Cold War – How The Cold War Nuclear Arms Race Affected The World

It has been a while since I posted on my blog. In the background I’ve been working on my ‘Lissa Blackwood’ action-thriller series, preparing these articles about the Cold War for publication and considering how I want my website to look in 2023. I hope you like the new-look banner!

As time passes we are forgetting what the Cold War was like. We are forgetting what it means to live in a country under the threat of a four minute warning before the bombs start to hit. We are forgetting how dangerous nuclear weapons are to both our individual survival, and the survival of every living thing on the surface of this planet. We are forgetting that these weapons are not toys to be played with as counters during political negotiations.

My ‘Cold War – How The Cold War Nuclear Arms Race Affected The World’ articles present some key facts and stories from the Cold War. Sharing them will help to ensure that the Cold War is still talked about, and provide some context for the ‘New Cold War’ which seems to have already started.

I have very strong memories of the closing years of the First Cold War. For a teenager growing up in those times, the news was full of reports about anti-nuclear protests by CND, the Falklands War, the Reagan Administration’s “Star Wars project” (ie SDI) , social uprisings in Eastern Europe, the eventual fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification. Films like ‘When the Wind Blows’, ‘The Day After’ and ‘Threads’ had shown just how devastating a nuclear war would be. I remember news reports of US Cruise Missile launchers prowling the UK countryside on manoeuvres, practicing for the day that they might need to rain nuclear hell on the USSR.

‘The World’ seemed like a very dangerous place.
It was.
And it still is.

Culture played its part in the Cold War, of course. Over the years my sense of Cold War style conflict has been inspired by wonderful films like the James Bond series (of course), and ‘The Ipcress File’. As a reader I’ve been enthralled by more classics than I count from the likes of Ian Fleming, John le Carré, Tom Clancy, Jack Higgins, Robert Harris, Alistair MacLean, James Patterson… and too many more to list here! All of that has blended with my lived experience of the Cold War into themes that often appear in my own fiction.

I hope these articles inspire your own reflections on what it really means to be in a Cold War.