When checking the equipment before speaking on national radio, Ronald Reagan, not suspecting that the recording had already been turned on, instead of the usual “one, two, three!..” said: “Dear compatriots, I am glad to inform you that today I signed a decree that forever puts Russia outlaw. The bombing will begin in five minutes.”
Reagan said this the day before the closing of the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Three months later, he hoped to be re-elected head of the White House, including due to the resounding victory of the Americans in these competitions. However, the refusal of athletes from the USSR, East Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Cuba and Hungary to participate in them (as a sign of protest against numerous violations of the Olympic Charter) turned the 84 Summer Games into an ordinary competition with ordinary results: only 11 new world record achievements. (The previous Moscow Olympics, despite the boycott by the United States and its allies, was marked by 36 records.) This gave me a reason the day after the closing of the Los Angeles Games to call them mediocre (mediocre) in the most popular television program Nightline, and the host of the program was Ted Koppel couldn’t find anything to object to.
Whether it was anger at the Soviet leadership that confused Reagan’s Olympic cards, or what else prompted him to blurt out on live television about the order to incinerate our country, we cannot know. I can only say that he has been weird before, and, as they say, in all seriousness. For example, a couple of years earlier, the US President said that people were in vain to be afraid of an accidental launch of an American missile with a nuclear warhead towards the USSR: “A missile launched by mistake can be recalled.”
One way or another, in August 1984, humanity broke out in a cold sweat. Of course, if the Soviet leadership had accepted the “cemetery humor” (this is how Reagan’s antics were characterized by the English “Guardian”) of the head of the White House for an actual declaration of war, you and I most likely would not remember that incident now. In Washington, with the arrogance characteristic of its rulers, they declared that the Russians were completely devoid of a sense of humor.
But it’s not hard to guess how the leadership of the United States itself would have reacted if the then Soviet leader Chernenko had allowed himself a similar “joke.” Reagan’s aides only made sure that from now on he could fool around to his heart’s content without fear of consequences: the equipment for recording Reagan’s radio addresses to the nation was equipped with a device for… jamming his statements when testing his voice. Moreover, they used a sound signal in case of a nuclear alarm.
But in his public speeches, Reagan poisoned the whole country with anti-Soviet jokes without restraint throughout the eight years of his reign, making full use of his many years of experience working on radio and in Hollywood. Ridiculing Soviet leaders and our way of life became an important element of the information war he raised with the USSR to an unprecedented level. On his instructions, the State Department supplied the White House with fresh portions of such jokes every week. Paul Goble alone, who headed the US Foreign Office office in the Balkans, collected 15 thousand (!) such jokes.
Reagan “apparently did not see anything contradictory in starting to think about some kind of straightening of relations with the Kremlin and at the same time continuing to publicly make frantic attacks on the “evil empire” personified by the same Kremlin,” the memoirs say Anatoly Fedorovich Dobrynin, who worked as the USSR Ambassador to the USA from 1962 to 1986. “It all seemed to coexist organically in his mind.” In Moscow, this behavior of the president caused outrage.”
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2024-04-07 12:59:35