7 ms·

'WWIII Queen's speech' script revealed

63 points by joelg236 13y ago

jgrahamc 13y ago
To me the speech is interesting because it reminds us how we did actually all live in fear that a nuclear war could happen. It seems remote now, but growing up it was ever present. I think it's in Generation X that one character describes "waiting for the flash". The idea that the sudden destruction of everything was an ever present background thought. In the book Coupland defines the term "Mental Ground Zero" for where you imagined you'd be when it happened. For me it was always on a train traveling between two cities that no longer exist.
- petercooper 13y ago
  I'm young enough to be on the tail end of it, but I remember seeing When The Wind Blows as a kid in the late 80s and being aware of what could happen. Curiously, the whole movie is now on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9aHT-IlkHo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9aHT-IlkHo (it's animated) For anyone with a morbid curiosity over nuclear war, THREADS is worth a watch too. I didn't learn about it until very recently but supposedly it was on prime time British TV in 1984 and scared the bejeezus out of everyone in its rendition of what might happen to the UK in the case of nuclear war. It's also on YouTube! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MCbTvoNrAg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MCbTvoNrAg
  - kingofspain 13y ago
    They showed us Threads in primary school. I don't remember much of it to be honest, other than finding the accents hilarious (as Lancastrians we were brought up to fear & hate the Yorkist dogs). I think it shook up the teachers more than us, but I guess that's to be expected. We were too young to really have felt the paranoia of the times.
    - tonyblundell 13y ago
      They showed it to us at Primary school too. I'm from south Sheffield though so the accents sounded quite posh to us :-)I do remember being freaked out by any loud noises in town for a few months afterwards. I watched it again a couple of years ago. It's amazing to think about how close we actually came to nuclear war not so long ago and now we're in a position where people can campaign for self disarmament of nuclear weapons.
      - gadders 13y ago
        We had people campaigning for unilateral disarmament then as well. TBH I still don't think it's a valid position when you have rogue states such as Pakistan and North Korea with nuclear weapons.
  - arethuza 13y ago
    There is also Peter Watkin's excellent "The War Game": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game
    - petercooper 13y ago
      I'd not heard of that, thanks! It's also on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrGg8PfkbZw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrGg8PfkbZw
  - JonnieCache 13y ago
    Beware, watching threads may lead to spending the afternoon staring at the wall with a blank expression for up to four hours after it finishes.
    - arethuza 13y ago
      It is worth noting that Threads was partially based on a UK goverment exercise that assumed a 205 megaton attack on the UK (Square Leg) - a real attack probably would have been far far worse (higher numbers of smaller bombs, much higher total yield). A real attack in the UK might have been far worse than the one shown in Threads!
      - JonnieCache 13y ago
        A scenario in which more people were killed more quickly could only be better. The thing I took away from Threads is that as soon as you see the mushroom cloud, it's in your interest to ensure that you die as soon as possible. I've just remembered the final scene. :(
  - rmc 13y ago
    Threads is great. It's not just "the nuclear attack" but goes on for months and years after the attack.
- arethuza 13y ago
  Even in fairly "optimistic" attack scenarios over 50% of the UK population were expected to die immediately in an attack: e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Leg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Leg For those interested in UK government cold war planning I can strongly recommend Peter Hennessy's book "The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst 1945-2010": http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Secret-State-Whitehall-Cold/dp/0141008350 http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Secret-State-Whitehall-Cold/dp/0... One particularly chilling part describes how early UK estimates thought that it would only take a small number of H-bombs to destroy the UK as a functioning society, resulting in the following: "Hennessy tells the story of a jokey 1961 encounter between Khrushchev and the British Ambassador, Frank Roberts. The Soviet leader asked how many H-bombs Roberts thought would be needed to wipe out the UK. ‘Six’, he replied. Khrushchev chided him for his pessimism. He said that ‘optimists’ estimated it would take nine — but reassured him with a twinkle that the Soviet General Staff… had earmarked several scores of bombs for use against the UK so that the Soviet Union had a higher opinion of the UK’s resistance capacity than the UK itself."
  - gambiting 13y ago
