Cold War

The last week has had rather a Cold War focus.
 
First there were the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which arguably presaged the start of the Cold War.
 
Then we spent a rainy afternoon watching Judi Dench (one of our favourite actors) in the movie Red Joan. She plays a spy who passed nuclear secrets to the Russians in the Cold War years because she believed that the world would be safer if both sides in the Cold War had a nuclear deterrent.
 
Meanwhile we have also been watching a TV mini series, Summer of Rockets, set in England in 1958 at the height of the Cold War. It reminds me of how strongly so many people felt, then, that nuclear war was an imminent threat.
 
The blip is from our visit to Berlin in August 2018 and shows one of the remaining sections of the Berlin Wall, erected in August 1961. The fall of the Wall in 1989 symbolised the end of the Cold War. I remember what a momentous event it was – the end of the Cold War world, which for us was the world we had grown up in, indeed the world as we had always known it.