These days, we’re edgy from the threat of rogue AI models triggering human extinction. What makes it even more frightening is the fact a group of tech bros were the ones to say there’s a threat. Meanwhile, the bros keep working to make artificial intelligence even more sophisticated, and presumably more deadly.

Then there’s climate change, and the latest from Russia. The cover-up of a Russian researcher’s death from a mysterious virus. Vladimir Putin’s growing aggression against NATO countries. 

And with Putin’s aggression comes the renewed threat of nuclear war.

Recent headline in The Guardian: “Fixated on AI, the world has forgotten what is staring it in the face: nuclear annihilation.” The column by Simon Tisdale has an even more sobering sub-head. “This is no scoffing matter. The accelerating proliferation of advanced nuclear weapons is bringing ‘end times’ closer by the day.”

It brings the past to life again.

Exactly 64 years ago, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world shockingly close to nuclear Armageddon. For 13 days, starting October 16, 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy faced down Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev over the Russian deployment of nuclear weapons in Cuba. 

Sanity prevailed. Khrushchev backed down. But it was a searing time, and I can’t help worrying that we’re heading into a similar crisis with far more unreliable leaders at the helm.

I like to think it’s an informed worry, since I wrote a novel called Far Creek Road set during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The research took me back to a time when everyday life was both like and unlike our lives today. Not so far back, although I learned to my bemusement that a work of historical fiction is defined as a novel set more than 60 years ago.

After Far Creek Road came out, I wrote about one aspect of the research: how I’d read my way through pamphlets and ephemera on the 1950s and 60s, when the Cold War had been raging, it was Us against Them, and nuclear annihilation was a real possibility.

I thought I’d update the piece and run it here today as the anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis clicks in. What was it like during those near-fatal weeks? And how can we learn what it really felt like?

Enjoy?

The Red Scare

“The menace of the Communists to our Canadian way of life is vividly evident. In a Communist Canada, every surviving citizen would be subject to a rigidly tyrannical control of every detail of his existence. He could not choose his job, or change his job. For grousing he could be ejected from his home. For lateness he could be sent to a slave-camp in the Yukon

“The Canadian Chamber of Commerce believes that Communism is an organized and even fanatical world movement opposed to true democracy and to the freedom of the individual. In the light of this belief, the Chamber holds that it has a responsibility to its members and to all Canadians to expose the aims of the Communists and the methods they employ, and to draw the attention of all citizens to the threat which Communism represents.”

—From The Communist Threat to Canada, a booklet published by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in 1947.

When I set out to write Far Creek Road, I was lucky to be able to draw on a small archive of Cold War material already in the house—the type of pamphlets and ephemera that are usually thrown out.

They came to us courtesy of my husband’s maternal grandfather, who made sure relatives sent him things instead of throwing them out. Family letters, old photographs, a chair from a pub that Great-Whatever-Grandfather owned during the 1850s, which Granddad repaired. He preserved whatever he thought was valuable, including the Cold War ephemera.

I love doing research, which many people think involves hitting the archives and reading books, especially for historical projects. It does, but to get the flavour of a different time, you also need to try to burrow your way back into the more personal aspects of daily life during a previous era. Old paper shows are a great help, stocked with family photos that the next generation has discarded, old pamphlets and dog-eared magazines.

And here I already had tons of that in the house. I remembered coming across the Chamber of Commerce pamphlet years ago, and looked it out when I began to research Far Creek Road. I already knew the novel would be set in a suburb of Vancouver in the year leading up to the Cuban Missile crisis, and planned to tell the story of a communist witch hunt through the eyes of a child.

What did the child overhear while eavesdropping on her parents and their friends? I decided she’d be a nosy kid with parents who tried to spare her. That’s where the pamphlets helped: in giving me a window into what it felt like back then. What frightened people, what hopes did they have, escape plans did they make, what information—propaganda—did they accept or reject?

Blackmail

“Every blackmailer is not a Communist, but every Communist is a potential blackmailer. Moral indiscretions, frequently framed with a cooperative Party girl, financial irregularities such as ‘padded’ expense accounts and ‘kickbacks’ for handing out union jobs, and any intemperance or indiscreet remark that can be colourfully contorted into something anti-union, anti-Semitic or pro-Fascist and the like, are carefully recorded and filed away for use, if necessary. Those with labour union experience know many a tale of clever Communist traps rigged for the unwary. They have learned to be careful and circumspect in both private and union life.”

—Excerpt from How Communists Operate! A Brief Memorandum on Communist Tactics, also issued by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, this time in 1948.

In my novel, the main character is a nine-year-old girl, Mary Alice (Tink) Parker, who strikes up a friendship with a boy named Norman. Tink’s uncle is a tough former lumberjack who’s the head of his union local, which is leftist but anti-communist. Given his political chops, Uncle Punk recognizes signs that Norman’s parents may be members of the Communist Party, or might have been at one time. Did they flirt with communism as students? Leave the party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary? Or do they remain committed members?

The other key question is asked by Tink’s father. Are the Hortons’ private beliefs anybody’s business? Violence can’t be tolerated, but what happens when a government legislates belief, or the crowd decides what people ought to think? Hall Parker speaks in a rare calm voice at a time when passions are elevated—and stoked by incendiary handouts–in a way I wish we heard more of today.

