My goto TEOTWAWKI movie is The Omega Man.  Just can't beat Charlton Heston as the last man standing...  The remake, I am Legend with Will Smith, was a good effort, but IMHO not a suitable replacement.

39 minutes ago, w6kd said:

My goto TEOTWAWKI movie is The Omega Man.  Just can't beat Charlton Heston as the last man standing...  The remake, I am Legend with Will Smith, was a good effort, but IMHO not a suitable replacement.

Oh yeah......Mr. Heston also was one on the last humans (speaking ones at least) in another great movie of that era...the Planet of the Apes saga.  He seems to gravitate to roles like that.

Loved the opening scene....just getting to pick whatever car you want to drive...I could only imagine   He picked a good one.

Not to stray from the subject movie, but another favorite is "Failsafe".

2 hours ago, birdguy said:

Forming your own movie in your head by reading the book openes up scenes and characters you won't find in the movie.  I do remember Alas Babylon and now that I have plenty of time to read I just ordered it from Barnes and Noble.

Another good one is Tomorrow by Philip Wylie.  He also wrote The Disappearnce where for al the men on the world the women disappear and vice versa.  So you have two stories, a world where women are running things and a world where men are running things.

Noel

Women are running things as far as I can tell.

I remember a documentary on the cold war where Nikita Krushcievs' son said his father told him laughing that in the fifties the USSR only had five ICBMs. By rolling them around they had the west deceived in believing they were rolling them out like sausages.

I remember as a youngster his proclamation he would conquer us without firing a shot. Looking at the internal social rot we are experiencing I wonder. Far more effective than any military threat.

3 hours ago, PATCO LCH said:

I remember a documentary on the cold war where Nikita Krushcievs' son said his father told him laughing that in the fifties the USSR only had five ICBMs. By rolling them around they had the west deceived in believing they were rolling them out like sausages.

The Soviets did that with a lot of stuff, swapping numbers on the sides of ships, having jets loop back around to fly by again over Red Square on the May Day parade, etc to make it look like they had more stuff than they actually did. If you think about it, that was quite a sensible thing to do. In spite of most Cold War propaganda, including Alas Babylon, which portrayed the Soviets as the aggressors and the ones keen to start a war, war was in fact the last thing the Soviets wanted; they knew exactly what it was like to lose millions of people; it happened to them in WW2 and they certainly were in no rush to repeat the experience.

Nevertheless, it did kind of suit them to make people think they were seriously tooled up and ready for a war, since that's as good a deterrent to an enemy as actually genuinely being tooled up and ready to go, and it is after all the point of a deterrent, in that you want to deter people from having a fight with you by thinking you are dangerous. This is something they managed with some very careful stage management with regard to ICBMs. and it's interesting how that played out...

The Russians were quite happy to let the West think the worst of them and suppose they were a really dangerous enemy. After all, generals on all sides want their new toys and the arms manufacturers want to make those new toys for them, so half the job of persuasion that there is a threat was already done by these people in the US pushing for more shiny new toys, by cheerfully playing up the Soviet threat, whether real or imagined.

Add in people like Joe McCarthy doing considerably more harm than good in the US, floating notions of reds under every bed and often launching wild accusations at people in the arts who were no more communists than he was, you can quite understand why the Soviets took the view of 'why bother actually making a load of missiles you never even want to use, so long as the other guy thinks you have them, thanks to such a climate of fear being generated by its own senators?'

Ironically enough, subsequent availability of old Soviet Union documents, in recent years, does actually show that the CPUSA was indeed under considerable influence of the Soviet secret service, so there certainly were some reds under the bed, but the preposterous and cruel accusations of McCarthy and Hoover in that period led to so much distaste in their activities from the wider US public, that in the end it diverted attention from being able to investigate the genuine threats.

This aside, we can see a more measured and thoughtful approach was the case with the Soviets, as demonstrated by the Cuban Missile Crisis for example. The Soviets were quite happy to let the public in the West think they had 'backed down', as far from making them look weak, it actually made them look like the ones willing to make peaceful concessions, when the reality was a contradeal between the two superpowers, with the US having to quietly remove the missiles it had placed in Turkey, these - aimed at the Soviets - being what had sparked the crisis in the first place. Those Turkish-based missiles had prompted the Soviets to go 'two can play at that game ' and stick some stuff on Cuba, and in fairness you have to say that was a balanced move. However, the Soviets agreed to not make a big noise about the US having to back down on those Turkish-based missiles, so it looked - to the average Joe - like only the Soviets had offered any concessions in removing their stuff from Cuba. Like Kennedy, Kruschev cared about winning p*ssing contests in public, but the reality is that he was a lot better at it when you look at the bigger picture. Time magazine had in fact put Kruschev on its cover in 1957 and proclaimed him Man of the Year, largely because of this propensity for clever political moves.

