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Longing for a more innocent time of nuclear apocalypse

Matt Hingerty

by Matt Hingerty

23 Nov 05:40am

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Filed under: Nuclear Power, Nuclear Weapons, Politics, Russia, The Greens, Uranium

34 comments

And so now we’re selling uranium to the Russians.  Juggling the morning madness of kids, breakfast, dogs and work, the news item relayed via my tinny trannie was easy to miss and at first didn’t register.  And then the irony of it all hit me like a shovel between the eyes.

Russian soldiers stand next to a military fueler on the base of the Russian Topol intercontinental ballistic missile. Picture: AFP

It is very, very, hard to convey to Gen Y what it was like coming of age in the late ‘seventies and early ‘eighties - before we were called Gen X, before mobile phones and before the internet.

It’s hard to make them understand what it was like living everyday thinking that it could be your last, thinking you were seconds away from being annihilated in atomic cataclysm launched by those Godless Soviets.

Every future plan you made – about study, a job, marriage, family, where you would live and whether you would retire up the coast and play golf had a footnote: unless we’re all killed tomorrow.  There was a prevailing community neurosis, a prevailing sadness and prevailing recklessness – “I thought about giving up smoking but we’ll all probably be dead tomorrow, got a light?”

This neurosis was constantly reinforced by art and culture, and it must be said this period of Apocalypse Art was one of our most vibrant.  The Day After, a telemovie starring a taciturn Jason Robards, screened the year I did my HSC. It was part fiction, part documentary, and scared us witless.  The BBC gave us the outstanding mini-series, the Edge of Darkness, starring Bob Peck and Joanne Whalley (which has recently been remade as a Mel Gibson vehicle). 

Speaking of Mel Gibson, Apocalypse Art spawned fine local films such as Mad Max, Peter Weir’s evocative The Last Wave and the outstanding New Zealand production of The Quiet Earth starring Bruno Lawrence.  Although set in a 1960’s American college, National Lampoon’s Animal House and in particular the over-the-toppedness of John Belushi tapped into the self-destructive gallows humour of the period.

Literature too fuelled our fear of imminent demise. 1984 and Animal Farm were, of course, standard texts.  For those of us of the X generation, Apocalypse Art probably started with an Australian-domiciled pom, Neville Shute, whose novel On The Beach had since been rendered to the big and small screens.

But it was in popular music the Apocalypse Art found its true voice.  Everyone from Johnny Rotten to Kate Bush and Ozzy Osbourne railed against the bomb.  Nena’s 99 Luft Ballons captured the vacillating hopeless/hopeful mood beautifully.  At home Midnight Oil and Goanna tapped into the pervading consciousness.  Redgum’s Beyond Reason from Frontline, the album that gave us I was only 19 was probably the finest, if least recognized example of the genre.

And we fought back too.  We voted for Peter Garrett and his Nuclear Disarmament Party.  We marched on Palm Sunday and we bought unread books on Trotsky and Lenin from funny little men in The Domain.  In our spare time we stopped the dams, saved the forests and tried to feed the world. 

And then something happened.  They blew their horns, and the walls came down.  As Berlin partied, people tizzed their hair, put on white moccasins and matching white belts, danced The Locomotion and drank big blue and green drinks in brandy tumblers.  We joined the Young Liberals and talked about the New World Order on mobile phones the size and weight of bricks and with the range of a short par 4.

It’s impossible to convey the gloomy mood of the Cold War era to Gen Y.  Their mouths feign empathy yet you can see the emptiness behind their eyes.  Sure there’s terrorism now but that’s random and happens to someone else – not the helpless, mutually assured self-destruction we lived with.  Climate change might be a worry but, really, it’s a long way off and somebody is sure to fix it.

Perhaps that’s why The Greens are being so successful.  It’s easy to pitch to Gen Y that the troops should come home from Afghanistan when the conflict is so far off, so anonymous and ambiguous.  After all, the Taliban don’t threaten me do they? And it’s not as if I’m ever going to go there…..um it’s not near Bali is it?

And yet in the same breath Bob Brown says we shouldn’t sell uranium to the Russians.  On the one hand we can down tools and walk away guilt-free from Afghanistan but must work ourselves into lather of panic about the supposed cunning plan of the Russians to get square for Ronald Regan.  On one hand we can shut our minds to the consequences of leaving a real conflict but be worried about a fantasy.

