[headdie]

The National Archive in the UK has released a document detailing a speech to be read by the Queen in the event of nuclear war with Russia. While not overly important I found it an intriguing thing to read all the same

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/queens-sombre-nuclear-war-speech-revealed-231712126.html?vp=1#Kqp4NSA

edit
idiots must forget links

[haloboy100]

I wasn't aware (in my naive, young little north american mind) that Britain actually had that much fear of the soviets during the cold war.
I mean, sure, all the western nations were intimidated by the soviets, but this gives me the impression that they were as paranoid as the Americans.

[headdie]

I wasn't aware (in my naive, young little north american mind) that Britain actually had that much fear of the soviets during the cold war.
I mean, sure, all the western nations were intimidated by the soviets, but this gives me the impression that they were as paranoid as the Americans.

the USSR encompassed a huge chunk of europe and NATO basically in charge of the rest with both sides anticipated Europe to be one of if not the main focus of any conventional warfare should direct conflict begin which is why the USA had significant deployments of standing troops in Europe along the NATO/USSR border right through the period, most famously in Germany.  the thinking being that after the USSR, its allies and North America, Europe was the next most significant region when looked at combining technology, economy and military influence

[StarSlayer]

I wasn't aware (in my naive, young little north american mind) that Britain actually had that much fear of the soviets during the cold war.
I mean, sure, all the western nations were intimidated by the soviets, but this gives me the impression that they were as paranoid as the Americans.

I suppose its something that we are so far removed from the Cold War that we get a statement like this.

[Luis Dias]

I wasn't aware (in my naive, young little north american mind) that Britain actually had that much fear of the soviets during the cold war.

Just putting this here:

[NGTM-1R]

I wasn't aware (in my naive, young little north american mind) that Britain actually had that much fear of the soviets during the cold war.
I mean, sure, all the western nations were intimidated by the soviets, but this gives me the impression that they were as paranoid as the Americans.

Once ablative Norway was gone (and it was pretty much expected that Norway, or at least its ability to interdict Russian operations over its airspace, would be ablative), the war in the North Atlantic would in a very real sense be won and lost between Scotland and Greenland. I wouldn't want to be living in the islands above that point.

[Luis Dias]

Not only that, the GB itself was a major nuclear power at that point, it belongs to NATO so it was itself a major target of Russia's own missiles. If there was ever a nuclear war between NATO and the Warsaw pact nations, the UK was one of the first nations to be nuclearly cleansed.

[MP-Ryan]

No offense to haloboy, but his comment is a prime indicator of how Canadians - despite how smug we are about better geography/history education than that generally presented in the US - need a considerably better history curriculum when it comes to the twentieth century.  Unfortunately, when I was in high school (which was now some time ago, I grant, but post-1990) the 20th century was only really discussed in grades 11 and 12, and History 12 was an elective.  The treatment of the 20th century in the 11th grade was shoddy at best for the period post-1945.  Canada is just as guilty as other countries of focusing its Social Studies (or whatever its now called) on itself without fair treatment to global issues.

While the US bore the full brunt of McCarthyism and associated idiocy, fear of the USSR was pretty universal among NATO nations.

[Beskargam]

My experience with the US highschool history was pretty much the same. We got maybe two days in AP world hist, and some more in AP US hist, but the history cutoff usually is 1945/WW2. My high school didn't even offer a specific post 1945 to present class.

[Phantom Hoover]

Honestly, I'm not actually sure there's space to cover that broad a scope in school.

[Polpolion]

Surprise surprise, there's a lot of history to learn. Since I've gone to high school (in the US of course) they have added a mandatory world history course; I'm not sure what they got rid of to make room for it though. But considering it takes two years for a cursory glance at our comparatively short US history people just aren't going to get a solid understanding of world history.

edit: This isn't to say the world history course is a waste of time, however. But there are always going to be topics people don't know much about wrt non-local history, and it shouldn't be all that big of a deal.

[Phantom Hoover]

Yeah, in the two years of senior school history I took before circumstances forced me to drop it (when I was 13) we had covered medieval and early modern British history, with a focus on Scotland. My sister has continued with it for two more years, and she still hasn't covered the Cold War at all. Jesus, there was a girl living on my corridor in university who didn't know the difference between the English Civil War, the Wars of the Roses and the Glorious revolution, and thought Genghis Khan was a boxer -- and she was studying history.

