To grow up in the Sixties and Seventies meant reading and hearing various assorted terms that pertained to the wonderful grown-up world of nuclear armaments; terms like “test-ban”, S.A.L.T. (Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty), ST.A.R.T. (STrategic Arms Reduction Treaty) and that old favorite, M.A.D. (“mutual assured destruction”). With any luck, this lingo will continue to seem as queer and antiquated as “23 skidoo” or “groovy” – but during the later decades of the Cold War, people who wished to be thought of as informed had to know what each of them meant. This article is appropriately drenched in the gravitas of the time because it announced that the short-lived age of “atomic security” that brought W.W. II to a close had reached an end. A new epoch had arrived at 11:00 a.m., September 23, 1949 when President Harry Truman announced
“We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.”
Nine months later Stalin gave the go-ahead for North-Korea to invade the South. Click here to read another article on that topic.
Additional magazine and newspaper articles about the Cold War may be read on this page.