Call it a paradox and breathtaking hypocrisy (considering the charge oft-laid against John Howard).  But appealing to the lazy good intentions of a younger generation while stoking the paranoia of an older one?  Now that’s cynical political genius on a grand scale.

Most commented

34 comments

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    • SR says:

      05:02am | 23/11/10

      “...And so now we’re selling uranium to the Russians…” well at least the Reds Under the Bed can annihilate Australia with our own product! I would be more conscious of some Asian States…as they love Australian Coal…as do I.

      Reply

    • watty says:

      05:50am | 23/11/10

      Must be a puzzle for all ,now that Julia has agreed to provide the “makin;s of that bomb” to the Comrades yet rejects fellow Commonwealth Member India.,

      Doesn’t Russia EXPORT uranium ?http://www.nti.org/db/nisprofs/russia/fissmat/minemill/overview.htm

      The crazies still run Labor’s so called “uranium policy”

      Reply

    • T.Chong says:

      08:19am | 23/11/10

      As far as the anti nuclear music goes, mid 80s the Mentals released Apocalypso - an anti war song, very rarely heard nowdays, also another obscure anti war track of the same era was Shiny, Shiny by Haysi Fantayzee.

      Reply

    • Connie says:

      08:22am | 23/11/10

      Gillard, Garrett….a bunch of boofheads that have no idea what they are doing.

      Reply

    • John A Neve says:

      08:30am | 23/11/10

      Is the author of this article for real?
      “thinking you were seconds away from being annihlated in a atomic cataclysm by those godless soviets.”
      Most, if not all those, who like me grew up in this period never gave a thought about such drivel. Likewise, most of us (I hope), don’t think constantly about terrorism.
      Media hype, is just that, media hype.

      Reply

    • Anne71 says:

      12:23pm | 23/11/10

      Speak for yourself, John.  I,  and pretty much everyone I grew up with, had that fear of nuclear war in the back of their minds.  We often had nightmares about it.

      And for anyone criticising Gillard for selling uranium to a former enemy - does the term “Pig-iron Bob” mean anything to you? In the 1930s that Liberal icon Robert Menzies sold scrap iron to the Japanese, which everyone knew was being turned into fighter planes and battleships - and everyone knew that Japan was spoiling for a fight. Governments will never let history or the possibility of future hostilities stand in the way of making a profit.

    • TheRealDave says:

      02:13pm | 23/11/10

      I’m with you John, I, nor anyone I knew, ever gave 2 seconds thought to a ‘Nuclear Holocaust’. If you think Australia is a regional backwater now - we weren’t even that much of a blip on the radar all those decades ago. Forget the fact we have far greater/faster/cheaper international travel, instant communications, the internet and all that promoting the crap out of Australia all around the world nowadays, back then Australia was the other side of the world, an exotic and far away place and we got the occasional footnote in the western world and were virtual unheard of anywhere else….especially in countries allegedly about to ‘do us in with giant mushroom clouds’.

      If you were seriously thinking about Nuclear Apocalypses back then I’d have to say you probably had serious psychological issues…..and probably think we are about to be invaded, any day now, by Indonesia and or China….

      Better get that fallout shelter filled with emergency provisions…..not long to 2012 and or a Zombie Apocalypse…..

    • Brad of Bentleigh says:

      02:42pm | 23/11/10

      I too grew up in this period, and I didn’t have apocolyptic nightmares, or was even concious of nuclear war… I’d suggest the author of the article was aiming for effect - fair enough. Anne’s (and her friends) nightmares though, suggest some kind of mass hysteria… born in 1971 (guessing) I’d say that she missed the good bits.

    • Eric says:

      02:50pm | 23/11/10

      One thing we can always count on is John’s ignorance of history. At least he’s consistent in that.

    • Gladys says:

      02:57pm | 23/11/10

      @ John: yes. I remember having discussions with my friend between a double maths period: where do you want to be when the bomb goes off? She said as close to the epicentre as possible. We were only talking about this conversation the other week.

      You only have to look at what we were listening to: Sting, Russians encapsulated our fears. Everybody wants to rule the world, Tears for Fears. ‘There’s a room where the light won’t find you.’ Or what about Ultravox, ‘Dancing with Tears in our Eyes’? It’s time, and I’m in my lovers arms, It’s time and I don’t think we really care….

