Protect & Survive Miami: End of Watch
- Thread starter wolverinethad
- Start date
On the other side of the Iron Curtain, this would be the last New Year's Eve programme of Soviet Central TV:
That certainly is...interesting (in the Chinese sense), @Guardian GI...
On a side note, it's interesting that YouTube has become an archive of a lot of past events...
OTL pre-Gorbachev Soviet New Year's Eve entertainment programmes were like that - ridiculously high-brow. We don't need no stinking pop music aimed at lowest common denominator like in the decadent West! We're a very cultured society, so here's classical music and folk dance collectives. People generally skipped through this thing to watch a very sanitised and censored compilation of music clips from socialist and friendly capitalist countries (e.g. France, Italy) called "Melodies and rhythms of foreign music" at 03:00.
Nowadays many people in Russia don't like remembering that - there are a lot of moralist old farts who want Soviet cultural censorship back because it made people so highly moral back then or something.
It never came up, I don't think, but I wonder how much the NYE celebrations would change ITTL — in terms of whether people would be as anxious to go out and celebrate, and whether cities would want to hold huge outdoor events just days after Key West (or if the federal government would put the kibosh on them). What kind of police/military presence would there be in Times Square?
IMO, there's likely to be a bigger police/security presence at such events (think first Persian Gulf War levels, like with Super Bowl XXV; the Orange Bowl in 1984 ITTL was held in such conditions), but people are still going to want to celebrate New Year's (a New Year's Eve party in Miami is mentioned in Land of Flatwater) in any conditions, IMO...
That's far better quality than I expected of Soviet TV, especially given how their technology was falling behind so badly. Good video quality and the music has the Eighties de riguier synthesizers and all.
Found them on YouTube, @wolverinethad; it's interesting that YouTube has become an archive of many past events...
That YT channel belongs to Russia's State Fund of Television and Radio Programs (Gosteleradiofond), so it's a digitized tape straight from the archives. There's a playlist of these holiday programmes (1962-1990) here.
After Gorbachev took control, the music became more what you'd expect to hear in the Eighties. New Year's Eve 1987 is a good example - less classical music, more synthpop.
In TTL 1987, I wonder if there would be anyone left alive in the USSR to celebrate anything, though. Judging by information provided by other P&S-verse threads, the Soviet Union was almost completely wiped out, with no successor government and very few (if any) survivors.
These clips bring up an important question - namely, what happens to recorded media?. The Exchange would have wiped out many major cities with media production and broadcasting centers (like New York City and Los Angeles). As a result, the radio and television stations of surviving cities (like Cleveland, New Orleans, and Fort Myers) now posses many of the remaining copies of most forms of physical media - TV shows, music records, news reports, etc. IMO maintaining these collections to ensure their long-term survival should be a top priority. Ideally, this is what I think should happen:
The surviving television and radio stations in a city agree to maintain their archived recordings until such a time where they can be properly preserved (no throwing away tapes, reels, etc. and no overwriting of existing recordings). Private residents who have their own recordings are allowed to donate their records to a community archive if they so desire. Then when a semblance of normalcy is restored (and the radiation subsided enough to make travel safe), media archivists can make the rounds to those surviving cities, take inventory of the recorded material, and (hopefully) make and distribute copies of said material to help preserve this content for future generations.
IIRC, there are mentions of a cooperation organization (All-Russian Council) among Russian survivors, and a very poor neo-stalinist state in the Russian far-east.
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I've been wondering if there were any medium to large-sized cities in the Soviet Union which managed to survive the Exchange entirely intact like Cleveland or only partially destroyed but mostly intact, like what happened in New Orleans. There's probably got to be at least a few US airdropped bombs, ICBMs and SLBMs which failed to reach their targets or warheads atop such missiles failed to detonate, despite failure rates being generally lower and higher accuracy (hence lower CEP) than their Soviet counterparts in the 1980s.
And within the People's Republic of China apart from Hong Kong (although it did not get hit, it was apparently hit with severe fallout), there's Xi'an, which appears have survived intact IIRC.
And within the People's Republic of China apart from Hong Kong (although it did not get hit, it was apparently hit with severe fallout), there's Xi'an, which appears have survived intact IIRC.
Candidates for survival (and would be capitals for successor states) would be medium sized cities in peripheral areas or without military targets nearby, IIRC this would be places like Magadan, or some western Siberian cities and northern Kazakhstan, and capitals of minor autonomous republics.
I should have mentioned that Cleveland was still intact...
But those videos are an interesting look at the early-to-mid-1980s...
This is pretty much how I envision it. You really can't do much else, especially if you want to preserve the media that's out there.
On a side note...Betamax probably survives in the P&S-verse. No competition war, desire to preserve whatever possible means no format gets eliminated. I wonder what plants survived in Japan, if any. If they did, probably a big stock of players/recorders that can be stored and used by governments going forward.
And as for Siberia, these are your likely major survivors:
--Magadan, population ~150,000
--Yakutsk, population ~280,000
--Norilsk, population ~183,000
--Tobolsk, population ~90,000
All four cities are large and do some important things, but at the same time, they are extremely isolated and difficult to reach under the best of circumstances, not to mention with the exception of Magadan, quite well inland. Not worth missile strikes, they'd probably be on the bomber list, and it's a long, long flight to those through a very dense net of air defense. So, between those four cities, quite a bit of distance, but enough people to rebuild a culture for what it's worth.
While I think this is a great idea, I suspect that with the immediate need of surviving, no one will think of it until years or even decades later, or have much in the way of resources to devote to maintaining the media for quite some time.
Perhaps not, but I bet alcohol consumption will go through the roof, even as the supply dwindles and people are forced to become modern-day moonshiners. Anything to get away from their crapsack world, even if for a short time.
I think there'd be some sort of pre-war plan to protect recordings. Whether it's the government's doing like with art, or it's largely left up to networks and individual stations, I'm sure there's some sort of contingency to get tapes to a salt mine in the middle of nowhere, or something equivalent. Both from the historical importance perspective as well as having something to show in an optimistic outlook that includes TV and radio transmission down the line.
Now whether it gets executed as planned, or even at all, is another issue entirely. But if Ted Turner can gin up an end-of-the-world video, he can bury a bunch of episodes of The Andy Griffith Show in the hopes that eventually he'll get to show them again.
I don't quiet understand why Fort Lauderdale would be spared though. It lies within the Miami metro and it could serve as a seaport for various civilian, military, and coast guard ships. In 1983: Doomsday, Fort Lauderdale went up in smoke along with the entire Miami metro.