Germany, born early seventies. Background, there was a strong “never again” sentiment after WW2 and to that end we were educated about the horrors of war from an early age. WW2 and the Third Reich was discussed in school and also very present in living memories of grandparents and their friends.
It was made very clear to us where the first nukes would drop (Germany) and who would drop them (Germans). Flexible response was explained to us, the Nato strategy of using nukes first, as well as MAD. We were given estimated times from sirens blaring to explosion. We visited a bunker, and we were imagining nuclear hellscapes and asking ourselves if one should even try to enter a bunker to try to survive. Pershing II were discussed and MIRV, which were new technologies at the time.
Sonic booms from military jets were common, we would respond to that with “Russians are coming”. Not fear, but fatalism was the usual response, and a large number of young men would reject draft and opt for civilian service, wanting to do something productive during service instead of training to get pulverized in the first wave.
Then came Gorbatschow, and Reagan would still pursue his star wars programme, which left us scratching our heads.
Not the point of your post, but I’ve never seen Gorbatschow spelled like that. In English it’s transliterated as Gorbachev. That’s super interesting. Like I know Russian has a different alphabet, but I just never thought about how Latin spellings of Russian words are basically approximations. I wouldn’t even know how to figure out other languages’ spellings of words like that. Like I could go to the other languages’ wikipedia pages… but I’d need to know the spelling to get there.
Wikipedia can work as a translation tool, because the same concept is linked through the language selection. You go to the English page for Gorbachev and open the language menu which will show you pages about the same person in all available and linked languages.
Germany, born early seventies. Background, there was a strong “never again” sentiment after WW2 and to that end we were educated about the horrors of war from an early age. WW2 and the Third Reich was discussed in school and also very present in living memories of grandparents and their friends.
It was made very clear to us where the first nukes would drop (Germany) and who would drop them (Germans). Flexible response was explained to us, the Nato strategy of using nukes first, as well as MAD. We were given estimated times from sirens blaring to explosion. We visited a bunker, and we were imagining nuclear hellscapes and asking ourselves if one should even try to enter a bunker to try to survive. Pershing II were discussed and MIRV, which were new technologies at the time.
Sonic booms from military jets were common, we would respond to that with “Russians are coming”. Not fear, but fatalism was the usual response, and a large number of young men would reject draft and opt for civilian service, wanting to do something productive during service instead of training to get pulverized in the first wave.
Then came Gorbatschow, and Reagan would still pursue his star wars programme, which left us scratching our heads.
Not the point of your post, but I’ve never seen Gorbatschow spelled like that. In English it’s transliterated as Gorbachev. That’s super interesting. Like I know Russian has a different alphabet, but I just never thought about how Latin spellings of Russian words are basically approximations. I wouldn’t even know how to figure out other languages’ spellings of words like that. Like I could go to the other languages’ wikipedia pages… but I’d need to know the spelling to get there.
Wikipedia can work as a translation tool, because the same concept is linked through the language selection. You go to the English page for Gorbachev and open the language menu which will show you pages about the same person in all available and linked languages.
That’s actually really cool!