      Hingerty isn’t making it up, our fear were real.

      If you were there and not scared, you were probably still stoned from the 60s.

    • Reg says:

      07:48pm | 23/11/10

      I’m with you John. I don’t know where Eric was but in those days the world was a very big place and all the bomb tests that happened in the Montebello Islands and the Pacific only lent assurance that gigantic explosions could happen and we’d feel not a murmur. The greatest scare I remember in about 1960 was that a Tsunami was about to hit the Queensland Coast. It never did, strengthening the impression that the Barrier Reef was good for dispersing even those.

      The big concern is far more recent. The knowledge that Russian submarines around Cuba carried surface launchable missiles and the Yanks didn’t know it. Menzies was a scare monger whose influence had diminished by the time it reached Queensland so I can’t imagine where Anne71 lived to be so effected, but I’m older than she.

    • Shane From Melbourne says:

      08:31am | 23/11/10

      Nuclear Apocalypse may or may not occur (limited strikes are likely). The collapse of western civilizations within the next 20-50 due to the lack of energy is highly likely and resource wars between nations over securing resources (oil, food, water minerals) is almost certain. Also mass migration on an unprecedented scales is likely (all this fuss about refugees- you ain’t seen nothing yet….)

      Reply

    • neil says:

      09:40am | 23/11/10

      How do you figure that, there is about 100 years worth of oil left, and 300~400 years of gas and coal, 200 years of Uranium and 1000’s of years of Thorium. and unlimited Hydrogen.

      Synthetic oil subsitutes can be made from methane, coal at the equivalent of $20 a barrel, factories are setting up all over the world right now.

      You can even recycle CO2 to make synthetic liquid fuel. As long as we have technology we will have cheap energy and as long as we have cheap energy we will have technology.

      There is no boomsday, there won’t be an apocalyps. Life 50 years from now will most likely be better than today.

    • Gladys says:

      03:29pm | 23/11/10

      My grandmother told me this in 1977.

    • Shane From Melbourne says:

      04:49pm | 23/11/10

      @Neil
      1. Your figures are unbelievable (pure BS) at present and future consumption rates.
      2. Even if synthetic oil substitutes from coal and methane did not deplete these resources even more rapidly it is impossible to convert economies rapidly or efficiently.
      3. Ethanol production conflicts with food production priorities.
      4. Conversion to hydrogen transportation is unworkable. Even leaving out that the hydrogen batteries require rare and expensive metals.
      5. It took over 60 years for the modern industrial economy to emerge after the invention of the combustion engine in an era of cheap petrochemical energy. I can guarantee that it will implode in less than 10 after the crest of peak oil.

    • neil says:

      06:53pm | 23/11/10

      Shane,

      1. no they are the best industry and scientific estimates

      2. We don’t need to convert rapidly we have centuries to do it.

      3. Bio ethanol production is an inefficient stopgap measure. Ethanol can be produced by cynobacteria in a facility akin to a sewage farm, converting Solar energy and CO2 into ethanol at a rate more efficient than solar panels can produce electricity.

      4. Fuel cells

      5. Oil industry experts agree that peak oil was achieved around 2000, ten years ago and we haven’t impolded yet. Peak oil is considered when the rate of consumption exceeds production. Or roughly 50% of known and anticipated reservers. We have used 50% in the past 130 years, with increased demand and factoring in anticipated oil substitutes, 100 years to use the last 50% is the general consensus.

      Your misanthropic alarmist propaganda is BS

    • Reg says:

      08:23pm | 23/11/10

      Well like most people, I don’t know much about the long term reality of fuel availability, but I do take comfort from the apparent research of the aircraft industry.  If there’s not going to be any fuel available in10 years then they’d better stop building their aircraft now or they’ll never get them paid for.

    • Patrick says:

      09:36am | 23/11/10

      I don’t know about the rest of you, but pending ecological catastrophes that vast amounts of the population refuse to acknowledge even exist gives me a far more existential mindset about the future than nuclear weapons ever did or could. The former is already guaranteed.

      Reply

    • Steve says:

      09:43am | 23/11/10

      The Cold War at least gave international relations a consistency and a methodical process.

