Dr. Peter Beter Audio Letter 72: Secret Warfare; Space Shuttle; Nuclear War- February 28, 1982
Channel: Peter Beter
Date: 2014-10-17

Dr. Peter David Beter - Audio Letter 72 - February 28,1982
Text: http://www.peterdavidbeter.com/docs/all/dbal72.html
MP3: http://archive.org/download/DrPeterBeter_AudioVideoLetters/drpeterbetter_audioletter_72.mp3
(1) Nuclear war fever and expanding secret warfare
(2) The third Space Shuttle challenge to Russia
(3) The shortening timetable for Nuclear War I

" On the final Sunday evening of last month, January 31,
millions of Americans tuned in their TV sets to watch a special
movie on NBC. It was a major production shown in two
installments on successive nights. The movie was titled "WORLD
WAR III." Viewers were drawn into a snow-swept world of rugged
terrain supposedly in Alaska. At a lonely outpost of the Distant
Early Warning radar network an unidentified blip appeared on the
radar screen. As it did so one crew member, supposedly a Soviet
spy, calmly killed all the others, preventing an alert signal to
NORAD. The blip turned out to be a Russian transport which
dropped a team of Arctic Commandoes onto the frozen Alaska
wilderness.

As the plot unfolded, it turned out that the Russian
Commandoes were there to sabotage the Alaska oil pipe line. They
had been sent to Alaska by Kremlin hardliners who thought that
they could use the sabotage threat to undo an American grain
embargo against Russia. Instead, the plan failed, leading
finally to simultaneous orders by both sides for a nuclear first
strike. During those two evenings of an imaginary build-up to
World War III, a surprisingly realistic atmosphere was created.
There were many technical inaccuracies but they hardly mattered.
What did matter was the emotional impact of the movie, and on
that level it was very effective.

Here in the United States there is a growing fascination with
violence, bloodshed, and war. More and more of our entertainment
is built around themes of hostility and destruction. This trend
is visible in sports, in music, in literature, in motion
pictures, and in television. It seems as if we have been too
well off for too long in terms of material things. We have a
restless craving for change.

My friends, what seems to be happening now in America was
expressed long ago by the Spanish writer and philosopher Don
Miguel de Unamuno. During the latter part of the 19th Century
Unamuno kept a secret and mostly spiritual diary at his workroom
in Salamanca, Spain. His last full entry was made in January
1902. Seventy years later the diary was discovered and
published, first in Spain and later in an English translation
here in America by the Princeton University Press. The Unamuno
diary, titled "The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations",
seems as relevant today as if it were freshly written. Unamuno
wrote, and I quote:

"Men seek peace, they say, but do they really? They are also
said to seek liberty. Not at all. They look for peace in time
of war, and for war in time of peace. They seek liberty under
tyranny, and tyranny when they are free."

My friends, these few words of the Spanish philosopher Unamuno
seem to describe America today. There has not been a war on
American soil, except for Pearl Harbor, in the memory of any
living American; and we have possessed freedom for so long that
we take it for granted, so now we are blindly following leaders
who are betraying us into the ultimate in both WAR and TYRANNY. [...]"