THOUGH WE MAY LOOK BACK ON AND REMEMBER THE 1980S as an action-packed neon factory where Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, arcades, and workout videos reigned supreme, it wasn’t always like that, especially at the beginning of the decade. We weren’t yet talking about Michael Jordan’s famous series-winning basket, “The Shot,” or dancing along to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. This all came down the road, but those final years of the late 1970s and early 1980s were a much different time, filled with haunting, unending fear.
With the dwindling economy set in motion by the administration of President Jimmy Carter, tough economic times were causing people to approach their daily lives in a different manner from how they had in the 1960s. It wasn’t as easy to get a well-paying job, or any job at all. Unemployment was on the rise (and would continue to climb, reaching the highest point in United States history in 1983), making it more difficult for Americans to support their families and build any kind of safety net. If you were able to find a job, you most likely weren’t focused on building a career that was personally fulfilling and focusing on your personal passions. A lot of people were just barely scraping by. It was extremely apparent at the time, permeating the national consciousness. Unease loomed over daily life like a storm cloud that could start spitting out lightning at any moment.
There wasn’t certainty in any sector, and personal and national security least of all. It wasn’t a time to take risks or venture outside your comfort zone. Many were struggling just to survive through another day, but little did they know there was a much larger threat looming above.
The Cold War had been going on for decades, starting just after World War II ended in 1945, and had turned from a specific event into a perpetual state of being. Though Germany had been defeated by the Allied powers, the Soviet Union didn’t want to relinquish power so easily. Instead, it gave the appearance of being peaceful, but was slowly consolidating all of the Eastern Bloc countries under its reign following along the protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which the USSR and Nazi Germany had signed in 1939 as an agreement of nonaggression toward each other during World War II. With two superpowers so close to each other during such a volatile invasion as that being executed by Nazi Germany, it was necessary for the Nazis to have the Soviet Union on their side. Contained within this pact was a secret agreement to divide six countries (Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania) between them into occupied territories following the invasion of Poland in 1939, establishing new borders and creating what we would later call the Eastern Bloc. Though many of these states weren’t officially overthrown during this time, they were considered to be satellite states under Soviet control.
Despite the Soviet Union pulling out of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and declaring it void in 1941 following Adolf Hitler’s order to attack Soviet strongholds within Eastern Poland, it did not return these countries to independent control and forced them to adopt the Soviet socialist systems, even rigging elections to ensure Soviet ideals would take hold. From the outside, this looked as if the USSR had been acting alone during the war, as the pact’s existence wasn’t officially confirmed until long after the end of the Cold War in 1989.
Considering that the USSR was an Allied force, this didn’t sit well with many countries—especially the United States, which felt the continued occupied invasions were an unnecessary grasp of power. While the US didn’t want to start another war following one of the deadliest wars in the history of the world, especially with an official ally, it couldn’t let the Soviet Union get away with slowly consolidating more and more countries under its power through hostile means. To counteract this, the US initiated a secret countereffort, funding and supporting all Western European countries who could provide opposition to the encroaching Eastern Bloc and also funding the Manhattan Project, the nuclear research effort that funded what would eventually become the US contribution to the nuclear arms race. Meanwhile, the USSR continued to push more funds into its newly acquired countries and pushed forward with nuclear research of its own. This series of nuclear armament from both the US (and its NATO allies) and the USSR resulted in a secretive and uncomfortable tension between the two nations that only escalated the longer it went on without a resolution.
Yet neither wanted to break protocol, and continued pushing their agendas in the dark, creating what would eventually become the Cold War. With each always concerned about what the other might be doing, both nations (and their allies) continued to push nuclear technology research out of fear it might need to be put into action. This went on for decades, resulting in the largest accumulation of nuclear weapons in history, unsurpassed even to this day. For context, the United States alone ran 1,054 nuclear explosion tests in the period between 1945 and 1992.
This stalemate resulted in one of the largest standoffs in military history and—despite attempted nuclear reform by the United Nations, which had been formed at the end of the war in 1945—left both nations in a constant state of fear that nuclear war could break out any moment.
While both programs were top secret, it was clear to everyone that this was occurring; even in the best of economic conditions, and had everything else been perfect, the situation would have left most in a perpetual state of uncertainty and fear. And it did just that; there was a feeling of deep-rooted uncertainty. If you start with the fear that you may not be able to support your family and that you’ll be kicked out on the street and forced to do anything you can to feed your kids, yet you might just barely succeed; add to that the sight of missiles streaking in from above and the knowledge that everything you know and love could be wiped out in an instant. That state of mind does something to you, and it certainly did for the average American trying to make it through daily life at the time.
This feeling of discomfort was unshakable, even as the economy began to recover in the mid-1980s. For most, the recovery was a false comfort; how long would it last before it all crumbled again? Could one actually loosen up the purse strings, or would it all fall apart with the next downturn in the stock market? These were the questions plaguing the American psyche at the time.
