The Annotated Mixtape

Yet in spite of the immeasurable importance of nuclear weapons, the world has declined, on the whole, to think about them very much. We have thus far failed to fashion, or to discover within ourselves, an emotional or intellectual or political response to them. This peculiar failure of response…has itself been such a striking phenomenon that it has to be regarded as an extremely important part of the nuclear predicament.

—Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (1982)

February 19, 1982: at Danceteria in New York City, Section 25—an obscure-and-growing-obscurer band from seedy seaside resort Blackpool, England—began their set with the four-and-a-half-minute instrumental “Trident.” Little more than a single searing, oscillating synthesizer note, flanged drums bashing a martial rhythm, and a doomy, throbbing bassline playing an octave interval from which it climbed and descended, the song was “never performed in more dramatic style,” according to the liner notes of Live in America &Europe 1982, a posthumously issued document of two brief tours Section 25 undertook that year. “Trident,” like much of Section 25’s output, is some of the most ominous, hypnotic, vaguely danceable music recorded in that era.

June 21, 1981: the Electric Boat Division of the General Dynamics Corporation announced “a very successful [test] run” of the USS Ohio—the United States’s first Trident nuclear-powered submarine, a $1.2 billion, eighteen-thousand-ton vessel armed with Trident nuclear missiles, still considered “the world’s deadliest weapon”—and promised to deliver it, two years behind schedule, to the Bangor Naval Submarine Base in Puget Sound later that year. Designed to patrol the seas, submerged for months at a time and following random courses to avoid detection, the Trident offered mobile deterrence to the USSR’s more numerous land-based strategic nuclear arsenal, and was considered provocative in part because its missiles could be fired underwater from points near the Soviet coastlines, thus decreasing warning time. At the Ohio’s commissioning ceremonies, on Veterans Day, 1981, Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman, Jr., told an audience of eight thousand that “our Trident submarines are deterrence personified.” A month before Section 25 played at Danceteria, the Air Force Space and Missile Test Center announced that the Ohio had successfully test-fired its first Trident missile.

In England, meanwhile, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher awaited a supply of Trident missiles she had requested for British NATO forces. Thatcher had approved memos written by Britain’s Ministry of Defence in 1978, the year before she was elected, stating that Trident missiles should replace the 1960s-era Polaris nuclear missiles then arming British submarines. In its report on these memos, the Manchester Guardian noted that

the British government opted for the Trident nuclear weapons system because it estimated it could kill up to 10 million Russians and inflict “unacceptable damage” on the former Soviet Union…. The breakdown of [Moscow or St. Petersburg] as a functioning community could be accomplished by inflicting “severe structural damage” on buildings across 40% of a city, the document argued. If the bombs were detonated in the air, this would be likely to kill at least 40% of the inhabitants instantly. But the document pointed out that up to 30% of city populations could be evacuated to a network of underground bunkers. These would protect people against bombs exploded in the air, it argued, but not against those detonated at ground level.

Between 1979 and 1981, police arrested over four hundred protesters at the General Dynamics shipyard in Groton, Connecticut. Activist Peter DeMott repeatedly drove a van into the rudder of the USS Florida, a Trident submarine under construction, during another launch ceremony; Navy Shore Patrol had to smash the van’s windshield and pull DeMott out to get him to stop. Others hammered missile hatches and splashed blood on submarines, or simply chained themselves together to block the shipyard’s entrance. A quarter of a million people marched through central London as part of a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament rally to protest nuclear missile bases in the UK; a few months later, two or three times as many people gathered in New York’s Central Park to support a nuclear freeze. Activists at Bangor regularly cut fences and planted gardens inside the base to protest the Trident program. When the USS Ohio finally arrived there—in August 1982, after voyaging from Groton through the Panama Canal and up the west coast—forty-six protesters defied its Coast Guard escort in an unsuccessful attempt at a blockade.

But by then, the Ohio’s twenty-four Trident I C-4 missiles—each of them, according to London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies, with a range of over four thousand miles and bearing eight 100-kiloton, multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) warheads—were already on the path to obsolescence: the New York Times had reported in July 1982 that the United States Navy was “accelerating development” of the even more powerful Trident II missile. Not only would the Trident II D-5 be capable of destroying hardened installations, it would be accurate to within a hundred yards, and could achieve a top speed of nearly four miles per second—equivalent to more than 13,500 mph. (It was deployed in 1990.)

Soviet-American détente collapsed with the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and President Jimmy Carter’s declaration of a grain embargo, as well as NATO’s decision that same month to place US Pershing II missiles in Western Europe to counter Soviet SS-20s. Carter’s 1980 boycott of the Moscow Olympics further damaged diplomacy—as did that year’s presidential election in the United States, which included the pledge in the Republican National Convention platform “to achieve overall military and technological superiority over the Soviet Union.” Ronald Reagan believed, as he said in a 1982 speech to British Parliament, that “the emergency is upon us,” and oversaw the most extensive peacetime military buildup in American history. The nuclear arms race he relaunched in the initial months of his presidency would eventually cost the United States, during his administration, $34 million per hour. “An NBC/Associated Press survey in mid-December 1981 found that seventy-six percent of the public believed that nuclear war was ‘likely’ within a few years,” according to Ronald E. Powaski’s book March to Armageddon. “One defense expert after another warned that a nuclear war was inevitable if not imminent. Stated George Kennan: ‘Never in my thirty-five years of public service have I been so afraid of nuclear war.’ Said Admiral Hyman Rickover, creator of America’s nuclear Navy: ‘I think we will probably destroy ourselves.’”

