Boy, do I remember that.Many people today are worried about global warming; some people are extremely worried about it. But global warming is something that will most seriously affect our children and our grandchildren. We certainly should be concerned about problems we may be leaving for them. But in the 1980s, we were worried about something that would affect us.
That would kill us.
At any time.
With little or no warning.
Not sure how to compare that with today, where there is no known nuclear superpower targeting us, but terrorism lurks as a more amorphous, just as ever-present, fear.
And in some ways, I'm still terrified of AIDS (also discussed on the linked page)
2 comments:
All the nuclear weapons are still there, and you might say it's actually more likely we'll all be vaporized now that the formr Soviet republics are a bunch of warring kleptocracies. And the giant asteroid might be on the way, and in five billion years the sun is going to explode, and within a hundred years we'll all be dead one way or the other anyway. Once again, I ask, how do you want to spend the time? Fretting about future events you have no control over? Or steampunk novels?
Yeah, there are several nukes still out there, no doubt enough to destroy ther world several times over. And we may be more likely to have a launch now than we were then. But I doubt that there would be more than a half dozen launched in any incident these days, whereas in the days of mutually assured destruction I think it would have been much worse.
Nuclear detonation isn't actually very high on my list of worries - there is very little that I can do about it. Dirty bombs are much more likely. And accidents and natural disasters are guaranteed to occur.
I think there's actually a bit of nostalgia here for a time when the enemy was clear. And for a time when The Police, REM, etc had regular playtime on the airwaves.
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