hic for Western Europe as the use of strategic nuclear weapons would be for North America.
Popular culture in the United States sided with European opinion on this issue, and the Reagan Administration's loose talk of war-fighting in the early 1980s gave rise to such films as "The Day After" and "Wargames." Both took the cataclysmic results of any nuclear exchange for granted, just as an earlier generation of films, from "On the Beach" to "Dr. Strangelove" had in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The Soviet Union, having survived the horrors of Nazi invasion in World War II, seems to have been less given to an apocalyptic interpretation, and more willing to take its own war-fighting scenarios seriously. The Soviets also lacked an independent media that could offer a grim or ironic treatment of the prospect of nuclear war. The practical end result was the same, however, and the Soviets and Warsaw Pact were no more willing to test the nuclear threshold than NATO was.
Indeed, Soviet policy throughout the Cold Wa
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