Berlin – It’s funny: After two years of being virologists and corona experts, people are now all Putin psychologists and military strategists. The other day I was sitting in a restaurant not far from a table where people were talking shop about the war. I heard scraps like “corridor”, “airspace”, “if I were Putin” and “aba the Americans”.
Unfortunately, the age-old specter of the nuclear threat has also resurfaced. That is, Putin woke it up. And some talk about it as if we had been beamed back 70 years. Back to the time when an animated turtle called Bert the Turtle was walking around on US television – “dam-dam-diddle-dam-dam”. Suddenly there was a bang and the turtle ducked down and crept into its shell. This was called “duck and cover”.
“Duck and cover” as protection from the bomb
Educational films have seen schoolchildren crawl under desks, crouch, arms behind their necks. Lots of little turtle berts. Yes, one apparently actually had the idea that there was a single bomb that one had to survive somehow.
An acquaintance – who grew up not in the West, but in the East – told me that she was taught at school that in an emergency you should lie down, “put your feet to the mushroom cloud, smear your face thickly with cream and put on a wet felt hat”. .
Today I hear that people are running to pharmacies to buy iodine tablets. In one program, a woman regretted that she had “no bunker”. On social media, young people are running a fashion competition on the topic: “Hey guys, what are you wearing for World War III?” All I can say is: choose the fleece teddy suit because of the nuclear winter! And pack some vitamin pills on top! It won’t help.
The fashion contest could even be seen as an ironic example of the helplessness we are stuck in. No, I’ll say it out loud here: neither a bunker, nor iodine tablets, nor the coolest fluffy suit will do any good. The only way to deal with nuclear war is to rule it out, draw a thick dark red line in front of it! Because he cannot be led. Thank God the old NATO generals who suddenly appear as experts in the various channels still seem to know that (didn’t even know that Tom Selleck mustaches are still worn).
“I can destroy you once, and that’s enough”
When the world was about to go nuclear in 1962, I was a baby and fortunately didn’t notice. Kennedy is said to have boasted to Khrushchev at the time that he could destroy his country many times over. He replied: “I can destroy you once, and that’s enough.”
When the Russian Stanislav Petrov, lieutenant colonel in Soviet satellite surveillance, saved the world in 1983 because he classified a reported nuclear attack by the USA as a false alarm (cloud reflections had been interpreted as rocket launches) – nobody noticed anything at all. Although in those days we twenty-somethings often talked shop about possible “computer bugs” that could “accidentally” trigger nuclear war.
Actually, we knew that then all of our lives would be over. And that of humanity. And so it would be today. No more iodine tablets, bunkers, fleece teddy suits and such: stop chattering about nuclear war. This is not fun.