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The Silent Voice
What we don’t hear from the mass media, and why we don’t hear it
In the years following the end of World War II, the world seemed divided into three parts. The USA with its NATO allies were one bloc; the geographically vast Soviet Union was another; and the third bloc comprised a multitude of economically and socially weak nations many of which were newly emerged from the ashes of Colonialism.
The USSR and the USA faced each other across a divide of mutual suspicion and potential lethality. World War II had dramatically advanced the business of creating new and powerful weapons and each of the two powerful blocs were racing to deploy ever-more-fearful modes of total destruction.
The Soviet Union was controlled by Russia, a nation with an unhappy history of being invaded that shaped its view of the post-war world. The USA was the only nation in history so far to use atomic bombs to kill vast numbers of unarmed civilians. Not surprisingly the USSR distrusted US intentions. The USA, meanwhile, was terrified of the very idea of communism as it threatened entrenched vested interests in its own society.
In consequence the world rapidly reached a state wherein each of the two powerful blocs had deployed sufficient nuclear capability to destroy all life on Earth many times over. Neville Chute’s novel On The Beach captures the mood of the time…