For some, this meant a shift back to the very same conditions that had haunted them in the previous decade: finally finding jobs and being able to support their families in a more sustainable way, only to begin to worry about losing it once again. For a select few, it was a complete reversal into excess as the stock market exploded in the late 1980s. Bankers and traders on Wall Street, who began making huge deals as the market rose and watched their salaries rise in kind, found themselves experiencing a kind of excess that most Americans couldn’t even fathom.
Even as Americans settled into relative economic comfort, a fear still remained—and would throughout the majority of the decade until December 3, 1989, when the Cold War officially ended. But before that point, there were nearly two decades of uncertainty around basic survival, financial stability, and, most of all, the threat of nuclear bombs that could wipe out the entire nation at any moment.
It was years before we’d hit the worst of it in 1983, and early on, things were relatively quiet. Despite the nuclear arms race brewing between the two superpowers for the past thirty years, we hadn’t actually heard anything from the USSR in a while. For some, it was a good sign that we weren’t getting daily threats to our safety; for others, it was infinitely worse to hear nothing. The silence was deafening, and let fear of the unknown creep into the everyday consciousness in an unsettlingly deep way.
Red Dawn, the film by John Milius, wouldn’t come out until 1984, but it perfectly captured the fears of everyday Americans, who were worried that one day they might turn to the sky to see a full-on invasion from the USSR. In the film, two brothers find their small Colorado town invaded by the Soviets, and they’re forced to band together to defend it, eventually defeating the opposing forces. The film perfectly encapsulated the fears that people were experiencing at the time, striking a cord in the national consciousness.
The Soviet Union was chosen as the invading force because, at the time, the CIA believed the USSR and Cuba to be the largest threats to national safety.
Though the film may have been a bit over the top in its portrayal, such a scenario was a real fear at the time. There was always concern that the Soviets might hit major cities with their ever-growing nuclear arsenal and then invade what parts of the United States remained. One day you might be trying to figure out how much money to set aside for your future, and the next you could be trading what few rounds of ammunition you had left to ensure that your family could eat for another day until help arrived. This was the potential reality.
This type of primal fear for safety messes with people. You lose sleep; you’re always anxious. Paranoia sets in as you wonder if that moment might come where everything you’ve worked for could blow away in a wave of nuclear heat. In this heightened state, your brain and body are affected in subconscious ways. Fear seeps into your everyday life. Your slightly elevated heart rate, the shakes that you attribute to too much coffee or skipping breakfast—even when you aren’t thinking about it, your body and overall state of being are still affected by a general sense of uneasiness that something is coming, yet you have no idea what it is or how to prepare for it.
Worst of all, that fear stuck around. The Cold War lasted nearly forty-five years, and it worked to cement fear as constant and unending. It became a part of life, one that never seemed to subside. In an oddly morbid sense, there was comfort in knowing that everyone else was experiencing the same fears. They might be better at handling it, or might have had fewer other things to worry about, but still they were right there with you; they got it.
As the economy started to pull together, most were starting to regain their sense of safety; immediate survival wasn’t as much of a concern, but fear of the unknown lingered: it might not be wise to spend that money on vacation, because if we go to war and we lose our primary source of income due to the draft, we’ll be stuck. On the other hand, screw it; we’ll all be dead soon enough anyway. All future plans hinged on the ability of a few politicians in Washington, DC, to defuse the longstanding, escalating conflict. This reliance on Washington led to an obsession with information, with everyone trying to stay as updated as possible.
In this quest for constant knowledge, up-and-coming media mogul Ted Turner saw opportunity. He sold off the local news station he owned in North Carolina, WRET, and in 1980, with outside investment from Reese Schonfeld, started CNN, the world’s first twenty-four-hour news network, in Atlanta. For the first time ever, you didn’t need to wait until ten or eleven o’clock at night to catch the news, hoping nothing important happened later that night. With no publicly available internet at the time, and newspapers that were only printed once or twice a day, any news that broke after those nightly broadcasts would have to wait until the following morning. There was a delay that you just had to deal with if you wanted to get the news; perhaps you’d hear something on the radio if you were driving late enough, but for most, television broadcasts were their primary source of information.
In a nuclear climate where entire countries could potentially be wiped out in an instant, this was less than ideal. Ted Turner saw an opportunity to fill this news void and created CNN, which brought a constant flow of information and access to more world news that ever before. No longer did you need to wait for the story about the local fair to wrap up to find out what was important. While for some it was a relief to be better informed, for others it was a negative experience, as they became locked in a trance, unable to stop watching the unending onslaught of information coming to them at breakneck speed.
This resulted in an odd combination of feeling simultaneously under- and overinformed. People were consuming information at a rate never experienced before, but it didn’t feel like it served to keep them more informed about the issues they knew very little about before; rather, it brought to light even more events that they had had no clue were even occurring. The more they watched, the less anyone felt like they really knew the whole story; they knew about an increasing number of news events, but less about each individual event, and more unrelated information snuck its way in.
