The scary one …….. October 1962 …… one to listen to

Now, anyone born just a few years either side of 1950, will remember the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945

Even now a full fifty-nine years after those days in the October of 1962 I can feel a sense of foreboding and that was nothing to the emotions I felt back at the time.

Some are still all too vivid and the power comes from reliving them through the memory of a twelve year old.

I was playing rugby out in Ewell and on that Saturday morning I kept looking for that mushroom cloud which I was convinced would appear.

Nor was I alone in picking up on that sense of uncertainty.  My friend Robin who is a year younger was also keenly aware of the events remembering “going into a room and my parents conversations falling away into silence.”

It is an event I written about.*

There have benn other “nuclear crises”, some of which are less well known, but Cuba always will have the power to scare me stiff.

So, I shall be listening to Nuclear destruction, which was broadcast this morning on Radio 4 and is available to listen to right now.**

“In 1962 the world teetered on the edge of nuclear destruction as the Presidents of the USA and the Soviet Union fought over Soviet warheads installed on the islands of Cuba. In Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the historian Serhii Plokhy retells the tortuous decision-making and calculated brinkmanship of John F Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro. He tells Amol Rajan it was ultimately fear that saved the planet, and it’s time to draw lessons from the many mistakes that were made at the time.

The Cold War era did produce a nuclear arms-control agreement – the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty – signed in 1987. But the nuclear physicist and former director of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research Patricia Lewis says that in 2019 the United States and Russia withdrew their support. Lewis, who now leads the International Security programme at Chatham House, asks whether we are now entering a second nuclear age.

The BBC journalist Sarah Rainsford visited the sites of the Soviet Union's nuclear stations in Cuba when she was posted there in 2011. She wrote about her experiences and the end of the Castro era in Our Woman in Havana. Rainsford is now the BBC’s Moscow correspondent and explores how far Khrushchev’s political scheming and disinformation compare to the strategy of President Putin.

Producer: Katy Hickman”

Picture, Atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, Charles Levy from one of the B-29 Superfortresses used in the attack, This image is a work of a U.S. Army soldier or employee, taken or made as part of that person's official duties

*The missiles of October 1962 ............... when great events are remembered by children,https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-missiles-of-october-1962-when-great.html

**Nuclear destruction, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000v1mz

On the pier at Weston-Super-Mare with a Dalek and a dark memory

Now, if you were born sometime between 1949 and 1958 and watched TV, the chances are, you were terrified of the Daleks.

A Dalek at Weston - Super-Mare, 2019

They first appeared on Dr Who in 1963 and have continued to reappear across the years, remaining the epitome of all that is evil.

It starts with that ugly voice, and the sinister machine which incases each one, and grows as you realize that they view all other life forms as inferior, fit only to be enslaved or exterminated.

Added to which they are determined to conquer the universe, and while they always get defeated, their malevolence coupled with their technical genius makes sure they always come back.

All of which makes them very scary, and best observed behind the armchair in the company of a dozen grownups.

But for me, aged 13, the fear was less the Daleks and more the circumstances which had created them.

They were the product of a nuclear war which had caused them to mutate and become reliant on that tin box in which they existed.

Atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945

Their enemies were the Thals, who by contrast were tall, and blonde but could only exist on the surface of the ruined planet with the help of drugs to counter the radiation which permeated everywhere.

And that for me was more terrifying, because when the Daleks made their first appearance on British TV, it was just a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the confrontation between the USA and the Soviet Union came close to a nuclear war.*

During the October of 1962 it is not an exaggeration to say the World held its breath, as the Super Powers squared up to each other with no apparent way of backing down.

On the Saturday of the crisis I was playing school rugby about 40 minutes from home and expected to see a mushroom cloud rise from the direction of London.

Nor was I alone, for in the last few years other people of my age have shared that fear, and we were not alone.

The US Secretary of State looked out of his office window and wondered if he would see the morning, while his Soviet counterpart quietly told his wife and family to leave Moscow.

And one friend remembered entering his front room to the hushed conversation of his parents which trailed off as he sat down beside them.

A Dalek at Weston - Super-Mare, 2019

All of which meant, that when the series was shown in the December of 1963, into the following February, the horror of what had almost happened was brought back out of the shadows.

None of the subsequent appearances of the Daleks have affected me in the same way, although even now I catch myself reflecting back to that first show, when Dr Who, his granddaughter and companions wander the petrified and irradiated forests of the planet.

