Hill, S. (2024), ‘Cold War Atomic Pop: Synth Pop and the Aesthetics of Nuclear Armageddon’ in Just Can’t Get Enough, Ed. by Geoff Stahl (forthcoming). 

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Introduction

There is nothing so distant as the recent past, especially when narrative accounts of that history are suppressed as official secrets.  Deutschland 83 (2015) revealed just how close we came to nuclear conflict in the early 1980s and the escalation of geopolitical tensions in the final years of the Cold War. This has been documented in the work of Burriss (2019), Dylan et al. (2020), Miles (2020), Enck (2021), and Fraise et al (2023). Amongst a raft of synth-pop anthems anticipating Armageddon, Peter Schilling's 'Major Tom' sets the mood perfectly. Originally a 1983 number-one in West Germany, it has enjoyed a second life as the show's title theme. With its signature “4,3,2,1” countdown, the song captures the anxiety of the latter half of the Cold War, specifically the 1983 NATO operation Able Archer, an exercise simulating DefCon 1, and the preparations for a nuclear attack.

The Able Archer drill was so convincing that, according to papers from 1990 and, declassified in 2015, the USSR was on the verge of launching a pre-emptive strike. Jones's Able Archer (2016) is the definitive account of this event. He argues that when the war game exercise ended, the West did not appreciate that the Soviets thought Operation Able Archer 83 was real. As Miller suggests, President Reagan's antagonistic approach to the Soviet Union was 'masked beneath a gilded exterior of hairspray, blue eyeshadow, and catchy pop music' (Miller 2023: 1). Oblivious though much of the general population was to this brush with nuclear destruction, the music of the synth-pop era seemed to capture that sublime terror.  In this chapter, I will investigate the atomic sensibility of Cold War pop, exploring the aesthetics of ten mainstream hits on the UK singles chart between 1980 and 1985 from artists that include Blondie, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Tears for Fears, OMD, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

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