I learned the acronym ICBM—intercontintental ballistic missile—playing Missile Command on a friend’s Atari 2600 around age ten. In that game, adapted from the arcade version, missile contrails a single pixel wide, fired by an unknown—but, at the dawn of the 1980s, implicitly Soviet—aggressor fell from the sky toward silhouetted cities our anti-ballistic missile batteries defended. When a missile struck, a small mushroom cloud expanded and buildings crumbled. We could intercept the incoming warheads, exploding them in digitized fireballs that rained no debris. But our own missiles, unlike those cascading upon us, were finite in number, and ultimately there was no real defense: the missiles came faster and in greater numbers—even as MIRVs—as the game progressed, until, inevitably, all six cities were annihilated.

If Cold War technologies now seem both fearsome and retro-futurist, provisional and yet enduring—the neutron bomb, the U-2 reconnaissance plane, Project Excelsior’s open-air gondola—then the Atari 2600 console itself was an ideal object from the late Cold War: its hard, grooved black plastic (with a slot to shove the game cartridges into, a few metal switches, and a joystick with a single red button—and in the early 1980s, we all knew what having one’s finger on the button meant) was accented with a fake woodgrain veneer strip along its front, as if to signify both homely appeal and mid-century modernist elegance. The Atari hooked up to the family television set: the tools of our warfare were both unimaginable and strangely familiar.

ICBM conjures a larger lexicon of historical anxiety—bomb shelter, missile silo, proliferation, first strike, NORAD, nuclear winter, mutual assured destruction, electromagnetic pulse—that we have updated to reflect contemporary anxieties: orange threat level, dirty bomb, WMD, anthrax, Homeland Security, pilotless drone, extraordinary rendition, sleeper cells, no-fly list, first responder, Patriot Act. The acronym ICBM depersonalizes weaponry we once knew by its often-mythic names—Atlas, Jupiter, Titan, Poseidon, Nike—but at the cusp of the 1980s we were all, willing or not, experts in military acronyms and terminology.

Section 25, in 1982, barely remained a band. Brothers Larry and Vin Cassidy had fired guitarist Paul Wiggin, in part because of his refusal to fly to gigs. Wiggin’s rasping, echoey textures defined the band’s first two albums, and without him the Cassidys had to discard most of their repertoire. The first record, Always Now, had sold well, but, because of its expensive, elaborate packaging—a heavy, matchbook-style sleeve, the marbleized interior of which was reproduced under a special license—the band had seen little income from it. The self-produced second LP, The Key of Dreams, had been edited from hours of recorded studio improvisation, and their label, Factory Records, offloaded it to its subsidiary Factory Benelux imprint.

The British music press had long mocked Section 25 for their perceived seriousness and lack of humor: “Although the music is rolling, the vocals are harsh and packed with false anger,” Mick Middles declared in Sounds. “The overall effect is unattractive and abrasive.” NME: “Section 25, a drab three-piece. The small, austere bass player orated doomed and distant vocals over angular riffs and thrashing guitar chords.” And in a review of The Key of Dreams, Vinyl offered a series of backhanded compliments:

The strength of these very ordinary gloomy songs lies in their ability to convey subtleties of feeling with as few means as possible…. The only apparent structure in the music is effected by frugal but syncopated drumbeats. Bass guitar and guitar provide mainly atmospheric smears of sound… and the vocalist mouths his lyrics with every appearance of disgust. Provided that you are absolutely knackered or smashed this record will make an oppressive but lasting impression on you.

At Danceteria, the Cassidy brothers were joined by percussionist Lee Shallcross, and, as a three-piece, Section 25 played mainly repetitive, droning dirges, with taped backing tracks to fill out the meager instrumentation of some songs. Larry Cassidy either mumbled or shouted his minimal vocals. The applause following each song evidences a similar scarcity. Not long after the brief American tour, Section 25 retreated to the studio. “When we came back after that tour we did a few gigs in England, but we just were really pissed off at the way things were, and we took a year off to re-think things. Didn’t do anything for a year but write songs,” Vin Cassidy told an interviewer in 1985. “The fact that Paul, the old guitarist, was such a big part of the band when he left—well, it seemed a farce to try and continue doing some of those songs.”

The yellow-and-black fallout shelter symbols affixed to buildings were large enough to see from the car as we drove by, and I saw them everywhere in my hometown: on the granite-and-limestone Memorial Auditorium, on churches, on the courthouse, on brick tenements. Nearly everywhere I went, these rusting, three-triangle signs, hung in the decade before I was born, afforded inescapable reminders of the unthinkable. Replicas can now be purchased at Amazon.com for $19.99: “Rugged and Distressed for Vintage Look.” “Create your own refuge with this Fallout Shelter Sign. Perfect for game rooms, garages, dens, and bars.”