New revelations about a program happening in the USSR? It was less, “Well, at least we know,” and more, “How did we not know about this before?” What was intended as a way to stay informed and quell any fears people may have had instead amplified those fears, increasing the internal anxiety plaguing the American consciousness.
This, of course, is the tenet on which news media is based. If you were to just come for the story you wanted to know about and left, that wouldn’t do them much good. But if you got caught up in a few other stories while waiting for the story you’re actually interested in, there’s a good chance you’ll stick around to finish the broadcast now that you’re hooked. Ted Turner said it best: “We won’t be signing off until the world ends. We’ll be on, and we will cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event.… [A]nd when the end of the world comes, we’ll play ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ before we sign off.”
With the economy in such dire straits, many found themselves unable to afford to go out to restaurants, enjoy a movie at the local theater, or catch a Van Halen concert, so instead they turned to CNN. It was free (if you had cable TV), and the stories were structured in an entertaining way. It certainly wasn’t a replacement for going out, but there was always something happening, and it was right there in your living room. There was a huge draw to this endless source of information, available anytime.
With every new story, it was clear we were living in different times. While the United States was concentrating on expanding the technology of its military and nuclear programs, the Soviet Union was employing traditional espionage tactics, and we never saw it coming. Espionage gave the USSR massive insight into what we were working on at the time. Back at the Potsdam Conference on July 24, 1945, there had been a meeting between Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, US president Harry S. Truman, and UK prime minister Winston Churchill as they met to discuss how to handle the conditions of Nazi Germany’s surrender, which had occurred only weeks before. During this meeting Truman famously mentioned to Stalin that the United States “had a new weapon of unusual destructive force”; Stalin had little response, simply replying that the US should “use it on the Japanese.”
For decades following, government officials were certain that Stalin’s response was one of an uninformed and confused leader who did not fully understand what Truman had told him; but it wasn’t until much later, that we found that Stalin’s lack of surprise was rather telling. For years Stalin had known of the existence of our atomic weapon program thanks to the infiltration of Soviet spies within our nuclear programs. And he didn’t just know of it; the USSR was devising its own atomic weapons program at the time, using blueprints stolen from the US program.
And it wasn’t just naïveté on our part; the Soviets were actually one step ahead of us, using methods that just made us look silly. While we were setting up wiretaps to catch them discussing plans on the phone, they were encrypting notes into code inscribed on the wrapper of a stick of chewing gum. If we blew our cover, their evidence was edible and gone before we even had a chance to know what we were looking for.
Because of these techniques, Soviet information traveled slowly and surreptitiously; we were caught off guard because we assumed that things would be moving faster due to the modern technology available at the time. The Soviets moved in the shadows, setting up drops and sharing information almost under our noses.
Nothing about this was easy on Americans. Somehow, knowing that the USSR was operating using such old methods in secret made things more difficult. Nothing just happened, it was drawn out over a long period, done in hiding and leaving questions in its wake. Perhaps worst of all was that we really had no idea who was actually doing this—and neither did our government. This resulted in a paranoia that only served to multiply the fears that were already so pervasive. Not only could everything be taken from you in an instant, but it could be your neighbor or coworker carrying out the orders to do so.
This was worrying in many regards, but also entirely emblematic of the dissonance we were experiencing at the time with the danger of being simultaneously under- and overinformed. We didn’t know what we didn’t know, but which was worse: knowing that we didn’t know, or the not knowing itself? While either option is just as upsetting, Americans were put in a really difficult place; the situation required immense trust in a government that many of us felt we couldn’t fully trust. The government had just taken us through World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, with the result being the death of American soldiers in the tens of thousands.
What could really be done, though? In a secretive nuclear arms race, we were unable to enact change or call both sides to a truce. It didn’t really work like that. Short of gathering up your family, selling your home, and beginning your new life as mountain hermits far enough from society to be unaffected by whatever nuclear devastation might be wrought on major cities, you were just stuck.
The longer the Cold War progressed, the more often we found ourselves stuck in this anxiety-inducing middle ground, the more that uneasy feeling built up. Instead of getting easier as time went on, it became more and more difficult, building like a boiling pot of water. We were approaching the upper boundary of what the public could endure, the point of no return.
For every meeting you went to, every family dinner or children’s soccer game where everything went as planned, there was an equal moment in an alternate universe where you looked to the sky to imagine missiles streaking down, other missiles leaving just as quickly as we would return fire, knowing all was lost but hoping to send a message just the same. At any moment you could potentially go from a moment spent with family around the TV watching Dallas to a crater where your house once was. Mutually assured destruction could occur at a moment’s notice, and there was nothing you could do about it.
For Americans, this was life for decades. This was the Cold War.