In the Summer of 1980, in response to the Soviet/Afghanistan War and the Iran Hostage crisis, President Carter re-activated mandatory selective service (the Draft) to men born from 1960 onwards. I was a part of that first generation (in a dozen years or so) to be required to sign up for the draft, and with the election of Ronald Reagan (I voted for John Anderson), a perceived warmonger, to the office of the Presidency in November, I was almost assured that I would be involved in a war. The sentiment at the time was an overwhelming surreality about the fact that a former B-movie actor had his finger on the button of the nuclear arsenal of the United States. A lot of that sentiment is reflected in the Bollock Bros. song "The Act Became Real":
There was not only a fear of Nuclear War, but of the meltdown of a nuclear reactor core and the ultimate coincidental act-became-real scenario of the movie "the China Syndrome" being released 12 days before the partial core meltdown at Three Mile Island. The classic song by The Clash, "London Calling" released in early 1980, echoes a lot of this feeling:
This song By TV Smith and the Explorers takes the perspective of the Tomahawk cruise missile, capable of warheads of either high explosives or nuclear:
The lament that the nuclear age of weaponry should have never begun with the dropping of the A-bomb on Japan in 1945 from the aircraft nicknamed "Enola Gay" is the view of this OMD (Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark) classic:
My first introduction to UB40 was this non-album single, which I heard on College Radio sometime in 1980, that describes the world after a nuclear holocaust:
The Sound asks, "Who the hell makes those missiles?":
More songs on this theme in YouTube playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxqjcypq3tqv2Kyvyw6sY1HKCL1gea1a9
No comments:
Post a Comment