“The use of nuclear power is merely a symptom of our troubled times. It is time for all Americans to take control of their own lives and stop being pushed around and poisoned. The race for nuclear superiority can only end with the destruction of civilisation.” — Debbie Harry
There is nothing so distant as the recent past, especially when narrative accounts of that history are suppressed as official secrets. The cult status of the Sundance/RTL television series Deutschland 83 has revealed to audiences, in both Europe and America, just how close we came to nuclear war in the early 1980s and the escalation of geopolitical tensions in the final years of the Cold War. However, revisiting the mainstream pop hits of the era, it would seem the soundtrack was already written.
Amongst a raft of synth-pop anthems anticipating nuclear Armageddon, Peter Schilling’s Bowie-inspired ‘Major Tom’ sets the mood perfectly. Originally a 1983 number one in West Germany, it is now enjoying a second life as the show’s title theme. Missing out on the UK Top 40 at the time, remarkably, the song peaked at 14 on the US Hot 100 and topped the chart in Canada.
With its signature “4,3,2,1” countdown, the song captures the anxiety of the latter half of the Cold War, specifically the NATO operation Able Archer, an exercise simulating DefCon 1, and the preparations for a nuclear attack. The drill was so convincing that, according to papers from 1990, declassified in 2015, the USSR was on the verge of launching a preemptive strike.
Reputedly, it was the closest the two superpowers had come to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, with the Soviets loading warheads onto combat aircraft at bases in East Germany. The crisis was deescalated thanks to Director of Defense Intelligence Leonard Harry Perrot, who advised leaders not to respond to the Soviet activities in contravention of the Warsaw Pact, based on intelligence sources gleaned from a UK double-agent.
Oblivious though much of the general population was to this brush with nuclear destruction, the music of the synth-pop, new-wave era captures the sublime terror. Here we take a look at ten massive hit records that capture the energy of the atom-splitting and continue to resonate to this day.
Read full version at Far Out Magazine
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