They had some > zero influence on their own governments.

That was who they were trying to influence.

“Cold War hysteria”. Where to begin?

Maybe with this:

http://www.amazon.com/Fifty-Year-War-Conflict-Strategy-Cold/dp/1557502641

Or this:

http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Story-Foreign-Operations-Gorbachev/dp/B000OA9FNO/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245699487&sr=1-6

The Cold War was a real war. The West almost lost circa the Mid-1970s.

Neither Thatcher nor Reagan were neocons. They were conservatives.

Moreover I’m still looking for two titles: A boy and his dog (yup, that’s the adaptation of one of Ellison’s novel, and yes – i keep in mind that was released in seventies) and One night stand (1984).

Much thanks for the video uploads. I love feeding my bloodlust for the “Armapocalypse” as much as the next sapien (Homo or otherwise).

Lexington Green: Westerners protesting in Europe and the US had zero influence over the Soviet Union. Not much chance of them affecting Soviet behavior while they would potentially have a chance to affect NATO policy. FWIW, I remember several groups opposed to nukes, not just NATO nukes.

I do find the attempts by some to rewrite history rather unfortunate. Contrary to the claims that the anti-nuclear movement in western democracies was controlled by the Soviets, it was both independent and critical of the Warsaw Pact nuclear arsenal, the Chinese, NATO, India and Pakistan and so on and so forth.

The arguments of the “Mutually Assured Destruction” lobby were never particularly successful, and in reality it was the hard work from the Russell-Einstein Manifesto in the 1950s to the CND, Die Grünen, Bündnis 90, Charta 77, etc in the 1980s that ultimately led to real steps towards disarmament and the end of the cold war.

Even now, the star black & white presentations of British policemen putting seriously wounded survivors out of their misery, and the presentation of radiation burns, etc. is far more effective than the later US productions or “Threads.”

This is probably because by the 1980s, most of us no longer believed nuclear armageddon was likely, the threat felt far more real in the sixties and early seventies than it did in the 1980s.

I recently discovered that Threads was available on DVD, so re-watched it 30 years on and it still has the same effect.

Forget any horror movie, Threads is the scariest, most disturbing movie I think I’ll ever see.

I remember watching the day after with a bunch of other college kids. A bunch of them were pouting and saying how upsetting it was. I said that it would never happen because the Soviets were afraid to die, and we would never start it, but if they started it, they would fucking well die for it. Deterrence held and it was going to hold and there was never any reason to think otherwise. The Cold War was not about two people fumbling in the dark and about to make a terrible mistake. It was about a communist empire that could not win by a direct offensive, and so was trying every means of propaganda and subversion available to it to try to get its enemy to give up. As Machiavelli put it, don’t tell a man, “put down your knife so I can kill you. Get him to put down his knife and you can do whatever you want.” The USSR wanted us to put down our knife. Their active allies, and their objective allies in the media and entertainment industries, wanted the same thing. They failed.

Henry Kissinger, I remember was on some very earnest panel discussion after the movie was over, and he said, all this movie did was take statistics that everyone has known about for decades and turn them into images, for the purpose of preventing people from thinking rationally, and to get them to act emotionally, and mistakenly, instead. I said, “right on, Henry”.

Feeblemind, that sounds more anti-nukes than pro-Soviet. In watching it again, the news chatter you hear the characters listening to prior to the films climax seems to me to paint the Soviets as the antagonists. Military build up, tanks rolling into east germany, low yield nukes used on NATO forces, etc. and then the US launches a hapless pre-emptive strike.
Tonight I’ll give Countdown to Looking Glass a watch as I’ve not yet seen it.

That being said, it takes place in a part of the country I grew up in. I remember when it came out. I didn’t think it was pro-Soviet propaganda, but I definitely remember feeling conflicted about it’s message. It was just the movie itself, but the hoopla around it. In as much as I could as a little kid, I felt the movie missed the point of the cold war. At that point, remember the Soviet Union had recently shot down a Korean Airliner. For some reason, that was a particularly searing moment for me; after that I considered the Soviet Union as evil.
Clearly nuclear war and it’s possibility is terrible and you can’t explain it to younger folks the feeling that some point in your life it would happen. However, at the time the movie came out, I remember feeling that it glossed over the character of the other side.

Also of note:
(1) “Red Dawn” which also came out in 1984 was big in my small home town.
(2) Apparently, the Russians at one point in 1984 thought that Nato military maneuvers were the set-up for an invasion and that year we came really close to a real shooting (nuclear) war.
(3) Final irony: I married a woman born in Russia in the 1980s.

Are we talking about the same film here?