Mind-Munitions

Propaganda, Cold War and the Television Age 275
Vietnam had demonstrated that wars are precisely the kind of
events that are good for television. But whether television was
good for war was an altogether different matter, discussed at
length by an American military now busy looking for explanations
for military defeat against an inferior opponent. During the war in
Vietnam 350,000 Americans had been killed or wounded, and
there was no homecoming parade for the survivors. A deep sense
of national mourning set in and the administrations of Presidents
Ford and Carter reflected this loss of national confidence in a
period which saw the Soviets actually threaten to overtake the
Americans in the arms race. As America looked in on itself in the
second half of the 1970s, this in turn gave them a lead in international
propaganda, as strategic arms limitations talks crept on to
the agenda in which the Soviets appeared to be the victim, not the
aggressor. Their most spectacular propaganda coup of this period
was the highly effective international campaign it orchestrated
against the American deployment of the neutron bomb that would
have shifted the balance back in America’s favour. The neutron
bomb was depicted as an inhumane, but typically capitalist,
weapon capable of destroying people but which left everything else
– the economic as well as the military infrastructure – intact for
subsequent exploitation. Precisely how much other popular agitation
against the US during the late 1970s was inspired by Soviet
agents of influence working in western and Third World media or
with terrorist groups will remain unknown until the KGB archives
are opened fully. On the other side, despite the Freedom of
Information Act, much CIA activity from this period also remains
shrouded in mystery. But Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev is on record
as saying in the 1970s that ‘the ideological struggle is becoming
ever more acute, and imperialist propaganda ever more subtle’.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was a stark reminder
to the western world that a militaristic enemy was still very much
in existence. A new injection of western confidence was needed
and the decade’s close found it in the forms of two determined
leaders: Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
As the Soviets became embroiled in their own Vietnam, the
Americans continued to examine the reasons for their defeat. In
popular culture, movies began the reassessment, tentatively at first
with films like Coming Home (1978), The Deer Hunter (1978) and
Apocalypse Now! (1979) but, reflecting the new confidence of the