[Drogoth]

No offense to haloboy, but his comment is a prime indicator of how Canadians - despite how smug we are about better geography/history education than that generally presented in the US - need a considerably better history curriculum when it comes to the twentieth century.  Unfortunately, when I was in high school (which was now some time ago, I grant, but post-1990) the 20th century was only really discussed in grades 11 and 12, and History 12 was an elective.  The treatment of the 20th century in the 11th grade was shoddy at best for the period post-1945.  Canada is just as guilty as other countries of focusing its Social Studies (or whatever its now called) on itself without fair treatment to global issues.

While the US bore the full brunt of McCarthyism and associated idiocy, fear of the USSR was pretty universal among NATO nations.

I graduated highschool in 2011, so perhaps it's been updated, and I can only speak of the Alberta curriculum, but  we covered the Cold War in great depth. Spent almost the entire grade 12 year on it. Furthermore, you don't graduate without taking Social Studies 30 (Our equivalent of History 12).

The history aspects of grade 11 and 12 curriculum, (Focusing on nationalism and liberalism respectively) give a fairly complete historical picture of Europe, the USSR, and North America from the French Revolution to today and the economic aspects (The development of capitalism, socialism, and communism as economic theories) does the same from the Industrial Revolution forward.

Edit -

In fact the 'Canadian Content' requirements foisted on us by busy bodies in Edmonton and Ottawa were so obviously footnotes and shoehorned in that neither the teacher nor the students paid them much attention. Obviously I have a bit more detailed knowledge of Canada/US planning in the Cold War, versus UK/US planning, but in the big picture we barely mentioned Canada.

[Mongoose]

My AP US History class didn't even manage to get past World War II or so before we ran out of time, and I don't think my earlier World History stuff got anywhere near the latter half of the 20th century either.  It's rather sad to have a functional gap in your more in-depth understanding of history from Nagasaki up until the first Gulf War.

[MP-Ryan]

-snip-

Glad to see the Alberta curriculum today appears to be considerably better than the BC curriculum when I was in high school, at least.

[Luis Dias]

I never learned anything about the 20th century at school.

Reading does pay off.

[haloboy100]

No offense to haloboy, but his comment is a prime indicator of how Canadians - despite how smug we are about better geography/history education than that generally presented in the US - need a considerably better history curriculum when it comes to the twentieth century.  Unfortunately, when I was in high school (which was now some time ago, I grant, but post-1990) the 20th century was only really discussed in grades 11 and 12, and History 12 was an elective.  The treatment of the 20th century in the 11th grade was shoddy at best for the period post-1945.  Canada is just as guilty as other countries of focusing its Social Studies (or whatever its now called) on itself without fair treatment to global issues.

I agree completely.
The school system's handling of history in our social studies (read: political science, sociology, history, and economics all mushed together) is very, very vague. The historical content involved in my high school classes (world war 2, the napoleonic wars, and a very brisk skimming of the cold war) was only presented as a way to create relevence for the political and economic theories such as liberalism and realism that we studied. In the way of actual historical content, there was very little elaboration and essentially no effort to create a comprehensive standing of last century. I was really dissapointed how much of history was skimmed just to make room for a huge amount of theory study in economics and politics.

I did take the -2 curriculum as opposed to -1, which I was told covers a lot more history, but I don't think there's much difference between the two streams. I do know that my first-year polisci courses are almost identical to social 30 in both content and elaboration. My Political Science 203 class was a joke.

[Dragon]

It's the same here in Poland. High school history pretty much ends in '45, after that, if you don't take the "extended" history course, you simply don't have enough time left to do anything serious. That means the Cold War, Communism and it's fall are pretty much untouched. Sometimes, I think it's kind of intended, because it opens doors for deceiving people about what was really going on back then (the legacy of those times is still an important political matter here).

[Phantom Hoover]

You guys are starting to get pretty disingenuous about the motives of our educators. You realise that European history encompasses about a millennium and a half of material (before it becomes Classics)? What are you meant to do in that situation, then? Remember that history is not just about knowing the general outline of events: developing the skills for in-depth inquiry is also important, and you inevitably have to dwell on a small area for a decent time to do that. I don't think it's possible or desirable to have every student leave school with that level of knowledge, any more than it is to have everyone learn calculus or Newtonian gravitation.

[Luis Dias]

That's fair and dandy, but I happen to think that perhaps a less focus on Egyptians and Ancient Greeks and just a little primer on the 20th century history where we would learn the basics of what happened to our countries wasn't that much to ask for, and I would perhaps have the nerve (!) to make the preposterous suggestion that these topics might be much more important to learn than what happened 2000 years ago in a land 5000 kms from home.

Not that they aren't all important. I should know, I always had an interest in history.