May Street School, which I attended from kindergarten through sixth grade, had been designated a fallout shelter. (Like every child raised in the postwar era, I had to apprehend, simultaneously, the myriad complexities of my life and the world, as well as the fact that it all could be obliterated in a flash of light, and I received these various educations at the same site. Did I know then the folly of believing my neighbors and I could survive a nuclear attack huddled in a basement lunchroom?) In those high-ceilinged classrooms, we hung our coats in cubbies, sat at wooden desks that still had inkwells, and opened the tall, multi-paned windows using poles tipped with brass hooks. We ended each school day with military efficiency, lining up double-file in the dark central hallway to form two patrol lines, each led by a student patrol leader wearing a fluorescent orange belt. Mr. Rowland, who taught sixth grade and supervised dismissal, would not release us until we’d satisfied him we were quiet—someone would always whisper, “Just shut up so we can go”—at which point our patrol lines marched out the north and south doors into the daylight to head home. At 10:00 A.M. every Tuesday, a nearby civil defense siren was tested, and its low wail, even repeated regularly, refused to harmonize with the other school sounds we knew so well: creaking floorboards, hissing radiators, the passing traffic on May Street, Ms. Nadolski’s tapping chalk.

The photograph covers the record’s front sleeve: a steep slate slope in the Snowdonia region of Wales; the hilltop vanished in fog; a series of multicolored poles planted on this rugged terrain, starting from the foreground to shape a precise ninety-degree angle on the land’s irregular contours. A thin gray banner, nearly as invisible as the hilltop, overlays this image: on it, in all-caps sans-serif type, appear the spaced words SECTION 25 FROM THE HIP FACT 90 FACTORY COMMUNICATIONS LTD. The back cover of the album is entirely pale blue but for a similar banner, on which have been reproduced vertical bars the colors of the poles from the front, spaced in 2-D the way the poles appeared in 3-D perspective on the front, with the numbers “25” and “90” inserted between two sets of these vertical bars.

I plucked this cryptic LP from a bin at Al Bum’s—another site of much of my primary education—in 1987. Its cover image combined the pastoral and the postmodern in what felt a direct appeal to my young sensibilities: the natural was, as I experienced it, often obscured by the artificial—irreparably ruined, yet still somehow beautiful. (“This is the region you were born in,” Larry Cassidy mutters in the downbeat “Regions” from The Key of Dreams, acknowledging that whatever world any of us has been born into is always already imperfect.) I knew the Factory label well enough to know I should buy the record; I knew that “FACT 90” was the record’s catalog number; and I knew that if the music on the record was half as cool as the cover art, I would love it.

I did love the LP, eight songs of synthesizers both lush and brutal, crystalline and phantom, pinned down by crisp programmed drums and humanized by Jenny Ross’s sweet, demure voice. I didn’t yet know that this LP was borne of crisis and a year of sequestration, nor that it marked a huge stylistic shift for the band. I didn’t realize that Section 25 had, by the time I found them, already disintegrated a second time, after From the Hip failed to earn the band a living. I only knew that I wanted to buy their other records as quickly as I could find them—first, at Al Bum’s, the Love &Hate LP and the “Bad News Week” 12”—and then, at the old Planet Records shop in Boston’s Kenmore Square, the Always Now LP and most of the early singles. From Newbury Comics, the “Looking from a Hilltop” 12", discounted to $1.99. A friend’s father’s graduate student dubbed The Key of Dreams onto a cassette for me, and I wore that tape out before finding my own copy of the album. For years I headed straight to the “S” bin of every used record store I entered. What British music journalists had, a few years earlier, heard as derivative, dull, and earnest, I found bracing: mid-’80s corporate music insulted me with party-boy hair-band excess, hip-hop braggadocio, syrupy teen pop, and airbrushed has-beens, all so obviously focus-tested and target-marketed. I refused to be a target. Section 25’s music and self-presentation were minimal—everything about the band signified a rigor and an indifference mostly absent in the era’s mass culture. If I was intended to consume the easy and the approachable, my refusals began with my valuation of the difficult and the inaccessible.

My friend Ben and I had, those high school years, encoded the phrase “Nova Scotia” to indicate not only what we imagined a perfectly remote place, but also the idea of retreat from an at-times overwhelming world—“Such a Nova Scotia day,” he’d mutter to me as we passed in the hall, or simply “Nova Scotia”—and Section 25’s music connoted similar feelings. Both Section 25 and Nova Scotia seemed so far off the map of what mattered to everyone but me that I burdened them with whatever meanings I liked. Maybe in 1981 too much morose austerity infected pop music, but by 1987 I drowned in celebratory Reaganesque fake cheer. Like every teenager—though possibly to a greater extent than most—I walked through rainstorms until my sneakers squished, photographed the smokestacks and spires of my city at dusk, discovered the bottomless cup of coffee, wore out the horizon with watching. The relentless dissonance of “Trident” merely reinforced my worldview. How could I have failed to relate to a song titled “Bad News Week” that begins with the proclamation, “It’s good news week: someone’s dropped a bomb somewhere / contaminating atmosphere and blackening the sky”? A quarter century removed from my teenaged self, I still sometimes find solace in this music. Teen angst may never have found a more suitable set of reasons, a more potent real-world context, than the Cold War.