    We have only found out few years ago, that the official doctrine of the Soviets was to nuke my country(Poland) to hell to make it impossible for any forces from the West to move using the shortest path to Russia. And theoretically we were their allies....so it's 100% of the population compared to 50% in the UK...
    - arethuza 13y ago
      Presumably they would only have done that if NATO ground troops were likely to advance through Poland? I'd expect the US to have similar plans to attack the UK if we'd done anything like immediately surrendering if a war had looked likely? [Militaries have lots of weird plans for strange events that could probably never happen]. NB The UK had plans to attack US bases here to get our hands on nuclear weapons if there was any sign that the US didn't want to get directly involved in a war - no idea why anyone would find it surprising that such plans were considered!
    - bane 13y ago
- oracuk 13y ago
  Coupland absolutely nailed it. I used to get sudden moments of fear that the 'flash' could happen at that particular moment when it struck. I can vividly remember these happening when I was a teenager. Looking back it was a terrible thing to grow up with, a constant fear of immediate death without warning. Somehow while the danger is still present the immediacy of the fear has waned as I have gotten older. Although now I worry about my children it's more of a vague worry about their future than a immediate pressing fear of a the 'flash'.
  - jgrahamc 13y ago
    a constant fear of immediate death without warning I wasn't afraid of dying; I was afraid of surviving.
    - arethuza 13y ago
      Even after 30+ years I still recall Carl Sagan from the Cosmos episode "Who Speaks for Earth": "In a full nuclear exchange, in the paroxysm of global death, the equivalent of a million Hiroshimas would be dropped all over the world. And, in such an exchange not everyone would be killed by the blast and the fire storm and the immediate radiation. There would be other agonies. The loss of loved ones; the legions of the burned and blinded and mutilated; disease; plague; long-lived radiation poisoning the soil and the water; the threat of stillbirths and malformed children; and, the hopeless sense of a civilization destroyed for nothing. The knowledge that we could have prevented it and did nothing." http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/sagan-carl_who-speaks-for-earth-1980.html http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/sagan-carl_who-speak... I found the idea of being someone left around with "the hopeless sense of a civilization destroyed for nothing" particularly appalling.
- cstross 13y ago
  I grew up in Leeds in the 70s and early 80s. Eight miles east of my home was the Vickers tank factory, the largest tank factory in Western Europe. Ten miles west was Leeds/Bradford Airport. Eight miles south was the M1/M62 junction, one of the two main north-south/east-west motorway intersections in the north/midlands, and a strategic choke-point on reinforcements arriving in Liverpool from the Atlantic and departing from Hull and Newcastle to European ports. I didn't expect to survive ... (Then I went to university in London. Enough said.) It's interesting how much of the art and music of the 1980s was influenced by this existential terror of sudden annihilation, and how little resonance songs like "The Final Countdown" (by Europe) or "Dancing with Tears in my Eyes" (Ultravox) and similar have for folks aged under 30.
  - eterm 13y ago
    Your description reminds me of Threads ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads ), which is set is nearby Sheffield. At the time (1984) the centre of much industry. The film itself is terribly bleak, I'm glad to have not consciously lived through always worrying of nuclear war.
- IvyMike 13y ago
  I was 10 when I saw "The Day After" [1] and "Testament" [2], back-to-back. I tell people this, and the younger ones never believe me, but I genuinely believed that I would never live to be an adult. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testament_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testament_(film)
  - arethuza 13y ago
    Going by your username, I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one simultaneously fascinated and deeply horrified by nuclear weapons! :-)
  - unimpressive 13y ago
    >I tell people this, and the younger ones never believe me, but I genuinely believed that I would never live to be an adult. I don't expect to live past my twenties. It isn't hard to believe that somebody on one side of a two sided prelude to a nuclear war could be nervous about their survival prospects.
- derefr 13y ago
  That "waiting for the flash" problem still exists, you know; the modern "flash" is the one that comes soon after the birth-moment of the world's first self-improving AI, unless that AI is "Friendly" to us humans. Could happen at any moment, if some dolt gets all the math right without also deducing the consequences.
  - ars 13y ago
    That AI would also need the ability to act, not just to think. A "dot with math" is unlikely to also have the ability to make a machine that can move. Everyone is worried about unfriendly AI - all you have to do is put that unfriendly AI in a computer without the ability to affect the physical world. (Also no network.) Give it only a screen, and a video camera. It can be as unfriendly as it likes.
