The good old Cold War

It is not just that Putin is advertising his anger against the United States in speeches and continuing his manipulation of global oil and gas prices, his support of Iran, his intrusions into the Middle East. It is not just that the Chinese leadership is openly staking a new place in the world order, in its Africa diplomacy, its missile tests and its move into hitherto Western-dominated international institutions. And it is not just that a dozen or more fragile states, chiefly in Africa, are collapsing into chaos, while various other societies, chiefly in South America, are unraveling. \o7It is the unnerving fact that all of this is happening at the same time, \f7though at different speeds and different levels of intensity.

So is it true? Was the Cold War era, on the whole, a safer era? Ponder the following counterarguments:

First, however tricky our relationships with Putin's Russia and President Hu Jintao's China are nowadays, the prospect of our entering a massive and mutually cataclysmic conflict with either nation are vastly reduced.

We seem to have forgotten that our right-wing hawks argued passionately for "nuking" communist China during the Korean War and again during the Taiwan Straits crisis of 1954. We also have apparently forgotten -- although newly released archival evidence overwhelmingly confirms this -- how close we came to a nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Likewise, we've forgotten the shock of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which prompted then-German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to ask, "Is this the new Sarajevo?" a reference to the outbreak of World War I. And who still remembers 1984-85, when we were riveted by Jonathan Schell's argument in the New Yorker that even a few nuclear explosions would trigger such dust storms as to produce a "nuclear winter"?

Those were really scary times, and much more dangerous than our present circumstance because the potential damage that could be inflicted during an East-West conflagration was far, far greater than anything that Al Qaeda can do to us now. No one has the exact totals, but we probably had 20,000 missiles pointed at each other, often on high alert. And the threat of an accidental discharge was high.

None of today's college-age students were born in 1945, 1979 or maybe even 1984. None lived with those triangular signs proclaiming their schools to be nuclear bomb shelters.