Always Now begins with the propulsive track “Friendly Fires,” in which the sole melodic notes are achieved by Larry Cassidy’s flat, out-of-tune voice. The song is otherwise all insistent drumming, a three-note bassline, and a wash of distorted, screeching jet-engine guitar:

Flying so high

flying so high

you can’t hear them

you can’t see them

they’re on their way

over

to you

No one can escape

this kind of war

40,000 feet above the floor

and the little children

have nowhere to run

they don’t even know

what’s going on

Flying so high

flying so high

you can’t hear them

you can’t see them

they’re on their way

over

to you

As an introduction to Section 25, “Friendly Fires” sets forth not only the self-imposed, anxious constraints of the band’s early sound, but also the dominant theme of much of their music: we are helpless against military power. The early records treat this topic with numbed despair; eventually, as the music became more melodic and sensual, war became something to resist with optimism, however naive that optimism might seem. Still, it would be 1984 before Larry Cassidy could admit to an interviewer from the Lancashire Evening Post that “you’re not as likely to feel suicidal when you hear us now.”

If “Friendly Fires” puts the listener in the position of the Vietnamese and Cambodians being carpet-bombed by B-52s cruising the stratosphere—and it is nearly impossible to hear the song without also recalling Nick Ut’s photograph of Kim Phúc and other children fleeing a napalm strike—and if “Trident” distills the terror of nuclear warheads into a furious, wordless distress signal, Section 25’s subsequent work refined and articulated such emotions. We regard our potential annihilation everywhere in the band’s music, particularly in song titles—“Warhead,” “Be Brave,” “No Abiding Place,” “The Last Man in Europe,” “God’s Playground,” “Beneath the Blade”—and in so many lyrics about bombs going off, “blow[ing] it all to bits,” “drop[ping] the bloody bomb,” and on and on. On side two of From the Hip, the overbearing synthetic tensions of “Program for Light” resolve only in the sound of a massive explosion that leads straight into the acoustic lament “Desert”—a sequence of sounds and titles that does not seem accidental. But these prominent references never reduce the songs to agitprop or easy opportunism. Rather, they seem fundamental to Section 25’s poetics—representing in music a particular dread and despair that afflicted the late 1970s and early 1980s. Countless bands have recorded an anti-nuclear song or two: but Section 25 differed from most in the depth of their sincerity—and, presumably, their terror—about the issue, and their inability to stop making music about our nuclear peril.

Haunted, melancholy soundscapes persisted on the band’s late records, though they became gentler elegies—even featuring a recorder and acoustic guitar in 1985’s B-side “The Guitar Waltz”: “Just want to fry in the white light / With all my friends becoming bright / They glow for days, their fears unknown / And we don’t hear a single moan.” Section 25’s music responded to the late Cold War as much as did Missile Command—it insisted that, in the atomic age, there isn’t much else worth worrying about, no matter how much we may wish to deny the potential for nuclear apocalypse. But just before their 1983 hiatus, Section 25 realized an answer to these anxieties in the ethos not of punk but of hippie culture, and two songs recorded and released in the wake of the US tour document this changing view: “You say you want the truth? / You say you need the truth? / You need to feel the truth? / The truth is love, you know,” Larry Cassidy moans in “The Beast.” “I want to live and love / without fear,” he admits in “Hold Me”: “Without love / we are nothing.” Transcribed, these lyrics seem like schoolboy flower-power clichés: trust me that the context of Section 25’s music—especially since these were two of the band’s first songs to feature prominently the warmth of analog synthesizers—transforms them. To counter the fear of annihilation with candid hopefulness aligned Section 25 with the anti-nuclear Plowshares activists—themselves an outgrowth of the 1960s—who used hardware-store hammers to batter missiles and submarines. We might consider Section 25’s music some of the most secular-humanist post-punk ever recorded.

Having concluded correctly that they could no longer remain ‘punks,’ but rejecting a change of name, the Cassidy brothers recruited Larry’s wife Jenny Ross to play keyboards and sing… new, lighter material…. They unveiled a spiked synthetic pop outfit of considerable so-phistication…. The new-look Section 25 premiered an embryonic electro set at the Hacienda, Manchester, on 3 February 1983…. While by no means disastrous, the date was poorly attended, and…the quartet promptly cancelled further live work to concentrate on further refining their new musical direction…. Between February and August 1983 the core quartet of Larry, Vin, Lee and Jenny worked tirelessly on new material for their make-or-break third album…. In August, the band recorded what became From the Hip at Rockfield Studios in Wales. (James Nice, liner notes to Section 25, Deus ex Machina:Archive Recordings 1983–1985 CD.)

