President Ronald Reagan intended for the joke to be a routine voice check. On Saturday, August 11, 1984, radio engineers arrived at Rancho del Cielo, the president’s vacation ranch northwest of Santa Barbara, California, to set up equipment for his weekly address. When a sound man asked the president to speak into the microphone to test it, Reagan improvised a quip: “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”1 Reagan’s macabre stab at humor was a rewording of comments he read a short time later on the air: “My fellow Americans: I’m pleased to tell you that today I signed legislation that will allow student religious groups to begin enjoying a right they’ve too long been denied—the freedom to meet in public high schools during non–school hours, just as other student groups are allowed to do.”2 The weekly radio address Reagan delivered that morning about the Equal Access bill for student religious groups was far from memorable and might have slipped into obscurity had it not been for the leak, two days later, of the joke he told about bombing the Soviet Union.3

Right away, the joke incited a storm of worldwide controversy and tarnished Reagan’s reputation at home and abroad. His approval ratings in the United States declined amid the furor, unnerving his advisers about the upcoming election. For the first time in the campaign, Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale had climbed to within single digits of the president in the polls, owing to the fallout.4 Overseas, one could almost hear the collective facepalms of America’s allies as they reacted negatively to the comment. “One just wishes to God—and I think this goes for most Europeans—that it hadn’t happened,” said Sir James Eberle, director of Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs. Reagan’s joke, lamented the left-leaning French newspaper Libération, “can only reinforce his image as a cowboy always ready to push the button for a nuclear attack.”5 Prominent Western European dignitaries—many of whom were already inclined to have negative perceptions of Reagan—heaped scorn on the president. But the harshest condemnation came from the Soviet Union, where officials regarded Reagan’s words as incendiary at best, warmongering at worst. High-level figures in the Kremlin took the joke as a threat, coming at a tense time in U.S.-Soviet relations. General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko placed Soviet armed forces on high alert. Pravda, the official Communist Party newspaper, editorialized that Reagan’s remarks amounted to “a political scandal of an enormous scale.”6 The “monstrous” joke, read an official Soviet statement, “showed the insincerity of U.S. calls for improved relations with Moscow.”7

The hubbub baffled Reagan. He thought the joke harmless and could not understand why people were being so sensitive. Where was their sense of humor? Meeting with the leaders of prominent American Jewish organizations in the White House on August 16, five days after his radio address, Reagan joked with the men and women in the room that “he certainly was not going to bomb Russia in the next five minutes.” Demands for an apology failed to yield the desired result. The closest Reagan came to saying he was sorry was when he groused, “If the press had kept their mouth shut, no one would have known I said it.”8

As you have no doubt noticed by now, Reagan’s gaffe has furnished the title of this book. By explaining the purpose of We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes: Late Cold War Culture in the Age of Reagan, I hope also to shed light on why I chose to christen it with Reagan’s joke. My desire to write about Cold War culture in the Reagan era dates back to when I was a graduate student in the early 1990s, looking out at a changed world after the Berlin Wall came down, the Eastern Bloc collapsed, and the Soviet Union dissolved into the Russian Federation. At that pivotal moment, I read historian Stephen J. Whitfield’s classic Culture of the Cold War for the first time in a doctoral seminar and loved it.9 Whitfield’s book—equal parts eloquent, informative, compelling, and persuasive—left me wanting more and nurtured my fascination with Cold War culture. Over the years, I’ve read extensively about the topic. The Cold War’s influence on popular culture in the late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s cannot be overstated and has been documented extensively in a number of outstanding books.10 For years, I sought out a narrative of Cold War culture in the Reagan years that functioned as a sort of sequel to Whitfield’s book—something along the lines of Culture of the Cold War II: Into the Eighties. When I found out that no such book existed, I set out to write it.

Along the way, I discovered that updating Whitfield’s book for the Reagan era was an impossible task, because it explored a dramatically different time and political landscape. Too much had changed by the 1980s. For one thing, the upheavals and cultural transformations of the 1960s and early 1970s had forever shattered America’s Cold War consensus, altering the very fabric of the nation. As a result, Cold War culture in the 1980s—which became hotly contested terrain—bore little resemblance to its early postwar era ancestor. Without a doubt, the First Cold War left openings for creative dissent and inspired its own internal ban-the-bomb marches and pop culture critiques.

