its brutal realism was in many ways an overly romantic view of the UK after a nuclear attack.   

Amongst my books I have a copy of "When the Wind Blows".  Very depressing.  I also have the Australian Government's "How to survive a nuclear attack" civil defence book.  Even more depressing.  They just thought it would be like the Blitz, just a bit worse.

Growing up downunder, it all though, seemed terribly remote and unreal.  Has anybody painted their V-bomber crews with black eye-patches?

I well remember the look on my young freind Lisa's face as we sat in the Vulcan cockpit at Woodford airshow having that particular bit of nastiness explained to us....

I first encountered it in the Mess as a young digger from some Artillery gunners who were joking about how to spot for a nuclear fire mission.  They'd hold their hand up over one eye, give the fire orders for the first spotting round and then uncover the good eye and say, "fire for effect" and then cover both eyes.  Amusing when drunk but in a very worrying way (in reality they actually planned to spot with a smoke round, not a live nuke round).

[NARSES2]

Even more depressing.  They just thought it would be like the Blitz, just a bit worse.

I think that sums it up and is backed up by my note about my mum's conversation during the Cuban Missile crisis.

I have seen some 1950's UK Civil Defence footage on Nuclear attack and it is all totally sureal and even banal, at least the stuff intended for public consumption anyway. The stuff intended for those involved is much harsher but still probably way off the truth. The US footage of kids hiding under school desks would be laughable if it wasn't so sad. Most people couldn't grasp the horror of what would happen in the 50's and 60's and we probably still can't.