    - derefr 13y ago
      Leaving aside the AI-Box experiment (http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox), the existence of side-channel attacks puts strong doubt to this argument. I would consider it unlikely that there isn't at least one way to do calculations on a modern CPU that results in arbitrarily-tunable EM emissions roughly in the radio (or wi-fi, or bluetooth, or...) band. Giving access to a screen makes this even easier; those emit EM by default.
      - ars 13y ago
        And? With this EM it can do what? It's a computer program, not magic.
        derefr 13y ago
        It can write a copy of itself into the working memory of another computer by once again exploiting a side-channel (wi-fi receiver DMA on a smartphone laying nearby, say.) Once it has Internet access, it can just yank some credit-card numbers and start ordering parts and subcontracting work to arbitrary addresses... ...but this is all assuming high-level side-channels. There are things you can do using the acoustics available in spinning hard disks that can produce any sort of resonance you like. I would imagine that, much in the same way a modern-day scientist could go go back to 300AD and still be able to construct a crystal radio just out of some spare bits of metal laying about (it's not a hard problem, just a theory you need to know to even think of approaching the problem that way), a sufficiently-advanced intelligence might be able to just do nanoscale assembly of whatever it likes using coalesced heat radiating off your RAM chips.
gadders 13y ago
And this is why we have a royal family. I actually felt quite stirred reading that speech. I can't imagine David Cameron or Ed Milliband managing that. I think Churchill was an outlier.
- air 13y ago
  It was not written by the queen. "The speech, devised by Whitehall officials at one of the most fraught Cold War periods..."
  - gadders 13y ago
    Yeah, but it matters who says it, right? Otherwise you could get a newsreader to deliver it.
    - rooshdi 13y ago
      Reading doesn't require royalty. Peasants can too.
    - air 13y ago
      It does feel a bit funny, that a piece of text she did not write, present, or probably even read, is given as a reason to have her as a monarch. Seems like you would probably get on just fine with a fabricated character played by an actress, who is charismatic enough. Say, "Big Sister"
      - prawn 13y ago
        First sentence there is superb. Wish I could up vote more than once. Really quite insightful.
      - gadders 13y ago
        Or we could do what Americans do and venerate a piece of cloth? I'm not having a pop at Americans, but it may make sense to view the queen as a symbol in the same way that the flag is for Americans. It's just that our symbol happens to be a person. Also, the Queen ties us back to stuff like Henry V and Agincourt etc.
sinkasapa 13y ago
If Hallmark made a "Sorry about your war" card, it would sound like this.
- arethuza 13y ago
  I don't think there is much of a market for a "Wish you a quick painless death in the forthcoming nuclear war" card. :-|
noarchy 13y ago
Unfortunately, we're still quite capable of annihilating the world several times over with nuclear weapons. We just don't seem to be threatening to do so, these days, at least not so openly. The nuclear cartel, for lack of a better word, has shifted its focus towards maintaining exclusivity on the possession of these weapons, and will wage war to accomplish this. To be a bit more on-topic, that this speech was even considered necessary gives me a bit of hope. We see it as a bit antiquated, fears of a time that is now largely behind us, when our rulers were willing to sacrifice most of us in their global power game.
- FeatureRush 13y ago
  > annihilating the world several times over with nuclear weapons. No, not really, see http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/how-i-learnt-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-bomb/ http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/how-i-learnt-to-s... http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html
eksith 13y ago
There's an interview of Jeremy Paxman with Parkinson that touches on the responsibilities of a newly elected PM which include writing (in their own handwriting) orders for the commanders of the nuclear subs. These are to be read in the event that the country is destroyed and they are dead. Tony Blair was so overcome with the gravity of this, he took to his home for a while to mull over the implications. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSrJNa--Oq8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSrJNa--Oq8 (5:25)
gnosis 13y ago
The most frightening and realistic depiction of a nuclear holocaust that I've seen is a 1984 BBC film called Threads.[1][2] You can watch it for free on youtube.[3] [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads [2] - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/ [3] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MCbTvoNrAg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MCbTvoNrAg