Not of course that many people will share those thoughts, instead the Daleks have become part of the landscape with them even appearing on a postage stamp in 1999 and allowing this one to wander at will down the pier at Weston-Super-Mare yesterday.

Leaving me just this passing thought, that while the people of Weston may view Derek the Dalek with a mix of fondness and tolerance, I remember his grand father on the planet Skaro, along with those petrified forests and the chilling Dalek cry “Exterminate”.

Location; Weston-Super-Mare

Picture; a Dalek in Weston-Super-Mare, 2019, from the collection of Diane Thomas, Atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, Charles Levy from one of the B-29 Superfortresses used in the attack.
 This image is a work of a U.S. Army soldier or employee, taken or made as part of that person's official duties

*The story of one house in Lausanne Road number 24 .................... the missiles of October 1962, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search?q=cuban+missile+crisis

The missiles of October 1962 ............... when great events are remembered by children

Atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945

Child hood memories don’t always make good history but that said they remain a powerful link to the past.

The trouble with them is that they end up telescoped into a vague point in time and more often are jumbled up with a whole mix of things.

That for the historian makes them tricky because they can’t always be verified, may refer to different periods and above all suffer from that rosy glow which walks with all nostalgia and would have us believe that summers were always sunny and hot and Wagon Wheels were bigger.

But just sometimes they can be very powerful and lock you into the great events in a way that news reels, photographs and official histories fail to do.

And so it’s with the Cuban Missile Crisis now so far away in the past to rank for many alongside Harold dying at Hastings, the victory at Trafalgar and the news of the relief of Mafeking.

U-2 reconnaissance photo over Cuba, 1962

It began at the height of the first Cold War with the discovery by the Americans that the Soviet Union was placing missiles in Cuba with a range which would threaten many US cities.

The options were stark and pretty much seemed no win solutions ranging from bombing the sites to an all out invasion of the island.

Any such moves raised the possibility of a Soviet move on Berlin which in turn would prompt a NATO response and in all probability be followed by an invasion of western Germany by the Warsaw Pact and pretty quickly an exchange of intercontinental ballistic missiles on the major cities of each side.

Me in 1962

Even now a full fifty-five years after those days in the October of 1962 I can feel a sense of foreboding and that was nothing to the emotions I felt back at the time.
Some are still all too vivid and the power comes from reliving them through the memory of a twelve year old.

I was playing rugby out in Ewell and on that Saturday morning I kept looking for that mushroom cloud which I was convinced would appear.

Nor was I alone in picking up on that sense of uncertainty.  My friend Robin who is a year younger was also keenly aware of the events remembering “going into a room and my parents conversations falling away into silence.”

It was a tense moment and one that I was reminded of all over again when I was rereading the sleeve notes of Bob Dylan’s second LP, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan released in 1962 where he recalled that in writing A Hard Rains A Gonna Fall, "Every line in it is actually the start of a whole new song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn't have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one."*

Tracking the missiles across the Atlantic, 1962

Of course for those at the centre of events with a great knowledge of just what was going on the future looked no less scary.

At a conference in Moscow a few years ago two of those at the heart of the crisis reflected on those few days.

The Russian had quietly phoned his wife and told her to take the children out of Moscow while the American had looked out from a White House window and wondered if he would see the sun rise in the morning.

But it is those childhood memories that lock me into the seriousness of that confrontation and by extension to that second Cold War in the late 1970s and 80s.

It like the first was brought on by a mix of circumstances.  There were hard line politicians in the White House and the Kremlin, a new generation of nuclear weapons and delivery systems capable of reaching their targets in ever shorter time, and an escalation of tensions brought on by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Put them together and they made for a potent cocktail all of which has been well documented so I will leave you with the comments of Kay who is a sixteen years younger than me and so was growing up during that second Cold War “I would lie awake at night, listening to planes going overhead. When they lowered their landing gear on their approach to Ringway, I was sure it was the bomb doors opening. “

And today equally horrific childhood accounts march across the news stories from Syria to the refuge camps and across the world

All of which is perhaps a reminder that history is not confined to the professional historian or the media commentator.

Pictures, Atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, Charles Levy from one of the B-29 Superfortresses used in the attack, This image is a work of a U.S. Army soldier or employee, taken or made as part of that person's official duties. Andrew in 1962 from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and U-2 reconnaissance photo over Cuba and a U.S. Navy aircraft  flying over a Soviet
freighter, these image  in the public domain in the United States and badge advertising the Chorlton Peace Festival 1984, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Which I have to confess loses something from discovering the song had actually been written in the May of 1962.