You know those folk who are nostalgic for the “old days” when their formative years were all bright and shiny? I’m not one of them.
Being a child of the Cold War, my memories of my teens and young adulthood are tinged with the ever-present threat of a nuclear holocaust.
Born in the same year as the Berlin Wall went up, the mood music was always one of being a misstep away from hoping you weren’t one of the survivors left in a radioactive slag heap after an exchange of nukes.
Gruelling films like Threads painted a chilling picture of what could so easily happen if we fell off the knife edge of mutually assured destruction between the Soviets and the West.
It was a threat that worked its way into everyday culture – even the pop charts, with songs like Russians by Sting and Kate Bush’s Breathing.
Forget The Snowman and check out Raymond Briggs’ When the Wind Blows. If you don’t have nightmares after that, then you’re the sort that eats cheese with impunity before bedtime.
‘What would you do if the four-minute warning went off?’
Meanwhile, back in the harsh reality of the 1980s, there was the Protect and Survive government information campaign waiting in the wings to tell you how to tie an ID tag to your granny’s toe before shoving her corpse out the door.
There was also cheerfully optimistic advice on how to build a shelter in your house to protect you from a nuclear blast because, you know, a table and dust sheet wards off a multimegaton warhead just fine. It was propaganda designed to keep calm and docile a population that would be incinerated if the balloon ever went up.
Even nights out in pubs and dinner parties at pals would come round to: “What would you do if the four-minute warning went off?”
I would dry my hair. I know because, one day in the mid-1980s, the warning sirens were accidentally set off in Edinburgh, but I didn’t hear them over the noise of my hairdryer.
And then the Berlin Wall fell and hope followed behind it.
The Secret Bunker became a tourist attraction and Stonehaven’s own nuclear shelter built for local bigwigs now has Doors Open Day tours
A collective sigh of relief, the chance to tag Boxing Day 1991 as the end of the Cold War and live our lives without fear of the gates of hell opening.
The Secret Bunker became a tourist attraction, and Stonehaven’s own nuclear shelter, built for local bigwigs fleeing the end of the world, now has Doors Open Day tours.
The genie is back out of the bottle
Fast forward 31 years and here we are, wondering if Vladimir Putin really is deranged and deluded enough to go nuclear in Ukraine – and, if he did, what would the West’s response be?
We can only hope and pray that Putin is sabre-rattling, and that wise heads will prevail. After all, the future of humanity is at stake and, surely, a land grab isn’t worth setting the world ablaze.
But, still, the genie is back out of the bottle and, once again, the dreaded hand of Armageddon is sitting on all our shoulders.
I hope, with all my heart, that in coming weeks, months and years we can lift that shadow again.
If we can’t? Well, at least I now know where the nuclear shelter is in Stoney.
Scott Begbie is entertainment editor for The Press & Journal and Evening Express
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