      It was West verses the East, and the enemy (for both sides) was identifiable and had something to lose.  Unlike today’s war on the emotional state of terror…

      Reply

    • Matt says:

      09:46am | 23/11/10

      Your assumption that those wanting to pull out of Afghanistan are selfish and uncaring, feeling that the troubles are far off and not our concern is simply wrong.

      As a person who has never felt the war to be appropriate, and also a member of Gen Y, my concern was always that the war was self-defeating. I maintain my view that a third party attempting to install a government in a foreign country engaged in civil war is not a viable option. Even if a Government were setup, how long until it were corrupted? How long until it became destabilized again? Any government that is installed by the west is not going to be seen as legitimate. A country must fight its own civil wars and overcome its own issues.

      Right now, they have a generation of teenagers who have been at war for more than half their life. They have witnessed the attrocities you grew up fearing. And they are highly impressionable, like all teenagers. I fear how easy it would be to manipulate these men to die for whatever cause is pitched at them.

      The attempts to bring peace have fuelled the unrest that we seek to end. As I have said, it is a self-defeating goal, and after nearly 10 years there we have only seen an increase in the violence, an increase in Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), and a world increasingly being consumed by the threat of terrorism.

      Clearly there was no easy solution to this problem. I can’t say ‘if they just did this it all would have been ok’. But my opposition, and I believe the opposition of many Australians to the Afghan war, was not cowardly nor uncaring, but simply a different projected outcome. I never felt this war would make Australian or Afghanistan citizens safer, and to date we all know it hasn’t.

      Reply

    • DigiDave says:

      10:32am | 23/11/10

      “I never felt this war would make Australian or Afghanistan citizens safer, and to date we all know it hasn’t.”

      How can you possibly know that ?  You haven’t even considered the possibility that if the Taliban had been left to conquer and take over Afghanistan with no outside help to resist it, they are then set up and have a base with which to seriously take on Pakistan and assume control there. Which they are already trying to do. And why would that be a problem ? Simple, Pakistan has nucleur weapons. Suddenly, the argument that we’d be no less safe if we pulled out collapses.

      Reply

    • EM says:

      11:52am | 23/11/10

      “It’s easy to pitch to Gen Y that the troops should come home from Afghanistan when the conflict is so far off, so anonymous and ambiguous.  After all, the Taliban don’t threaten me do they? And it’s not as if I’m ever going to go there…..um it’s not near Bali is it?”

      Umm you do realise that you’ve just insulted EVERY Gen-Y soldier that has or is serving in Afghanistan with you’re stupid diatribe don’t you!  Tell me, what good have you done in this world that you feel safe to insult those who sacrifice all to serve their nation; just because they’re under 30?

      This started off fine, then your true aim of Gen-Y bashing seeped through…

      In my experience, Gen-Y are a lot more clued into reality that my generation (Gen-X) gives them credit for, they’re definitely a lot more switched on to the world than we were at their age.

      Like most Gen-Y bashers, I think you just hate them because they are becoming everything you couldn’t become, through lack of gutso.

      Reply

    • Anne71 says:

      12:51pm | 23/11/10

      EM - well thank you, you’ve just managed to insult EVERY Gen-X with your response. Gen Y more switched on to the world than we were at their age? Please speak for yourself. Perhaps you were ignorant of the world around you as a teenager / 20-something but I sure as hell wasn’t, and neither were my friends. And showing support for a cause back then wasn’t as simple as clicking “Like” on Facebook page or adding a Twibbon to your profile, either. 
      How ironic. You had a go at the writer for generalisation about Gen Y but were more than happy to generalise about Gen X to do so.

    • Gladys says:

      03:34pm | 23/11/10

      What Anne71 said.

      And I don’t think Hingerty is bashing Gen Y. He’s saying they are being manipulated by Bob Brown and the Greens to think Australia should get out of Afghanistan.

      The point is, there was a time when we (Xs and older) were worried we might not wake up in the morning because the Soviets were the biggest threat to our security.

      Now we’re selling them uranium and the Greens don’t seem to mind. Moreover, Peter Garett used to sing songs about it, and he doesn’t seem to mind either.

      Last, but not least, I’m a gen-y basher and I never see Hingerty at the meetings.

    • steve says:

      12:38pm | 23/11/10

      “You haven’t even considered the possibility that if the Taliban had been left to conquer and take over Afghanistan with no outside help to resist it, they are then set up and have a base with which to seriously take on Pakistan and assume control there.”

