Great movie! The reason nothing like this ever happened, is because there were reasonable men on both sides, they kept t
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lorenzb-2 — 14 years ago(February 19, 2012 04:08 PM)
I suppose lots of Russians long for the good old days when they were a superpower and even the mighty U.S. feared them. They have certianly lost a lot of prestige. And I don't think things have gotten better for the adverage Russian citizen. Sort of a nostalga. But no matter what, a return to communism would be a disaster. It simple dosen't work.
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tgs333 — 14 years ago(April 03, 2012 08:08 AM)
Wow this is a great thread for this movie!
I have the film on DVD and read the book. I love the come back to Brian Keith's statment: I am only concerned with American Leaders. Rock Hudson: A classical but Fatal mistake. The American people are their own leaders!
Suffice to say, Threads would make a good sequal to WWIII. The tenions would have built up in Alasaka rather than Iran.
"I'm a vehemently anti-nuclear, paranoid mess, harbouring a strange obsession with radioactive sheep." -
artisticengineer — 13 years ago(June 18, 2012 09:15 AM)
Interesting comment and I somewhat agree with you. Please remember though that a grain embargo against another country by the United States is the basis of the conflict in this movie. Yet, that premise is somewhat ludicrous as grain is one of the items that is under no restriction! The U.S. will sell grain to most any other country; even the countries that we have very serious disagreements with. The U.S., for example, sells food (including grains) to North Korea and Cuba!
And, in the era that this film was made, the Soviets were building a pipeline expressly to sell us oil! So, the premise of their attack on our pipeline, in order to restrict our oil supply, is also pretty ludicrous; unless it was done by them in order to get rid of the competition.
I think different issues should have been used to make this film more believeable. -
lorenzb-2 — 13 years ago(June 18, 2012 09:40 AM)
Well, in fact Jimmy Carter did indeed have a grain embargo aganst the USSR in the late 70s, as "punishment" for all the s**t they were stirring up. Which was pleanty. Not that we wern't too though. However the embargo was meaningless, because Argenina, Canada and others were more than happy to take up the slack. So Reagan wisely ended it as soon as he got in. Not that he wasn't a beep up too though. As someone who lived through the entire cold war, I'm SO glad it's over!!! WW3 never happened because there were reasonable men on both sides, who also cared about their own lives and families.
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artisticengineer — 13 years ago(June 18, 2012 04:26 PM)
Yeah, that's right; I remember now about the grain embargo. I kept thinking about the 1972 sale of grain to the Soviet Union but now that you mention it.Well, like you mentioned, other countries were not banned from selling grain to the Soviet Union unlike in the movie where all of the West participated in an embargo. Now that I remember it I think Jimmy did not want to sell grain to the Soviets ostensibly due to the Soviet actions in Afghanistan; however, his real reason seems to have been to keep the grain in the U.S. and therefore keep food prices from going up even faster.
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murad23 — 12 years ago(January 02, 2014 09:32 AM)
You have your facts all wrong.
The US had a grain embargo against the Soviets. It is true that like everything Jimmy Carter did, it was ludicrous.
And the Soviets were NEVER building a pipeline to sell us oil. -
acecrisp-1 — 12 years ago(April 14, 2013 01:53 AM)
Actually the reason world war three never happened had nothing to do with politics.
Russia wanted war.
It wanted to take over the world
During the Cuban missile crisis they wanted war.
In Afghanistan they lost not because of the rebels but because of the same reason they didn't go to war over Cuba and since then
This is based on solid data.
Their economy was so bad that the every day costs of a major war were too mic for them to afford..
Just imagine if they had had the money -
ObscureAuteur — 11 years ago(September 01, 2014 07:17 PM)
Reagan's first term sabre-rattling evil empire nonsense from day one led us to the closest we ever came, at least since the Cuban Missile Crisis, to an actual WWIII in 1983 due to a NATO exercise, Able Archer 83, that by design looked a like preparations for a first strike. The USSR went to high alert in response. (Might be fittingly titled
The Ten Days That Almost Ended the World
.) Apparently after this close call Reagan finally realized that it is possible that everyone does not view the USA as "the good guys" that would never really do such a thing as a preemptive first strike. Also, this bellicose posture probably contributed greatly to the shooting down of KAL007 instead of forcing it to land somewhere with an entirely different kind of incident to deal with.
Setting the stage.
On June 8, 1982, Reagan, in a speech to the British House of Commons confidently declared that, " Freedom and Democracy will leave Marxism and Leninism on the ash heap of history." Viewed without ideological bias, this is at least the equivalent of Khrushchev's infamous and deliberately misrepresented "We will bury you" speech. (Which said Capitalism would be buried after its natural death, not after murder by Soviet military action.)
Regarding the nuclear weapons in Turkey. I read an article (by John Barron) in Reader's Digest (not quite as far right as, for example, American Opinion, published by the John Birch society) a few years after the Cuban Missile Crisis denouncing Kennedy for conceding anything at all, that the USA had been again bamboozled by the treacherous Soviet's tactic, taking something, then getting something to give it back. Notwithstanding that U.S. nuclear weapons already in place in Turkey, viewed fairly, were the equivalent of what the Soviets were attempting to gain in Cuba. I am certainly glad Kennedy did not listen to the hard liners, chose to ignore the more belligerent of the two messages from the USSR, and kept the missiles out of Cuba. Yet there are people who still regard this as a defeat, and a few that still think "getting it (the 'inevitable' nuclear war) over with" was a plan worthy of serious consideration, or worse, regard it as a fulfillment of religious prophecy to be desired.
CB
Good Times, Noodle Salad -
Eric-62-2 — 10 years ago(April 24, 2015 11:33 PM)
Oh please. Reagan's remoralizing of the Cold War after a decade of retreat in the dtente decade is what ultimately turned things around and led to victory in the Cold War. The "ash heap of history" speech is with hindsight a sign of his courage that the Soviet Union was not an implacable entity that would be around forever, as all the "experts" had insisted for so long, and that they could be defeated peacefully as was proved to be the case. You want to blame someone for KAL 007, try blaming the perpetrators of the act instead.
The legacy of dtente was the greatest advancements the Soviet Union made in the entire history of the Cold War, culminating with the invasion of Afghanistan and the crackdown of Solidarity in Poland. The legacy of the Reagan policy was the end of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe, the end of the Berlin Wall and the end of the USSR.