Journal tags: coldwar

Maureen has written a really good overview of web feeds for this year’s HTMHell advent calendar.

The common belief is that nobody uses RSS feeds these days. And while it’s true that I wish more people used feed readers—the perfect antidote to being fed from an algorithm—the truth is that millions of people use RSS feeds every time they listen to a podcast. That’s what a podcast is: an RSS feed with enclosure elements that point to audio files.

And just as a web feed doesn’t necessarily need to represent a list of blog posts, a podcast doesn’t necessarily need to be two or more people having a recorded conversation (though that does seem to be the most common format). A podcast can tell a story. I like those kinds of podcasts.

The BBC are particularly good at this kind of episodic audio storytelling. I really enjoyed their series Thirteen minutes to the moon, all about the Apollo 11 mission. They followed it up with a series on Apollo 13, and most recently, a series on the space shuttle.

Here’s the RSS feed for the 13 minutes podcast.

Right now, the BBC have an ongoing series about the history of the atomic bomb. The first series was about Leo Szilard, the second series was about Klaus Fuchs, and the third series running right now is about the Cuban missile crisis.

The hook is that each series is presented by people with a family connection to the events. The first series is presented by the granddaughter of one of the Oak Ridge scientists. The second series is presented by the granddaughter of Klaus Fuch’s spy handler in the UK—blimey! And the current series is presented by Nina Khrushcheva and Max Kennedy—double blimey!

Here’s the RSS feed for The Bomb podcast.

If you want a really deep dive into another pivotal twentieth century event, Evgeny Morozov made a podcast all about Stafford Beer and Salvadore Allende’s collaboration on cybernetics in Chile, the fabled Project Cybercyn. It’s fascinating stuff, though there’s an inevitable feeling of dread hanging over events because we know how this ends.

The podcast is called The Santiago Boys, though I almost hesitate to call it a podcast because for some reason, the website does its best to hide the RSS feed, linking only to the silos of Spotify and Apple. Fortunately, thanks to this handy tool, I can say:

Here’s the RSS feed for The Santiago Boys podcast.

The unifying force behind all three of these stories is the cold war:

• 13 Minutes—the space race, from the perspective of the United States.
• The Bomb—the nuclear arms race, from Los Alamos to Cuba.
• The Santiago Boys—the CIA-backed overthrow of a socialist democracy in Chile.

I’ve been watching The Right Stuff on Disney Plus. It’s a modern remake of the ’80s film of the ’70s Tom Wolfe book of ’60s events.

It’s okay. The main challenge, as a viewer, is keeping track of which of the seven homogenous white guys is which. It’s like Merry, Pippin, Ant, Dec, and then some.

It’s kind of fun watching it after watching For All Mankind which has some of the same characters following a different counterfactual history.

The story being told is interesting enough (although Tom has pointed out that removing the Chuck Yeager angle really diminishes the narrative). But ultimately the tension is manufactured around a single event—the launch of Freedom 7—that was very much in the shadow of Gargarin’s historic Vostok 1 flight.

There are juicier stories to be told, but those stories come from Russia.

Some of these stories have been told in film. The Spacewalker told the amazing story of Alexei Leonov’s mission, though it messes with the truth about what happened with the landing and recovery—a real shame, considering that the true story is remarkable enough.

Imagine an alternative to The Right Stuff that relayed the drama of Soyuz 1—it’s got everything: friendship, rivalries, politics, tragedy…

I’d watch the heck out of that.

Myself and Jessica were on our way over to Ireland for a few days to visit my mother. It’s a straightforward combination of three modes of transport: a car to Brighton train station; a train to Gatwick airport; a plane to Cork.

We got in the taxi to start the transport relay. “Going anywhere nice?” asked the taxi driver. “Ireland”, I said. He mentioned that he had recently come back from a trip to Crete. “Lovely place”, he said. “Great food.” That led to a discussion of travel destinations, food, and exchange rates. The usual taxi banter. We mentioned that we were in Iceland recently, where the exchange rate was eye-watering. “Iceland?”, he said, “Did you see the Northern Lights?” We hadn’t, but we mentioned some friends of ours who travelled to Sweden recently just to see the Aurorae. That led to a discussion of the weirdness of the midnight sun. “Yeah”, he said, “I was in the Barents Sea once and it was like broad daylight in the middle of the night.” We mentioned being in Alaska in Summer, and how odd the daylight at night was, but now my mind was preoccupied. As soon as there was a lull in the conversation I asked “So …what brought you to the Barents Sea?”

He paused. Then said, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

Then he told us.

“We were on a secret mission. It was the ’80s, the Cold War. The Russians had a new submarine, the Typhoon. Massive, it was. Bigger than anything the Americans had. We were there with the Americans. They had a new camera that could see through smoke and cloud. The Russians wouldn’t know we were filming them. I was on a support ship. But one time, at four in the morning, the Russians shot at us—warning shots across the bow. I remember waking up and it was still so light, and there were this explosions of water right by the ship.”

“Wow!” was all I could say.

“It was so secret, that mission”, he said, “that if you didn’t go on it, you’d have to spend the duration in prison.”

By this time we had reached the station. “Do you believe me?” he asked us. “Yes”, we said. We paid him, and thanked him. Then I added, “And thanks for the story.”