63 points by joelg236 13y ago

To me the speech is interesting because it reminds us how we did actually all live in fear that a nuclear war could happen. It seems remote now, but growing up it was ever present. I think it's in Generation X that one character describes "waiting for the flash". The idea that the sudden destruction of everything was an ever present background thought. In the book Coupland defines the term "Mental Ground Zero" for where you imagined you'd be when it happened. For me it was always on a train traveling between two cities that no longer exist.

petercooper 13y ago
I'm young enough to be on the tail end of it, but I remember seeing When The Wind Blows as a kid in the late 80s and being aware of what could happen. Curiously, the whole movie is now on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9aHT-IlkHo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9aHT-IlkHo (it's animated) For anyone with a morbid curiosity over nuclear war, THREADS is worth a watch too. I didn't learn about it until very recently but supposedly it was on prime time British TV in 1984 and scared the bejeezus out of everyone in its rendition of what might happen to the UK in the case of nuclear war. It's also on YouTube! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MCbTvoNrAg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MCbTvoNrAg
- kingofspain 13y ago
  They showed us Threads in primary school. I don't remember much of it to be honest, other than finding the accents hilarious (as Lancastrians we were brought up to fear & hate the Yorkist dogs). I think it shook up the teachers more than us, but I guess that's to be expected. We were too young to really have felt the paranoia of the times.
  - tonyblundell 13y ago
    They showed it to us at Primary school too. I'm from south Sheffield though so the accents sounded quite posh to us :-)I do remember being freaked out by any loud noises in town for a few months afterwards. I watched it again a couple of years ago. It's amazing to think about how close we actually came to nuclear war not so long ago and now we're in a position where people can campaign for self disarmament of nuclear weapons.
    - gadders 13y ago
      We had people campaigning for unilateral disarmament then as well. TBH I still don't think it's a valid position when you have rogue states such as Pakistan and North Korea with nuclear weapons.
- arethuza 13y ago
  There is also Peter Watkin's excellent "The War Game": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game
  - petercooper 13y ago
    I'd not heard of that, thanks! It's also on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrGg8PfkbZw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrGg8PfkbZw
- JonnieCache 13y ago
  Beware, watching threads may lead to spending the afternoon staring at the wall with a blank expression for up to four hours after it finishes.
  - arethuza 13y ago
    It is worth noting that Threads was partially based on a UK goverment exercise that assumed a 205 megaton attack on the UK (Square Leg) - a real attack probably would have been far far worse (higher numbers of smaller bombs, much higher total yield). A real attack in the UK might have been far worse than the one shown in Threads!
    - JonnieCache 13y ago
      A scenario in which more people were killed more quickly could only be better. The thing I took away from Threads is that as soon as you see the mushroom cloud, it's in your interest to ensure that you die as soon as possible. I've just remembered the final scene. :(
- rmc 13y ago
  Threads is great. It's not just "the nuclear attack" but goes on for months and years after the attack.
arethuza 13y ago
Even in fairly "optimistic" attack scenarios over 50% of the UK population were expected to die immediately in an attack: e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Leg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Leg For those interested in UK government cold war planning I can strongly recommend Peter Hennessy's book "The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst 1945-2010": http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Secret-State-Whitehall-Cold/dp/0141008350 http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Secret-State-Whitehall-Cold/dp/0... One particularly chilling part describes how early UK estimates thought that it would only take a small number of H-bombs to destroy the UK as a functioning society, resulting in the following: "Hennessy tells the story of a jokey 1961 encounter between Khrushchev and the British Ambassador, Frank Roberts. The Soviet leader asked how many H-bombs Roberts thought would be needed to wipe out the UK. ‘Six’, he replied. Khrushchev chided him for his pessimism. He said that ‘optimists’ estimated it would take nine — but reassured him with a twinkle that the Soviet General Staff… had earmarked several scores of bombs for use against the UK so that the Soviet Union had a higher opinion of the UK’s resistance capacity than the UK itself."
- gambiting 13y ago
  We have only found out few years ago, that the official doctrine of the Soviets was to nuke my country(Poland) to hell to make it impossible for any forces from the West to move using the shortest path to Russia. And theoretically we were their allies....so it's 100% of the population compared to 50% in the UK...
  - arethuza 13y ago
    Presumably they would only have done that if NATO ground troops were likely to advance through Poland? I'd expect the US to have similar plans to attack the UK if we'd done anything like immediately surrendering if a war had looked likely? [Militaries have lots of weird plans for strange events that could probably never happen]. NB The UK had plans to attack US bases here to get our hands on nuclear weapons if there was any sign that the US didn't want to get directly involved in a war - no idea why anyone would find it surprising that such plans were considered!
  - bane 13y ago
oracuk 13y ago
