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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how

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Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

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Speaker 1: I'm editor Candice Getson, joined as always by Josh Curious

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Speaker 1: like a cat clerk. Hey, Candice, So, I've been smoking

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Speaker 1: cigarettes dipped in from malde hyde all day and it's

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Speaker 1: kind of reminded me of my youth um back in

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Speaker 1: the eighties. How how old were you were you even

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Speaker 1: sentitioned in the eighties negative six Oh, I was running

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Speaker 1: around like a wild march hare in the eighties. I

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Speaker 1: was definitely a child of the Cold War. Thankfully you

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Speaker 1: didn't really have to live through that. It was kind

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Speaker 1: of a weird time, right. There's some great movies that

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Speaker 1: came out of it, like Red Dawn. Have you ever

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Speaker 1: seen that? Oh my god, that's a good movie. Ruskies,

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Speaker 1: it's a pretty good one. To War Games. Well, they're

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Speaker 1: all very good movies, but they kind of created a

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Speaker 1: mentality in me, my impressionable young from aldehyde addult brain

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Speaker 1: um of of a fear. Everybody was kind of afraid

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Speaker 1: during the Cold War. And I remember my earliest experience

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Speaker 1: at a concert, well one of them. It was a

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Speaker 1: Howard Jones show at Pine Knob great place to see

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Speaker 1: a show outdoor Amphitheater in Michigan. Um, and I started crying,

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Speaker 1: and my older sister looked over at me, like, what's

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Speaker 1: wrong with you? And I told her I was afraid

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Speaker 1: that the Russians were gonna hear US and nucas. So, um,

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Speaker 1: that was kind of the prevailing mentality. I don't know

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Speaker 1: if everybody cried at Howard Jones shows, but I definitely

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Speaker 1: wasn't just totally off the chart. So as I get older,

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Speaker 1: I start to look into this whole thing, you know,

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Speaker 1: the Cold War, it's a pretty interesting experience. Um, and

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Speaker 1: I found that we had enough nuclear capability at one

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Speaker 1: time for either side to wipe one another off the

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Speaker 1: face of the earth. Was I right to cry at

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Speaker 1: this Howard Jones show? Was this fact or fiction? Scarily enough,

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Speaker 1: that's actually fact? And as we know, the Cold War

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Speaker 1: was are of threats. It was sort of abstract as

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Speaker 1: far as war goes. There weren't weapons being fired. And

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Speaker 1: it's sort of blossomed out of tensions between the ideologies

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Speaker 1: of capitalism the US and communism the U s s R.

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Speaker 1: The Soviet Union, and both nations were stock piling nuclear weapons. Um.

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Speaker 1: The United States developed the atom bomb, and then Russia

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Speaker 1: responded with the hydrogen bomb, and then back and forth.

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Speaker 1: It was very much a tit for tat and nuclear

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Speaker 1: proliferation sort of things. There was like a war threats,

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Speaker 1: but everybody had the goods to back it up. Yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 1: almost like capital and there was real gold and the

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Speaker 1: safe Well why why why are we still here? Why

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Speaker 1: wasn't there that nuclear annihilation that I was so concerned

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Speaker 1: with as as a youth. That's the kicker. No one

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Speaker 1: ever used these weapons. People understood, yeah, they're really powerful.

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Speaker 1: I could wipe out my enemy, but it's tantamount to

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Speaker 1: suicide firing one because you wipe out yourself too. Well.

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Speaker 1: The weapons were strong enough to destroy the world a

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Speaker 1: couple of times over, that's how much power was in them,

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Speaker 1: and so the doctrine of mutual assured destruction was formed

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Speaker 1: acronym MAD appropriate. Yeah, and both sides understood that neither

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Speaker 1: side would ever fire one of these weapons, but it

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Speaker 1: was the threat of having them in their arsenals that

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Speaker 1: gave both nations equal footing, and conventional warfare wasn't used either.

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Speaker 1: There were no guns, no tanks, no bombs. Don't feel

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Speaker 1: like this fired because, according to the theory of the

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Speaker 1: ladder of escalation, if there were a smaller shot fired,

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Speaker 1: the next nation would respond with a bigger shot, and

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Speaker 1: even bigger and bigger and bigger and so forth until

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Speaker 1: someone pulled out the big gun or war exactly. Well,

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Speaker 1: thanks for clearing that up for me. You can better now. Strangely,

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Speaker 1: I know the Cold War and I feel a little

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Speaker 1: bit more warm. And if you want to learn even

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Speaker 1: more about the Cold War, you can read What's Mutual

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Speaker 1: Shure Destruction and also our article and how Game Feel

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Speaker 1: Works works dot com for more on this and thousands

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Speaker 1: of other top beschin is at how stuff works dot com.

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Speaker 1: Let us know what you think. Send an email to

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Speaker 1: podcast head how stuff works dot com. M