“The Chinese Water Torture Trick”

“The Chinese could reputedly drive a man mad by having drops of water drip incessantly on his shaven head. The Communist’s effective twist to this trick is a campaign of suave, intelligent and apparently well-intentioned questions directed at a union leader day after day, month after month, to create the impression that he has not shown sufficient energy and wisdom in his union duties. Those familiar with this tactic simply denounce the tormentors for what they are. The unwary often blow up and quit their office, leaving it open for a secret Party member. Few people would continue to carry on in the face of such persecution.”

—Chamber of Commerce pamphlet, 1948 

It wasn’t hard to get a picture of the paranoia of the times from both the pamphlets and, oh, maybe a shelf and a half of books I bought to research the novel.

What also helped me understand it was the fact I started to write it at the beginning of the Covid pandemic and lockdowns. As I wrote, I watched the herd effect take hold of society. We huddled together in the face of a faceless danger, taking comfort in doing what everyone else was doing, whether it was banging pots at 6 p.m., buying too much toilet paper, sanitizing shopping carts or keeping six feet apart in the supermarket.

Then that part of it stopped, the herd deciding to ignore the pandemic, despite the number of infections still (vaguely) reported by governments. I find it telling that the least popular post I’ve written over the past couple of years is a review of a very good book about the long after-effects of covid.

Research takes many forms, and one is extrapolating from what’s going on around you, human nature being human wherever it’s found. During the Cold War, people were afraid to be non-anti-Communist even if they didn’t have strong political views. They kept their heads down. During the pandemic lockdowns they—we—did it again. That means I know what it feels like, and didn’t before the pandemic began.

One final thing helped me prepare to write the novel. I was struck by how well the Cold War booklets were written. Granddad also saved an undated handout from The Telegram newspaper of Toronto headlined Red Menace in Canada? It boasts of its readability, even though the vocabulary in its eleven pages is far more sophisticated than mass-market reporting today.   

“Much of the daily news and the literature of three continents is concerned these days with Communism and Communists,” it states in a hefty font on the cover.

“They are a major factor in international politics and a considerable one in the domestic policies of the United States, Great Britain, and most of the Western World. 

“What about Canada? How serious is the Red menace here?…

“The Telegram assigned reporters Allan Kent and Clem Shields to investigate the present state of Communist fortunes in Canada and to try to find answers to these questions…

“Their report is written in clear, factual style,” it says—and it is.

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Tip for Writers: Obviously you need to read history when researching historical fiction. fiction. But don’t disappear into books. Ephemera like Granddad’s pamphlets, along with ads in newspapers and magazines, period photos and prints can be found at old paper shows. 

They’re not expensive, and they give you the flavor of the times to go along with the facts. Old radio shows from the past 100 years, TV shows since the 1950s—you can find them in archives and often online. You don’t want your work to get too cerebral. That’s not how most people have ever lived. 

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In the 75 years since these pamphlets were published, what we call a “clear, factual style” has changed. Before sitting down to write about the pamphlets, I watched two episodes of the Netflix series Life On Our Planet. The visuals from Industrial Light and Magic were stunning, but I found the script painful, even as Morgan Freeman voiced it with slow, gravelly authority. All the sentences were short, and both the rhythm and the vocabulary were notably repetitive. 

“For the first time in history, there was a global power. Dinosaurs. They were to rule for over 150 million years.” 

“Earth never remains stable for long. Sometimes that helps life. Sometimes it hinders it.”

I streamed the show after reading a story about a 2022 Gallup analysis of U.S. education department figures. It shows that that 130 million adult Americans—54 per cent of those aged between 16 and 74—currently read at or below a Grade 6 level. Watching the show, I wondered if the filmmakers on Life on Our Planet knew the figures and had deliberately pitched the voiceover at a Grade 6 level. They were going for a mass audience, and kept it simple.

I bring this up because when you’re writing a novel, especially a piece of historical fiction, you have to try to get more than the psychology and political context right. You also need to write your characters’ speech in a way that feels appropriate to the period. I don’t mean trying to reproduce it. Hilary Mantel didn’t fill her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell with courtiers saying “forsooth.” Instead she wrote simple declarative sentences peppered with period vocabulary and a notable absence of contractions. 

Here’s what happened when I pulled the middle volume of her trilogy off my bookshelf, Bringing Up the Bodies. I sat back down, wondering what had happened to my copy of Wolf Hall, then let the book fall open randomly.

“‘I think I can speak frankly to you, Cromwell,’ Fitz says… ‘A queen should be mild and pitiful. She should move the king to mercy—not drive him on to harshness.’”

So when writing about the Cold War period, I kept not only the politics in mind, the hysteria and the herd instinct, but also the fact that people at the time spoke slightly differently than we do now. Both the sentences and the attention spans were longer in 1962, and I tried to reflect that. After reading Far Creek Road, people who remember the period tell me that my dialogue sounds right, and the characters feel true to the period. That’s satisfying.

As I say, doing research is fun, and it’s especially satisfying when people think you’ve nailed it.

Not the I like thinking about the dangers of the herd that remain with us today, as Armageddon edges closer again, in whatever form it might take.

You can get your copy of Far Creek Road here. And read more about it on my website here. 

Simon Tisdale’s opinion piece in The Guardian is available here. (No paywall.)

You can read more about the Cuban Missile Crisis here.

The literacy study figures are available here.