Last night I watched Threads, an extremely affecting BBC film from 1984 about the effects of a full-scale nuclear war on one British city, Sheffield.1 One might say it’s a very British ‘kitchen sink’ approach to the subject, following the lives of two ordinary families during the international crisis (involving Iran — so what else […]
It’s exactly 40 years since the Battle of Long Tan, a notable feat of Australian arms during the Vietnam War. But I have a more personal anniversary in mind — yesterday was 90 years to the day since my great-grand uncle John Joseph Mulqueeney was killed by an artillery round during the Somme campaign, on
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] The kick-off for the football1 World Cup final is only hours away. To mark the occasion, here’s Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, head of the Royal Air Force, on the correct use of airpower (in 1923, in the context of a hypothetical war with France): Would it be best
If you were wondering what the biggest and loudest air raid siren of all time is, then wonder no more, because it’s the American Chrysler Victory Siren, made in the 1950s. Well, I don’t know for sure that it was — I’d like to see what the Soviets had to offer — but it was
Another bit from the Earl of Halsbury’s 1944 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926), this time from p. 217. It’s a couple of weeks after a massive Russo-German air strike on London, Paris, and in fact most of the bigger cities of western Europe. Two members of a group making its way to the southern coast of
In my previous post I talked about some Japanese ARP posters from 1938. One in particular (above; click for larger version) is very revealing: it shows exactly whose bombers the Japanese were worried about, by plotting circles on a map of Japan and its neighbours, representing the radius of actionNo more than half the maximum
Twenty years ago this week, Sting’s song “Russians” entered the US top 40: In Europe and America, there’s a growing feeling of hysteria Conditioned to respond to all the threats In the rhetorical speeches of the Soviets Mr. Krushchev said we will bury you I don’t subscribe to this point of view It would be
I was in the bowels of the ERC library at Melbourne Uni the other day, scavenging for primary sources, when a book called The Peril of the White caught my eye – not because it has anything to do with my topic, but because of the author, who has one of the most splendidly silly
On this day in 1952, the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb, at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marsall Islands. Possibly not coincidentally, the October 2005 issue of History Today features an absorbing article by Geoffrey Best entitled “Winston Churchill, the H-Bomb and nuclear disarmament”. I have a quibble though … Best quotes a 1953
Aside from the whole shadow-of-the-bomber thing, I have an amateur (okay – more amateur, then) interest in the Cold War and the fear of nuclear war. Partly because of the obvious continuities and parallels with the area I’m studying, but also because I’m old enough to remember the last flowering of nuclear paranoia in the