The cover of TIME magazine’s January 31 issue depicted a Pershing II missile lifting into a clouded sky. “NUCLEAR POKER: The Stakes Get Higher And Higher,” read the caption. Strobe Talbott’s lengthy cover story dubbed 1983 “The Year of the Missile,” because of the ongoing dispute about intermediate-range Soviet SS-20 missiles aimed at Western Europe, and the scheduled deployment of intermediate-range US Pershing II missiles in West Germany to counter them; the Pershing II, launched from a mobile carrier and accurate to within fifty meters, could reach targets in the Soviet Union in four to six minutes—leaving the USSR almost no time for a retaliatory strike. “The sense of urgency is intense, the diplomatic activity frenzied,” Talbott wrote. “The Pershing IIs would arc-up to the edge of space and unleash earth-penetrating warheads that can destroy concrete-reinforced bunkers 100 ft. underground,” he noted, adding that “the West Europeans [fear] that their countries might be the battlefield” for the “limited” nuclear exchange Reagan’s administration believed possible.

The Soviets’ covert activities were similarly frenzied. Throughout the early 1980s, the USSR operated the largest-ever peactime “intelligence program,… to scrutinize the United States and NATO for evidence of immediate preparations for nuclear war,” former CIA officer Peter Vincent Pry writes in his book War Scare: Russia and America on the Nuclear Brink. “It was funded and manned at a wartime level, on the assumption that nuclear war was imminent,” and its documents “make crystal clear the Soviet Union’s virtual obsession during the 1980s with the immediate threat of a US nuclear surprise attack.” On February 17, 1983, the KGB cabled its operatives that the program had “acquired an especial degree of urgency” because of NATO’s scheduled deployment of the Pershing II.

Reagan, speaking at the National Association of Evangelicals convention in Florida on March 8, named the USSR an “evil empire.” Two weeks later, in a nationally televised prime-time speech, Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative (or SDI; the next day, Senator Ted Kennedy criticized the plan as “reckless Star Wars schemes,” and the insult stuck):

It took one kind of military force to deter an attack when we had far more nuclear weapons than any other power; it takes another kind now that the Soviets, for example, have enough accurate and powerful nuclear weapons to destroy virtually all of our missiles on the ground. Now, this is not to say that the Soviet Union is planning to make war on us. Nor do I believe a war is inevitable—quite the contrary. But what must be recognized is that our security is based on being prepared to meet all threats….

Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope. It is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive….

What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant US retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?

… Isn’t it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war? We know it is.

The nuclear-scare movie WarGames premiered on June 6, 1983. Twelve years old, I saw it that summer, perhaps because it seemed, with high school—age characters, a movie aimed at kids—especially kids, like me, who’d dabbled with computers. In the film’s opening sequence, one member of an American missile silo crew draws a pistol on his superior, who is unwilling to follow protocol and “kill twenty million people” during a launch exercise that neither man knows is only a test. “Twenty-three minutes from warning to impact,” an assistant says in a meeting at North American Defense Command (NORAD) after the failed test. “Six minutes if it’s sub-launched.” She speaks these specifics in a weary, almost blasé tone—and because her words delineated how little I knew about the details of nuclear war, they suggested, as I sat in the theater’s darkness, how suddenly and terribly our ends might come. “I wish I didn’t know about any of this,” Matthew Broderick’s character complains, late in the movie, when he thinks that the simulated nuclear war he started on a computer will, within hours, incite a real one. “I wish I was like everybody else in the world and tomorrow it would just be over.”

We see two primary sets in WarGames—the rumpled suburban bedroom of a computer nerd, and NORAD’s war room beneath Cheyenne Mountain. The computer terminal and the cathoderay tube screen link these two rooms; in each room, characters initiate and observe nuclear war simulations. As the film clarifies, the bedroom is a war room in a nuclear conflict: civilians and cities are primary targets, as are airstrips, silos, and radar installations. The film offers optics not unlike those of my friend’s Atari running Missile Command, though on the cinema’s wide screen: as NORAD’s computer cycles through various possible causes and strategies under which nuclear war might be waged, the flickering graphics of missile flight paths and strikes play over the characters in the film and the audience in the theater, all of us rapt at the prospects our technologies have wrought.

If the idea that a computer could start World War III seemed no more than a chilling fiction in the summer of 1983, consider Ronald E. Powaski’s assertion that

in an eighteen-month period that ended June 30, 1980,…NORAD experienced 147 false alarms that were serious enough to require an assessment of whether they constituted a Soviet attack. In November 1979 fighters were scrambled after a NORAD computer falsely indicated that a Soviet attack was in progress. Twice in June 1980 a computer falsely warned that the Soviets had launched submarine-and land-based missiles at the United States. It was discovered that a computer chip costing forty-six cents was responsible for the false alarms. No one could say how many computer failures and accidents the Soviets [had] experienced. Ultimately, and ironically, America’s security had come to depend as much on the efficiency of Soviet computers as on its own.