Coupland absolutely nailed it. I used to get sudden moments of fear that the 'flash' could happen at that particular moment when it struck. I can vividly remember these happening when I was a teenager. Looking back it was a terrible thing to grow up with, a constant fear of immediate death without warning. Somehow while the danger is still present the immediacy of the fear has waned as I have gotten older. Although now I worry about my children it's more of a vague worry about their future than a immediate pressing fear of a the 'flash'.
- jgrahamc 13y ago
  a constant fear of immediate death without warning I wasn't afraid of dying; I was afraid of surviving.
  - arethuza 13y ago
    Even after 30+ years I still recall Carl Sagan from the Cosmos episode "Who Speaks for Earth": "In a full nuclear exchange, in the paroxysm of global death, the equivalent of a million Hiroshimas would be dropped all over the world. And, in such an exchange not everyone would be killed by the blast and the fire storm and the immediate radiation. There would be other agonies. The loss of loved ones; the legions of the burned and blinded and mutilated; disease; plague; long-lived radiation poisoning the soil and the water; the threat of stillbirths and malformed children; and, the hopeless sense of a civilization destroyed for nothing. The knowledge that we could have prevented it and did nothing." http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/sagan-carl_who-speaks-for-earth-1980.html http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/sagan-carl_who-speak... I found the idea of being someone left around with "the hopeless sense of a civilization destroyed for nothing" particularly appalling.
cstross 13y ago
I grew up in Leeds in the 70s and early 80s. Eight miles east of my home was the Vickers tank factory, the largest tank factory in Western Europe. Ten miles west was Leeds/Bradford Airport. Eight miles south was the M1/M62 junction, one of the two main north-south/east-west motorway intersections in the north/midlands, and a strategic choke-point on reinforcements arriving in Liverpool from the Atlantic and departing from Hull and Newcastle to European ports. I didn't expect to survive ... (Then I went to university in London. Enough said.) It's interesting how much of the art and music of the 1980s was influenced by this existential terror of sudden annihilation, and how little resonance songs like "The Final Countdown" (by Europe) or "Dancing with Tears in my Eyes" (Ultravox) and similar have for folks aged under 30.
- eterm 13y ago
  Your description reminds me of Threads ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads ), which is set is nearby Sheffield. At the time (1984) the centre of much industry. The film itself is terribly bleak, I'm glad to have not consciously lived through always worrying of nuclear war.
IvyMike 13y ago
I was 10 when I saw "The Day After" [1] and "Testament" [2], back-to-back. I tell people this, and the younger ones never believe me, but I genuinely believed that I would never live to be an adult. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testament_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testament_(film)
- arethuza 13y ago
  Going by your username, I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one simultaneously fascinated and deeply horrified by nuclear weapons! :-)
- unimpressive 13y ago
  >I tell people this, and the younger ones never believe me, but I genuinely believed that I would never live to be an adult. I don't expect to live past my twenties. It isn't hard to believe that somebody on one side of a two sided prelude to a nuclear war could be nervous about their survival prospects.
derefr 13y ago
That "waiting for the flash" problem still exists, you know; the modern "flash" is the one that comes soon after the birth-moment of the world's first self-improving AI, unless that AI is "Friendly" to us humans. Could happen at any moment, if some dolt gets all the math right without also deducing the consequences.
- ars 13y ago
  That AI would also need the ability to act, not just to think. A "dot with math" is unlikely to also have the ability to make a machine that can move. Everyone is worried about unfriendly AI - all you have to do is put that unfriendly AI in a computer without the ability to affect the physical world. (Also no network.) Give it only a screen, and a video camera. It can be as unfriendly as it likes.
  - derefr 13y ago
    Leaving aside the AI-Box experiment (http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox), the existence of side-channel attacks puts strong doubt to this argument. I would consider it unlikely that there isn't at least one way to do calculations on a modern CPU that results in arbitrarily-tunable EM emissions roughly in the radio (or wi-fi, or bluetooth, or...) band. Giving access to a screen makes this even easier; those emit EM by default.
    - ars 13y ago
      And? With this EM it can do what? It's a computer program, not magic.
      - derefr 13y ago
        It can write a copy of itself into the working memory of another computer by once again exploiting a side-channel (wi-fi receiver DMA on a smartphone laying nearby, say.) Once it has Internet access, it can just yank some credit-card numbers and start ordering parts and subcontracting work to arbitrary addresses... ...but this is all assuming high-level side-channels. There are things you can do using the acoustics available in spinning hard disks that can produce any sort of resonance you like. I would imagine that, much in the same way a modern-day scientist could go go back to 300AD and still be able to construct a crystal radio just out of some spare bits of metal laying about (it's not a hard problem, just a theory you need to know to even think of approaching the problem that way), a sufficiently-advanced intelligence might be able to just do nanoscale assembly of whatever it likes using coalesced heat radiating off your RAM chips.