      They didn’t have to conquer it, they were the government of Afghanistan before the US stepped in.  Have you considered the possibility that the labor party could conquer and take over Australia if the terrorists don’t step in to stop them?

      Reply

    • Romli065 says:

      01:17pm | 23/11/10

      OMG Matt, how sad that you grew up thinking all those morbid things on a daily basis.  I am a Gen X-er too and I certainly didn’t walk around worrying about the cold war or being anihalated by an atomic bomb, that’s ridiculous! Yes these things were newsworthy at the time, but they didn’t form the person I am today. I think you’re overstating it greatly, or you might just be the most neurotic person on earth!  Lighten up FGS!

      Reply

    • Eric says:

      02:54pm | 23/11/10

      Your ignorance of the reality of the Cold War does not give you a right to claim superior understanding. Rather, the opposite.

    • Romli065 says:

      04:11pm | 23/11/10

      I have a very clear understanding of the Cold War thanks Eric.  I was born in Europe, my family left our homeland because it was being run by communists.  I grew up on a steady diet of all things cold war related.  I was very active in my own community in all manner of political discussion and direct action with political and diplomatic figures of the time.  I am in no way ignorant about this era, and how dare you assume such a thing.  I’m just saying it didn’t ruin my entire childhood.  You have to balance what you can and can’t control in life.

    • James Hunter says:

      05:33pm | 23/11/10

      at least in those “good old days” we knew where the bomb may come from as did the russians. nowadays it is ratbag nations controlled by meglamaniac tyrants who are the risk. I know what I would prefer.

      We would be well advised to process our uranium and sell or lease it as fuel rods to russia india european union countries, hell even the americans. That way we could controll it and make heaps of money. build a few new style nuclear power plants and get on with the 21st century.
      pity so many are still living with tyheir heads in last years sand.

      Reply

    • michael j says:

      06:10pm | 23/11/10

      your article covers a big area,and these commets cover a lot of ground,but things have changed scince the cold war peoples that were our enemy are now our trading partners and as such a.t.m. we seem to want to sell them every thing they ask for from all types of minerals to huge tracts of farmland,to huge residential buildings(who owns what on the gold coast) why are there no proper records for all these things,,one of the reasons i don’t worry about the nuclear holocost is i am a late stage baby boomer and i have no for a nuclear shelter so i sold mine some years back,  Afghanistan is a place that is allways been some sort of shira law and as cruel and horrific as it is even if the allies stay for fifty years i don’t think it will make much difference,you carn;t defeat a belief with bullets,only education can do that

      Reply

    • Reg says:

      07:54pm | 23/11/10

      Eric, you lose and so does Matt. smile

      Reply

    • youdy beaudy says:

      06:26am | 24/11/10

      Anyyyyyone who presses the button can say bye bye to their country. I don’t think there is any world leader who is stupid enough to do that.

      Reply

    • Reg says:

      09:49am | 24/11/10

      I don’t think we should underestimate the scare the USSR got from the Cuban crisis as well. The Soviet submarines around Cuba with their surface launchable nuclear missiles, the ones we only found out about only after the wall came down, were under instruction that if communications was lost with their home base, the decision to launch was at the discretion of the submarine commander. Since there was no way such communications could be guaranteed, the Russian leaders must have been sweating blood at having the situation beyond their control. It only needed one wild-eyed commander to start WWIII.

    • youdy beaudy says:

      11:40am | 24/11/10

      Nuclear weapons should never have been allowed to procede further after the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And further, those first bombs were 100 times smaller than the ones we have today.

      The lunacy regarding weapons of mass destruction and their possible use should be resigned to the dustbin of history. We’re not talking about some little bit of local destruction here. The Destruction that would be caused by a thermo nuclear detonation anywhere in the world would bring about destruction on a scale unimaginable to us all.

      North Korea, Pakistan, India, Israel, Russia and America should be aware of the potential of nuclear destruction and immediately destroy their arsenals and practice peace. They can’t even give their peoples a decent life but have plenty of money to waste on something that would be insane to use.y

      If you can’t give people a decent life then you don’t have the right to govern. There should be mass destruction but it should be to nuclear weapons. If they don’t do it then there may be cause to repent and not necessarily in a religious way.

      Reply
 
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