Mind-Munitions

Propaganda, Cold War and the Television Age 253
ensure that fear of the enemy was sustained at a higher level than
fear of the bomb. Both in Russia and America, as well as in their
alliance blocs of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, it was imperative to
convince people that fear of the enemy was genuine, legitimate and
justified. This in turn would legitimate and justify the need to sustain
a nuclear arsenal that would have to be at least the equal of the
other side, in which case there might never be a use for it. And so the
nuclear arms race continued through its inescapably logical course.
This climate of fear – or balance of terror – was played out in
the media. So long as ‘The Enemy’ had ‘The Bomb’, he would
always be feared by decent, peace-loving citizens, whether they be
Soviet or American. Propaganda exploited these fears with such
themes as ‘nuclear weapons cannot be disinvented’ (technological
determinism), ‘because they are pointing weapons at us we must
point the same weapons at them’ (deterrence), ‘if they attack us
first, we have effectively lost’ (first strike capability) and so on. The
other side had always to be portrayed as aggressive, militaristic
and repressive – as a genuine threat to peace and freedom however
such concepts were defined by either side.
On this aspect, it might be thought that the Soviet Union, with
its state-controlled media and thus its greater capacity to shape the
information and opinions of its citizens concerning the intentions
of the outside world, enjoyed a considerable advantage over its
democratic rivals. This was certainly so on the domestic front
within the borders of the Soviet Union and in its Moscow-imposed
allies. It held this advantage until the 1980s when new
communications technologies were finally able to penetrate the
Iron Curtain and provide alternative images of what ‘The Enemy’
was really like which ran counter to the ‘accepted view’ decreed by
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Until then,
however, it was possible for the CPSU to maintain an information
environment that was just about hermetically sealed, an environment
in which the official Soviet world-view could prevail, while it
simultaneously exploited the very freedoms cherished by the West.
Paradoxically, that same sealed environment provided the
United States with advantages of its own in its propaganda when it
came to painting a particular image of ‘the enemy’. It meant that
the ‘freedom-loving’ public could only perceive the Soviets as being
afraid to permit alternative ways of seeing and believing, and thus
by way of contrast reinforce their views about the undesirability of