Speechification

The paralysing gravity of this programme’s subject matter creeps up on you. By the end of the programme—when we hear the launch sequence for a submarine nuclear weapon just as it would have been heard in the event of a real launch—I found myself choking back tears. Tears, I suppose, of relief that the bloody thing never happened.

I’m using the past tense because the programme’s about the grim intensity of cold war readiness and the men (they’re all men) who would have been required to press the button if everything had gone pear-shaped. I have to say that I’m glad it was all over while I was still a young man: I think the older me would have been crying all the time…

Not that it couldn’t happen now in the blink of an eye, of course: the submarines and the aeroplanes are still ready to go. I think you’ll find yourself admiring these men, though, as I did. Their calm and their seriousness and their real understanding of the gravity of their hideous obligations is, to say the least, reassuring. Absolutely nothing gung-ho here.

Here’s the MP3, here’s the programme’s web page. and here’s an excellent slideshow made using audio from the programme, contemporary images and photographs from the government bunker featured in the programme (pic from the slideshow).

In 1958 USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine - an unqualifed triumph of American ingenuity - sailed submerged from the Pacific to the Atlantic by way of the North Pole and sent the remarkable signal: “Nautilus 90 North”. The programme (another Archive Hour highlight, this one from March 2006) makes use of evocative tapes recorded on-board during the amazing voyage and the voices of surviving crew (including later-to-be-President Jimmy Carter).

And, since I’m here. Remind me someone: why doesn’t Archive Hour have a decent archive? MP3.

You won’t believe this: in 1981 I was sent to West Berlin to write (and photograph!) a feature about the City’s music and fashion scene for then very new and underground iD Magazine (I don’t get asked to write about fashion so much these days). I had a most amazing time in what was then still a City in a sort of dream, suspended like a decadent bubble above the miserable East.

Tourists had privileges not extended to residents in those awful days so I flitted back-and-forth East-to-West, visited an artist who worked in a huge steel drum in no-man’s land, all the trendiest record and clothes shops, terrifying punk clubs in snowy Kreutzberg and workers’ cafeterias in the East. I remember a band called Deutsch-Polnische Aggression (named in parody of DAF: Deutsch-Americanische Freundschaft). I can still feel the chilly thrill of crossing the border on the U-Bahn and the bleak glamour of Friedrichstrasse Station. Anyway, that’s enough Cold War nostalgia for now…

You’ll have to suspend your prejudices about a) Ann Leslie and b) The Daily Mail (assuming you own some) to listen to this very moving half hour in which Leslie returns to Berlin to meet the people she knew when she was writing a series of articles about the fall of Honecker’s regime eight years after my (obviously pivotal) visit. This is really good radio, part of a series about reporters returning to the scene of historic stories MP3.