tear down the wall

[julesjones]

Yesterday I posted about my visit to the Hack Green Secret Bunker museum, where I stood and looked at a pair of decommissioned nuclear missiles. I'm at the older end of Generation X -- I was already a young adult twenty years ago. I grew up in the shadow of the Bomb, with the knowledge that there was the capability and perhaps the will to go to Mutually Assured Destruction, the potential end of civilisation in a war that was not survivable in any meaningful sense.

And then, twenty years ago today, the most blatant symbol of that terrible, deep division between nations -- was repudiated. The East German people decided in large numbers that they had had enough of being divided from their own across the Berlin Wall, and the newly installed leader of East Germany declined to give the order to shoot. An order that had been given many times in the past, but not twenty years ago today.

It was a process that began before the Wall came down, and continued long after. It is a process that is not entirely complete, that has had reversals. There is still suspicion, there are still madmen with access to the tools of mass destruction. But twenty years ago today is a day I can point at and say that that was the day I really believed that the world would not end in fire just yet.

Comments

[hawkeye7.livejournal.com]

I note in passing that, unlike Canada, the UK has not given up its nuclear weapons.