But in the 1980s, an anti–Cold War culture flourished, oftentimes eclipsing the dominant Cold War culture against which it rebelled. Opponents of the Cold War in the Reagan era brought a passion, a level of commitment, and an underlying sense of mission to their undertakings that its apologists lacked. Their opposition assumed the form of grassroots protest movements and a striking variety of cultural resistance, such as films, music, TV shows, and books. Sure, there are those few famous artifacts of eighties Cold War culture that infamously linger in the memory—the Red Dawns, the Rambos, the Rocky IVs, the Amerikas—but they were far fewer in number and lacked the gravitas of the cultural expression generated by the Cold War’s foes at the time.

We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes argues that post-détente efforts to revive the Cold War, and all of its cultural manifestations, encountered fierce opposition on a number of fronts. Multiple social protest movements gained traction in the 1980s, focusing on such Cold War–related issues as the disputed legacies of the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, U.S. intervention in Central America, sanctuary for Latin American refugees arriving in the United States, and U.S. investments in South Africa. Eighties dissenters posed a more decisive challenge to the Cold War than did their McCarthy era counterparts with their vigor, outspokenness, and creativity and in the sheer size of their critical mass of supporters.

Virtually every facet of the Cold War in the 1980s encountered opposition, putting its proponents on the defensive. The revival of the Cold War created deep fissures in American society, and the general public remained deeply divided on the issue throughout much of the decade. On one side of the rift, President Reagan, Cold Warriors in both parties, assorted anticommunist activists, and conservative cultural figures worked in tandem to revive the Cold War and restore the shattered consensus that buttressed it decades earlier. Theirs, however, proved an onerous uphill struggle. Nationwide polls and surveys taken during the 1980s—as we shall soon see—revealed a lack of public enthusiasm and support for Cold War policies during Reagan’s presidency, which made the job of its defenders that much more difficult.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, authors, filmmakers, artists, grassroots political organizers, and a handful of outspoken politicians presented critiques and alternative visions of the Cold War that often had a meaningful impact on American society. Movies with a critical eye depicted such weighty topics as the Vietnam War (Platoon, Full Metal Jacket), nuclear holocaust (The Day After, WarGames), U.S. intervention in Central America (Under Fire, Salvador), and the evils of South African apartheid (Cry Freedom, A Dry White Season). These films challenged anticommunist narratives that emphasized American exceptionalism and a generally black-and-white worldview.

Elsewhere in the cultural landscape, the 1980s proved to be a renaissance for Vietnam veteran artists, writers, and filmmakers whose contributions contained profoundly antiwar themes. Music offered another pivotal battleground, with a variety of sounds—from Springsteen to punk—subverting dominant Cold War narratives. Central America also came to occupy a central place in the collective American imagination of the 1980s, and cultural and grassroots protests against U.S. policies in the region fueled widespread public skepticism about Washington’s Cold War agenda. Meantime, Americans in different religions rigorously debated the meaning and nature of the Cold War, with ideological divides splitting spiritual camps. Right-wing televangelists led crusades against communism abroad and secular humanism at home, while religious figures on the left played vital roles in organizing the peace movement and established sanctuary churches to help Central Americans fleeing persecution in their home countries.

And in the middle of these robust debates about the nation, its purpose in the world, and its future could be found millions of ordinary Americans, experiencing a Cold War culture in which virtually every issue was hotly debated and in which dissenters spoke up without fear of being blacklisted, administered loyalty oaths, or subjected to other forms of McCarthyism. In short, they witnessed an entirely different kind of Cold War culture than the one that loomed so large in the domestic scene a mere thirty years earlier.

Finally, we return full circle to Reagan’s joke: “We begin bombing in five minutes.” Reagan never understood why words intended to be humorous left so many who had heard them shaken and fearful. That was especially so across Europe, where memories of World War II were still fresh in many people’s minds. The president’s lighthearted quip about a matter of the utmost gravity reflected a blasé attitude, widely shared by the Cold War’s apologists, who seldom defended the global ideological contest with the same level of conviction and emotion as did those who resisted it. Despite a cynicism that underlay their actions, Cold Warriors still sought—with rigor and determination—to revive the bloody and costly contest, with the elusive goal of restoring a consensus destroyed on the battlefields of Vietnam and in the streets of America. The discord that greeted their actions caught them by surprise. Sustained by creativity, tenacity, and a vision of a Cold War–free world, a broad-based protest movement, backed by activists and cultural rebels alike, hunkered down and prepared for a long fight.