What is interesting about Kruschev and the claim of how many ICBMs the Soviets actually possessed, is that he very cleverly made the launch of Sputnik 1 make it look like this equated to the idea that the Soviet ICBM program was far in advance of where it actually was. Kruschev frequently added an interesting bit of punctuation to his state visits, having them preceded by some kind of Soviet space launch or missile test launch, to emphasize the idea that the USSR was ahead on missile capability. Not everyone in the US was fooled by this, pictures from US spy planes would often serve to give the game away, but ironically most of the time this photographic data was not reported to the people in the US Government who held the purse strings, lest it curtail the flow of cash for new toys for the US military. Meanwhile, the man in the street was firmly of the belief that the ICBM threat from the USSR was as real as the Russians and the US military portrayed it, so Kruschev was still able to use this to leverage treaties even though many people in the intelligence service knew much of the reported threat was based on inflated claims. All of which just goes to show you that when you get up at the really high levels, politics is even more of a game than a reality!

Edited July 9, 20205 yr by Chock

It's I interesting that Nikita and Eisenhower actually had a warm relationship. When Krushciev visited Camp David he won over Ike's grand kids like a favorite uncle with his stories and antics. Except for the U2 incident relations improved under them. Remember the Disney Land visit. This softening contributed to Krushcievs' removal.

On first meeting Krushciev sized Kennedy up as appearing rather week, inexperience and sickly which led to a more aggressive posture. Kennedy of course had to repair his image after Bay of Pigs which drove relations south as well as the Viet Nam fly paper. Remember the line "if I pull out now they won't reelect me".

On 7/8/2020 at 6:29 PM, PATCO LCH said:

I remember a documentary on the cold war where Nikita Krushcievs' son said his father told him laughing that in the fifties the USSR only had five ICBMs. By rolling them around they had the west deceived in believing they were rolling them out like sausages.

I remember as a youngster his proclamation he would conquer us without firing a shot. Looking at the internal social rot we are experiencing I wonder. Far more effective than any military threat.

Yep, whatever ultimately brings us down will come from within, from our own people, which will then make us easy pickings for some external force.

Dave

Cleaning out my bookshelf I found and old paperback hidden away.  It was a favorite of mine and I discovered it is still in print.

A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.

It has become cult classic.  I've read it about three or four times and now that I've found it again I think I will start it again.

Overiew...A monastery in a post apocalyptic world found blue prints signed by Liebowitz.  They have no idea what they are but are faithfully reproducing them like monks of old reproduced print.  They have made Liebowitz a saint and dedicated the monastery to him the story continues through time until a chosen few monks are boarded on a rocket ship to escape the next imminent nuclear holocaust.

Noel

Yeah, I seem to recall that from finding the blueprints it takes about 2000 years before the apocalypse is repeated once more.. 

I'd forgotten the title, thank you!

A good read 

3 hours ago, birdguy said:

Cleaning out my bookshelf I found and old paperback hidden away.  It was a favorite of mine and I discovered it is still in print.

A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.

Oh my! I remember reading that amusing story about a bazillion years ago. I'll have to check to see if I can get it for my Kindle so I can read it again.

Not available for Kindle, but a new paperback for $7.99. I had $10.40 rewards from my Amazon Prime Visa, so I got it essentially for free. I should have it tomorrow.

I can’t see it mentioned here so I’ll throw a 1980s BBC drama called ‘Threads’ into the pot. Covers a nuclear bomb explosion over Sheffield and the consequent panic and longer term breakdown of society. Very, very gritty watching, even by today’s standards. 

How about, Down to a Sunless Sea; by David Graham.  I have and love both Canticle For Leibowitz, and Alas Babylon.

 Sue

On 8/3/2020 at 10:42 AM, scotchegg said:

Covers a nuclear bomb explosion over Sheffield and the consequent panic and longer term breakdown of society. Very, very gritty watching, even by today’s standards. 

... plus about 3000 megatons unleashed worldwide... with the nuclear winter aftermath too.

Weird thing is, scotchegg, I was just watching Threads last week (random Youtube surfing)! Despite being made in 1984, it is still scarily depressing; this was the first time I'd watched it, even though I was more than old enough to watch it the first time round (I was 18 in '84). Was still living at home with my parents back then - perhaps they didn't have it on the main TV, I was probably playing a video game on my ZX Spectrum hooked up to my TV in my room.. 

2 hours ago, HighBypass said:

I was just watching Threads last week (random Youtube surfing)

I couldn't find it on YouTube, but that did prompt me to try other places and, Oh my giddy aunt, it's on internet archive:

https://archive.org/details/threads_201712

Because what we all need right now in this period of social stability, calm, and content, is apocalyptic TV!