Korean Air Lines Flight 007—a Boeing 747 traveling from New York to Seoul with a layover to refuel in Anchorage, Alaska—strayed unaware into Soviet airspace in the early morning hours of September 1, 1983. A Soviet Sukhoi Su-15 intercepted Flight 007 over the Sea of Okhotsk and Sakhalin Island before firing two missiles that brought down the airliner. The crew and passengers—269 people, including Larry McDonald, a congressman from Georgia—were all killed.

Several months earlier, shortly after Reagan’s announcement of SDI, the US Pacific Fleet had conducted its largest maneuvers since World War II. “During the three-week exercise, Navy warplanes… directly overflew Soviet military installations on the Kurile Islands, just north of Japan,” Seymour Hersh writes in his book “The Target Is Destroyed.” And on the night of August 31 to September 1, Hersh reports, a US RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft—a modified Boeing 707—had flown figure-eights off the Kamchatka peninsula in advance of a suspected Soviet missile test; KAL 007 flew into the airspace the RC-135 had just vacated. In War Scare, Pry—citing a KGB double agent—claims that “the Soviets may have shot down KAL 007 because they mistook the airliner for an RC-135…. Their hysteria about an anticipated US surprise attack led them to overreact,” and concludes that

the United States and its NATO allies have never shot down even a Soviet or Russian intelligence aircraft, let alone a civilian airliner, in retaliation for airspace violations, because the threat posed by such intrusions does not justify so draconian a response. The Soviet destruction of KAL 007 makes sense militarily and politically only if the Soviets believed an attack on their territory was imminent.

As US and Japanese intelligence assembled intercepted Soviet communications and determined that the airliner had been shot down, Hersh recounts, “some senior Air Force and Navy officers in the Pacific… ‘got emotional,’ as one officer recalled, and began formulating actions ‘that could have started World War III.’” US officials began a propaganda war—through the press, on the floor of the United Nations, and during previously scheduled arms talks in Geneva—with their Soviet counterparts over incompletely interpreted and translated intelligence. The US stoked public anger over what Reagan called a deliberate “massacre”; Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov claimed the flyover was a premeditated provocation and accused the Reagan administration of “imperial ambitions,” “extreme adventurism,” and “hypocritical preaching about morality and humanism.”

If the shootdown of KAL 007 was “a function,” as Hersh writes, “both of poor command-and-control and a ‘spastic response’ by Soviet Air Defense officials,” then the actions of Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov a few weeks later were anything but. Petrov commanded an early warning bunker outside Moscow on September 26, when, as he recalled in a 1998 interview with the Daily Mail, the “system suddenly showed the launch of five ballistic nuclear missiles within three minutes from a base on the Atlantic coast of America. It was showing a full nuclear attack. I felt as if I’d been punched in my nervous system.” But the nuclear first strike is designed to overwhelm an opponent’s offensive and defensive capabilities and neutralize retaliatory capabilities; five missiles could not do so. After ground-based radar failed to confirm incoming ICBMs, Petrov surmised that the system had malfunctioned, and didn’t forward the alert up the chain of command.

Petrov… recalled making the tense decision under enormous stress—electronic maps and consoles were flashing as he held a phone in one hand and juggled an intercom in the other, trying to take in all the information at once. Another officer at the early-warning facility was shouting into the phone to him to remain calm and do his job.

“I had a funny feeling in my gut,” Petrov said. “I didn’t want to make a mistake. I made a decision, and that was it.”

Petrov was substituting for another officer who should have been on duty that night. The radar glitch was, according to the Post, “traced to [a] satellite, which picked up the sun’s reflection off the tops of clouds and mistook it for a missile launch. The computer program that was supposed to filter out such information was rewritten.” “After it was over,” Petrov said, “I drank half a liter of vodka as if it were only a glass, and slept for 28 hours.”

“What was probably the single most dangerous incident of the early 1980s,” according to Pry in War Scare,

occurred during a NATO military exercise known as ABLE ARCHER—83, held on November 2–11, 1983…. It was nothing less than a rehearsal for World War III, with US nuclear forces based in Europe practicing nuclear-release procedures and going through the steps for making a nuclear strike. The Soviets were leery of NATO military exercises, because Soviet military doctrine warned that an enemy might use training to conceal preparations for an actual attack.

Don Oberdorfer, in From the Cold War to a New Era, confirms this danger, writing that, as NATO intelligence monitored transmissions during ABLE ARCHER–83, “an unusually sharp increase in the volume and urgency of the Warsaw Pact traffic was noted. More ominously, Moscow placed on higher alert status about a dozen nuclear-capable Soviet fighter aircraft stationed in forward bases in East Germany and Poland.”

A front-page article in the New York Times on November 4 noted that a nuclear-powered Soviet attack submarine had surfaced fewer than five hundred miles off the South Carolina coast. Within a day the Times reported that the submarine might have been disabled by a US destroyer towing a sonar device—with which it was hunting Soviet subs. This submarine, “designed to kill US ballistic missile submarines,” as Pry writes, was loitering not far from US “anchorages at Charleston and King’s Bay, Georgia…. Its presence…. off Charleston at this particular moment, in the middle of ABLE ARCHER–83… might have been coincidence, but probably it was not.” (Soviet ships, trailed by US reconnaissance aircraft, towed the submarine to Cuba for repair.)