gadders 13y ago

And this is why we have a royal family. I actually felt quite stirred reading that speech. I can't imagine David Cameron or Ed Milliband managing that. I think Churchill was an outlier.

air 13y ago
It was not written by the queen. "The speech, devised by Whitehall officials at one of the most fraught Cold War periods..."
- gadders 13y ago
  Yeah, but it matters who says it, right? Otherwise you could get a newsreader to deliver it.
  - rooshdi 13y ago
    Reading doesn't require royalty. Peasants can too.
  - air 13y ago
    It does feel a bit funny, that a piece of text she did not write, present, or probably even read, is given as a reason to have her as a monarch. Seems like you would probably get on just fine with a fabricated character played by an actress, who is charismatic enough. Say, "Big Sister"
    - prawn 13y ago
      First sentence there is superb. Wish I could up vote more than once. Really quite insightful.
    - gadders 13y ago
      Or we could do what Americans do and venerate a piece of cloth? I'm not having a pop at Americans, but it may make sense to view the queen as a symbol in the same way that the flag is for Americans. It's just that our symbol happens to be a person. Also, the Queen ties us back to stuff like Henry V and Agincourt etc.

sinkasapa 13y ago

If Hallmark made a "Sorry about your war" card, it would sound like this.

arethuza 13y ago
I don't think there is much of a market for a "Wish you a quick painless death in the forthcoming nuclear war" card. :-|

noarchy 13y ago

Unfortunately, we're still quite capable of annihilating the world several times over with nuclear weapons. We just don't seem to be threatening to do so, these days, at least not so openly. The nuclear cartel, for lack of a better word, has shifted its focus towards maintaining exclusivity on the possession of these weapons, and will wage war to accomplish this. To be a bit more on-topic, that this speech was even considered necessary gives me a bit of hope. We see it as a bit antiquated, fears of a time that is now largely behind us, when our rulers were willing to sacrifice most of us in their global power game.

FeatureRush 13y ago
> annihilating the world several times over with nuclear weapons. No, not really, see http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/how-i-learnt-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-bomb/ http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/how-i-learnt-to-s... http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html

eksith 13y ago

There's an interview of Jeremy Paxman with Parkinson that touches on the responsibilities of a newly elected PM which include writing (in their own handwriting) orders for the commanders of the nuclear subs. These are to be read in the event that the country is destroyed and they are dead. Tony Blair was so overcome with the gravity of this, he took to his home for a while to mull over the implications. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSrJNa--Oq8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSrJNa--Oq8 (5:25)

gnosis 13y ago

The most frightening and realistic depiction of a nuclear holocaust that I've seen is a 1984 BBC film called Threads.[1][2] You can watch it for free on youtube.[3] [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads [2] - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/ [3] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MCbTvoNrAg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MCbTvoNrAg