It’s taken us a while to get to see Spielberg’s extraordinary film on the Cold War, but today (hot on the heels of Star Wars yesterday) we did – and found it stunningly well made. Makes me determined to get to The End of the Cold War, by Robert Service, which is one of my stacks of impending books to read.
I have clear memories of the Wall going up, Powers’ u2 coming down, and the subsequent Powers-Abel exchange. And the scene of the young boy preparing for an atomic bomb burst brought back memories of young nightmares, too. I also recall the moment in the late 1950s when we were living in Northern Ireland and Tim went off for many months to fly fall-out monitoring missions around the British bomb-bursts on Christmas Island.
But I had never heard of the parallel-to-Powers story around Yale student Frederic Pryor, nor about the Nuremberg Trials background to the involvement of James Donovan.
A brilliant conjuring of the atmosphere during one of the world’s recurrent periods of paranoia. How long before we’re there again? If President Putin has his way – and perhaps it’s a complete accident that one of the four interogators working over Powers looked rather like an extruded Putin – we will be trading new types of asset across a new generation of Glienicke Bridges or Checkpoint Charlies?
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