“The United States and NATO remained in the dark about the danger while ABLE ARCHER–83 was going on. It is inconceivable,” Pry argues, “that the president, Joint Chiefs, and NATO allies would allow the war game to continue in the face of clear evidence the exercise could provoke a Soviet nuclear strike.”

I watched The Day After—a made-for-TV movie depicting a thermonuclear attack and its aftermath, a movie about which I’ve retained few memories save images of people being vaporized—with my parents, who had participated in duck-and-cover drills when they were students. A hundred million people in the United States tuned into ABC’s broadcast on November 20; those of us in school had been prepared in class for the movie and instructed not to watch it alone. Counselors waited on toll-free hotlines. Secretary of State George Shultz gave an uneasy televised performance following the broadcast; even eternal optimist Ronald Reagan confided in his diary that the advance screening he saw “left [him] greatly depressed.” My experience of the movie was one of utter dread, a dread that the ensuing weeks failed to diminish. I understood little of global politics, and nothing of conflicting US-Soviet ideologies beyond the inherited schoolyard insult “commie,” but I understood all too well a vague-but-intense terror of nuclear war that the movie’s sanitized details—“The catastrophic effects you have just witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would occur,” a statement at the end of the film warned us—still magnified.

“The movie did not exaggerate,” wrote Anthony Lewis in the New York Times, the morning after it aired. “Nor did it really tell us anything new; as one of the characters in it remarked, we have known the truth about nuclear weapons for nearly 40 years…. What the film did was to make our abstract knowledge of nuclear devastation concrete: personal, individual, and therefore terrible. It made us aware of reality.”

The previous day, in his own first strike, Times television critic John Corry had asserted that “‘The Day After’ engenders a feeling of hopelessness, and to be without hope is to be passive. It is to believe that nothing will avail. Psychologically, this is to want to disarm, to throw down weapons rather than take them up.” Corry presented a different awareness of reality:

The Soviet Union has 5,000 ICBM warheads; the United States has 1,054 missile silos. The Soviet Union could target two ICBM warheads to each American silo, leaving it 3,000 warheads; 500 of these could be used to destroy American airfields, and another 500 could be used to wipe out military communications centers. This would still leave the Soviet Union with 2,000 warheads with which it could erase our cities.

American Trident submarines would still be at sea, but the submarines do not have the ability to fire their missiles with the accuracy necessary to eliminate the second-strike Soviet missiles. If an American President declined to surrender after the first Soviet strike and ordered the Trident submarines to launch their missiles, he would be condemning our cities to their deaths.

This stark, simple, unnerving distillation of the “limited nuclear war” doctrine—in the newspaper of record, in the context not of political or military reporting but a review of a made-for-TV-movie—may have persuaded some readers of the virtues of deterrence and Reagan’s arms buildup. (Limited nuclear war assumes “that nuclear hostilities can be halted at some new equilibrium in the balance of forces, before all-out attacks have been launched,” writes Jonathan Schell in The Fate of the Earth, describing Corry’s scenario as one “argued recently by nuclear theorists.” In such a scenario, “rather than initiate the annihilation of both societies” following the Soviet strikes, “American leaders might acquiesce.” Further, while the term “nuclear winter” was coined a month after Corry’s article, its effects had been known for a decade. The hypothetical detonation of three thousand nuclear warheads in North America would have made retaliation pointless, because the resulting global cooling and ozone depletion would have condemned any surviving cities anyway.)

In a roundtable discussion ABC hosted after the movie, Carl Sagan presented another way of imagining deterrence: “Imagine a room, awash in gasoline. And there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has 9,000 matches. The other has 7,000 matches. Each of them is concerned about who’s ahead, who’s stronger…. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be laughable.”

On November 24, the first Pershing II missiles arrived at a US airbase in West Germany—fewer than twenty-four hours after West Germany’s parliament voted in favor of their deployment.

Martin Walker, summing up the events of 1983, writes in The Cold War: A History that “US intelligence analyses of the great panic about an imminent US nuclear strike which had hit Moscow in the autumn of 1983, between the shooting down of the Korean airliner and the NATO Able Archer exercise, had sobered President Reagan. ‘I don’t see how [the Soviets] could believe that, but it’s something to think about,’ Reagan told his National Security Adviser, Robert McFarlane.”

As for me, in February 1983 I graduated from cheap plastic boombox to receiver, turntable, and tapedeck, and spent much of that year in the bunker of my bedroom on Havelock Road. My windows screened by spruce branches, I listened intently on huge headphones to all the records I hoped might provide me the intelligence to decipher even the smallest fragments of the precarious, provisional nature of what I was experiencing.

