Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm editor Candice Getson, joined as always by Josh Curious
Speaker 1: like a cat clerk. Hey, Candice, So, I've been smoking
Speaker 1: cigarettes dipped in from malde hyde all day and it's
Speaker 1: kind of reminded me of my youth um back in
Speaker 1: the eighties. How how old were you were you even
Speaker 1: sentitioned in the eighties negative six Oh, I was running
Speaker 1: around like a wild march hare in the eighties. I
Speaker 1: was definitely a child of the Cold War. Thankfully you
Speaker 1: didn't really have to live through that. It was kind
Speaker 1: of a weird time, right. There's some great movies that
Speaker 1: came out of it, like Red Dawn. Have you ever
Speaker 1: seen that? Oh my god, that's a good movie. Ruskies,
Speaker 1: it's a pretty good one. To War Games. Well, they're
Speaker 1: all very good movies, but they kind of created a
Speaker 1: mentality in me, my impressionable young from aldehyde addult brain
Speaker 1: um of of a fear. Everybody was kind of afraid
Speaker 1: during the Cold War. And I remember my earliest experience
Speaker 1: at a concert, well one of them. It was a
Speaker 1: Howard Jones show at Pine Knob great place to see
Speaker 1: a show outdoor Amphitheater in Michigan. Um, and I started crying,
Speaker 1: and my older sister looked over at me, like, what's
Speaker 1: wrong with you? And I told her I was afraid
Speaker 1: that the Russians were gonna hear US and nucas. So, um,
Speaker 1: that was kind of the prevailing mentality. I don't know
Speaker 1: if everybody cried at Howard Jones shows, but I definitely
Speaker 1: wasn't just totally off the chart. So as I get older,
Speaker 1: I start to look into this whole thing, you know,
Speaker 1: the Cold War, it's a pretty interesting experience. Um, and
Speaker 1: I found that we had enough nuclear capability at one
Speaker 1: time for either side to wipe one another off the
Speaker 1: face of the earth. Was I right to cry at
Speaker 1: this Howard Jones show? Was this fact or fiction? Scarily enough,
Speaker 1: that's actually fact? And as we know, the Cold War
Speaker 1: was are of threats. It was sort of abstract as
Speaker 1: far as war goes. There weren't weapons being fired. And
Speaker 1: it's sort of blossomed out of tensions between the ideologies
Speaker 1: of capitalism the US and communism the U s s R.
Speaker 1: The Soviet Union, and both nations were stock piling nuclear weapons. Um.
Speaker 1: The United States developed the atom bomb, and then Russia
Speaker 1: responded with the hydrogen bomb, and then back and forth.
Speaker 1: It was very much a tit for tat and nuclear
Speaker 1: proliferation sort of things. There was like a war threats,
Speaker 1: but everybody had the goods to back it up. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: almost like capital and there was real gold and the
Speaker 1: safe Well why why why are we still here? Why
Speaker 1: wasn't there that nuclear annihilation that I was so concerned
Speaker 1: with as as a youth. That's the kicker. No one
Speaker 1: ever used these weapons. People understood, yeah, they're really powerful.
Speaker 1: I could wipe out my enemy, but it's tantamount to
Speaker 1: suicide firing one because you wipe out yourself too. Well.
Speaker 1: The weapons were strong enough to destroy the world a
Speaker 1: couple of times over, that's how much power was in them,
Speaker 1: and so the doctrine of mutual assured destruction was formed
Speaker 1: acronym MAD appropriate. Yeah, and both sides understood that neither
Speaker 1: side would ever fire one of these weapons, but it
Speaker 1: was the threat of having them in their arsenals that
Speaker 1: gave both nations equal footing, and conventional warfare wasn't used either.
Speaker 1: There were no guns, no tanks, no bombs. Don't feel
Speaker 1: like this fired because, according to the theory of the
Speaker 1: ladder of escalation, if there were a smaller shot fired,
Speaker 1: the next nation would respond with a bigger shot, and
Speaker 1: even bigger and bigger and bigger and so forth until
Speaker 1: someone pulled out the big gun or war exactly. Well,
Speaker 1: thanks for clearing that up for me. You can better now. Strangely,
Speaker 1: I know the Cold War and I feel a little
Speaker 1: bit more warm. And if you want to learn even
Speaker 1: more about the Cold War, you can read What's Mutual
Speaker 1: Shure Destruction and also our article and how Game Feel
Speaker 1: Works works dot com for more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other top beschin is at how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: Let us know what you think. Send an email to
Speaker 1: podcast head how stuff works dot com. M