General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTalk about weird synchronicity. Guess which TV series we are binge watching? Yup...The Americans
...just happens to be about the cold war, Russian spies living among us - the Reagan years (oh what years they were...)
It is pretty sad when you go to escape the news with some entertainment - then that entertainment just seems to be a continuation of the news. What is really weird is the view of the Russians back then. Compared with the "no problem, it's OK" attitude of I suspect the majority of, if not all, Trump supporters.
I guess that saying - truth is stranger than fiction - is...well, true!
Binkie The Clown
(7,911 posts)It won't matter who sits on the iron throne when the White Walkers come.
It can be considered as a metaphor for "It doesn't matter who's in the White House when global warming destroys us all."
femmocrat
(28,394 posts)What an amazing story. I always enjoy the references to reagan's paranoid policies that caused the KGB to (over-)react. We are actually fortunate that things never escalated to the point of annihilation!!
NRaleighLiberal
(60,014 posts)Will wait and watch 5 when it is free on Prime!
Gabi Hayes
(28,795 posts)Cabinet memos and briefing papers released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that a major war games exercise, Operation Able Archer, conducted in November 1983 by the US and its Nato allies was so realistic it made the Russians believe that a nuclear strike on its territory was a real possibility.
When intelligence filtered back to the Tory government on the Russians' reaction to the exercise, the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, ordered her officials to lobby the Americans to make sure that such a mistake could never happen again. Anti-nuclear proliferation campaigners have credited the move with changing how the UK and the US thought about their relationship with the Soviet Union and beginning a thaw in relations between east and west.
The papers were obtained by Peter Burt, director of the Nuclear Information Service (NIS), an organisation that campaigns against nuclear proliferation, who said that the documents showed just how risky the cold war became for both sides.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/02/nato-war-game-nuclear-disaster
femmocrat
(28,394 posts)Thanks!
Gabi Hayes
(28,795 posts)who turned the FBI guy, and because I used to live there, and watched a lot of it to see how realistic the settings were (not so much, including the arlington/fallsh church area that was portrayed on occasion--bogus arlington hospital for one).
nit picking a bit, there, but the story just got too hard to swallow, especially that wig the hubby put on for his FBI wife, or whatever she was
Hassin Bin Sober
(26,328 posts)RYAN
Operation RYAN (or RYaN) was a cold war military intelligence program run by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during the early 1980s when they believed the United States was planning for an imminent first strike attack. The name is an acronym for Raketno-Yadernoe Napadenie (Russian: Ракетно-ядерное нападение, "Nuclear Missile Attack" . The purpose of the operation was to collect intelligence on potential contingency plans of the Reagan administration to launch a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union.[1][2][3] The program was initiated in May 1981 by Yuri Andropov, then chairman of the KGB.
According to the historian Christopher Andrew, Andropov suffered from a "Hungarian complex" from his personal experience of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. He had, as the Soviet ambassador to Hungary, "watched in horror from the windows of his embassy as officers of the hated Hungarian security service were strung up from lampposts". Andropov remained haunted for the rest of his life by the speed with which an apparently all-powerful Communist one-party state had begun to topple. Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov, then Chairman of the KGB, justified the creation of Operation RYaN because, they claimed, the United States was actively preparing for nuclear war against the Soviet Union and its allies. According to a newly released Stasi report, the primary Chekist work discussed in the May 1981 meeting was the demand to allow for no surprise.'"[4]
The Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky divulged a top secret KGB telegram sent to the London KGB residency in February 1983. It stated: "The objective of the assignment is to see that the Residency works systematically to uncover any plans in preparation by the main adversary [USA] for RYAN and to organize a continual watch to be kept for indications of a decision being taken to use nuclear weapons against the USSR or immediate preparations being made for a nuclear missile attack." An attachment listed seven immediate and thirteen prospective tasks for the agents to complete and report. These included: the collection of data on potential places of evacuation and shelter, an appraisal of the level of blood held in blood banks, observation of places where nuclear decisions were made and where nuclear weapons were stored, observation of key nuclear decision makers, observation of lines of communication, reconnaissance of the heads of churches and banks, and surveillance of security services and military installations.[4]
Hassin Bin Sober
(26,328 posts)I still get a little jump when the "Special Report" graphics pop up on tv or the alert message buzzes for a test.
Able Archer 1983 The Brink of Apocalypse
https://m.
Gabi Hayes
(28,795 posts)across the street, firing a machine gun at our house from the Petersen's 2s story window! woke up sweating, but sorta dug the rush
now, though....jeez. it's not so entertaining, what with at least two insane nuclear power wielding heads of state, and another one that we're propping up, hoping against hope that ISIS/Alqaeda don't get their hands on their arsenal
Greybnk48
(10,168 posts)It's very good, but chilling.
dsc
(52,162 posts)I watched all of last year on one day and am current with this year. Great show but rather different to watch now than even a few years ago. I grew up in the era that the Americans is set in. I would be the age of Henry give or take a year or so. I very much remember what we thought of the Soviet Union then. I honestly never dreamed that I would see the day that the party of Reagan would become the party of Putin.
mcar
(42,331 posts)And, yes, oddly timely.
roamer65
(36,745 posts)Whoops...I am being racist.
Hassin Bin Sober
(26,328 posts)Apparently, they feel a kind of let bygones be bygones atmosphere helps with the show's popularity. Not so much if Russia is fucking with our elections.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2017/03/06/the-americans-fx-russia/98717866/
'The Americans' producers aren't thrilled about Russia making headlines
As The Americans returns Tuesday for its fifth season, the FX drama's fictional Soviet spies are competing for attention with real Russians.
For many viewers, Cold War-style subterfuge seemed a historical relic when the story of Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell), married spies embedded in suburban 1980s Washington, premiered in early 2013. Now, as the penultimate season opens, its front-page news.
Stinky The Clown
(67,799 posts). . . . got us started. Supposedly a fairly honest look at spies among us.
When we finished that, we went to Madame Secretary.