The Late Cultural Cold War

A few days before the Thanksgiving holiday in 1983, nearly half of U.S. households with television sets—more than 100 million viewers—tuned in to watch the obliteration of Lawrence, Kansas in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. A made-for-TV movie that aired primetime on ABC, The Day After climaxed with fictional footage of the bombs bursting in air: a grinding four-minute segment replete with a trio of mushroom clouds towering over humans seared instantaneously to the bone amid the horrified screams of the cowering not-yet-dead. Three years later, as U.S. President Ronald Reagan worked to secure a historic arms control agreement with Soviet Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev to ban intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, the president sent a telegram to the director of The Day After, Nicholas Meyer. “Don’t think your movie didn’t have any part of this, because it did,” Reagan wrote. The incident is a highlight in Andrew Hunt’s We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes: Late Cold War Culture in the Age of Reagan. Having set out to write a book “that functioned as a sort of sequel” to Stephen J. Whitfield’s pioneering 1996 study Culture of the Cold War, Hunt contends that because of cultural change and social unrest in the 1960s and 1970s, Cold War culture in the 1980s “bore little resemblance to its early postwar era ancestor.” Unlike the restrictive early Cold War environment of Hollywood blacklists, House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings, and Hoover’s crusading G-men, in the 1980s an anti-Cold War culture thrived, Hunt argues, “oftentimes eclipsing the dominant Cold War culture in which it rebelled” (2–3).

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