Section 25, if they were remembered at all in the years before the Pitchfork generation rediscovered Factory Records, were remembered for the modest club hit “megamix” of “Looking from a Hilltop,” the second track on From the Hip. James Nice, in his 1997 biographical liner notes, argues that this track presents one possible genesis of acid house, because, performed live, it

featured hard sequencer patterns and the piercing Roland TR-303 sound later typical of acid house. Vin Cassidy had stumbled across the remarkable effect by accident early in 1983, employing it to good effect on the unreleased 12" remix of “Beating Heart,” and in live performance the following year. While it might seem unlikely that audience members in Chicago or Detroit were inspired by Section 25 to further refine house and techno, the fact remains that a full year before these sounds reached Europe, a band from Blackpool had toured it across most of the major cities in the United States.

Music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, writing in the December 2001 issue of The Wire, indirectly supports this thesis with his reminiscence about seeing a 1984 Section 25 show in New York:

I’d never heard drum machines through a PA and had no idea how punishing they could be. I couldn’t hear a single word but I couldn’t get their weird sound out of my head. The next day I bought the only Section 25 12" I could find, ‘Looking from a Hilltop (Megamix).’ Backwards drum machines flew out like sparks, but crazy funky like someone here had programmed them, not some… foreigner. Then there was a blast of tape-mangled whiteboy guitar noise and some mopey chords and what was that girl saying? The whole thing floated in the fjord between the icy Factory scene in England and uptempo NYC edit tracks by Big Apple Productions and the Latin Rascals. Charging and droning, blowing my tiny mind, ‘Hilltop’ still sounds like music of no country.

Musicologically, such facts offer one ready reason for Section 25’s posthumous reputation. Still, for years I felt surprised whenever I stumbled upon a reference to some Factory band other than Joy Division or New Order—especially Section 25, a band Ben and I considered our personal Nova Scotia. But in the wake of 9/11—whether because of renewed postmillennial anxieties, or simply because enough time had passed for the obligatory nostalgia-induced revival: or both, as in the case of Frere-Jones’s reverie—post-punk regained cultural currency, spawned a bunch of admiring plagiarists, and Section 25’s albums were reissued on CD a second time, along with rare, live, and archival recordings.

The informed dread and misplaced optimism of Section 25’s work still seem to me the only viable options for maintaining one’s sanity and one’s humanity in the post—Cold War, ongoing War on Terror era—which may be another reason this band’s music continues to speak to us so profoundly. Our anxieties may no longer be nuclear ones, though we still feel keenly the precariousness of our lives, whether via terrorism, environmental catastrophe, or economic crisis. Frere-Jones is correct in noting the apparent national exile of Section 25: missiles that can hurtle thousands of miles in minutes and bombers that can be refueled in flight to reach the opposite side of the earth without stopping render meaningless the idea of borders.

Jenny Ross died of cancer in November 2004, after aborted attempts in the preceding years to resume playing music with Larry and Vin Cassidy. After her death, and nearly two decades after Love &Hate, the brothers did release two albums of new material, the second of which included Larry and Jenny’s daughter on vocals. A third album, featuring re-recorded and reinterpreted versions of some of the band’s 1980s tracks, was being prepared for a fall 2010 release when Larry Cassidy was found in his home, dead from an apparent blood clot.

The desk at which I sit is under the flight path of C-5 Galaxy transport airplanes from nearby Westover Air Reserve Base—which, during the Cold War, was a Strategic Air Command base, and thus a primary target of the USSR. Eight nuclear-armed B-52 bombers stood on twenty-four-hour alert at Westover, and could, within fifteen minutes of an alarm, be airborne, en route to the Soviet Union via the North Pole. Many afternoons the whining drone of a C-5’s engines disrupts the quiet as the huge planes, big-bellied and low-flying, pass overhead.

In the line of hills I can see from my desk when the leaves are down, the former Strategic Air Command bunker, now owned by Amherst College, serves as a library depository and houses over eight miles of books. According to the Boston Globe, the bunker once held “food and water for a staff of 350 to survive for 35 days,” and was designed to withstand the Soviet nuclear strike that would have incinerated Westover’s B-52s and much of western Massachusetts. Its thinnest concrete walls are allegedly seven feet thick.

In 1983, the United States was estimated to possess more than 23,000 nuclear weapons—on submarines, in missile silos, on bombers, and in stockpiles. The Soviet Union was estimated to possess nearly 36,000 nuclear weapons that same year. (The two superpowers’ combined total of warheads would peak at 64,000 in 1986.) As of February, 2011, the Federation of American Scientists reports that the United States and Russia each maintain an operational arsenal of approximately 1,900 warheads on high alert; the two countries combined still possess a “total inventory” of nearly 20,000 nuclear weapons; France, the United Kingdom, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea are now estimated to possess more than 2,500 nuclear weapons among them.

The USS Ohio, originally scheduled for retirement in 2002, was—along with three more of the United States’ eighteen Trident submarines—modified to transport guided missiles instead of ballistic missiles: the Ohio now bears Tomahawk cruise missiles, which can carry either conventional or nuclear warheads; it isn’t due for decommissioning until 2023. The remaining fourteen Trident submarines and their Trident II D-5 missiles will remain operational until 2040.