Nuclear Timelapse & The Cold War

by Goldie on November 19, 2013

in Uncategorized

The below video of a time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998 is an interesting video but not a surprising one.  It’s been around the links share before but today I re-found the video from an article that remarks on the speedup during the Cold War and while I admit my entry into adulthood came rather late in the Cold War (mid/tale 80’s), I remember one of the feelings I had at College was that nuclear war was a very real and likely possibility.

I remember the Doomsday clock on the back of the Watchmen comics as they came out and how that resonated with me.  I also remember Tetris coming out and its significance was as much political as its game play was addictive.  I remember how exciting it was to have something come out of the _Soviet Union_ and that we could play and connect and bond over games.  I remember as the networks coalesced into what is now the Internet- Bitnet, Fido Net, DARPA net, etc. and the knowledge that the distributed nature of DNS which makes it fairly resistant to failure (in spite of its limitations) was initially developed with the thought of how to make the network survive in case of a nuclear attack, so one targeted attack would not take out the whole internet.

Nuclear power and nuclear weapons are as much a threat as before, but perhaps I’ve become jaded or have more trust in the survival of the world but it doesn’t seem nearly as scary now as it did then.

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