Public and available to all ages free of charge, Heta Linjen became a social sensation when it first appeared.
By Jesse Karjalainen
The years 1982 to 1984 were the height of the Cold War. The Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982 and was ultimately replaced by Yuri Andropov, who had once been the head of the KGB. He died in February 1984 and the Soviets once again put a new guy in charge. He was happy to see the Cold War with the West escalate under his watch.
President Ronald Reagan was telling us all about the “Evil Empire”, the Soviets had their military on high alert and shot down a Korean 747 aircraft in 1983 and the US meanwhile was deploying nuclear tipped Pershing II rockets across Europe. World fears of a nuclear war were at a peak not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. In late 1983, Americans were shocked by the release of The Day After on their televisions.
I turned 11 years old in 1984 — the year made famous by writing supremo George Orwell — and this was simply the everyday environment we Generation X kids grew up in. But we lived with it, even if the grown-ups were on tenterhooks.
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The thing that would save us all from nuclear war, we were always told, was that there was a direct phone line between US…