mtbc | Television dramas and reality (Reply)

I enjoyed the recent Deutschland 83 about Cold War nuclear tensions in, you might guess, East and West Germany in 1983, and, now into its fourth season, I also enjoy watching The Americans, about KGB agents living as Americans while acting for the Soviets in the Washington, DC, region.

mst3kmoxie challenged us to read a Pulitzer-prize-winning book this year: I chose David E. Hoffman's The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy. It makes for excellent reading: packed with interesting facts and not too dry. One pleasant surprise is how very accurate the history portrayed in Deutschland 83 turns out to be even within the West German military and East German intelligence services. I assume that the actual characters we see are fictional but the background, in terms of interaction between Moscow and the Stasi, their fears about Able Archer and suchlike, looks pretty spot-on. This also goes to some extent for The Americans: for instance, currently in the show we have Soviet interest in biowarfare agents and in the The Dead Hand I am presently reading a section about the weaponizing of smallpox, I think in around 1984.

So, not only is it a good book, but it is showing me that perhaps some popular dramas aren't quite as fictional as I typically assume.