Friday quiz: coming in from the cold | Michael Tomasky

If we grow up with something, and it's what we learn about the world as children, we think it's normal. But what, I ask myself in retrospect, was "normal" about a world in which two superpowers spent billions and billions of dollars amassing the weaponry to destroy not only each other but all known life not once, not even three or five times over, but a 100 or 1,000 times over?

The cold war – I would personally prefer upper-casing it, to give it its proper historical due, but that runs counters to Guardian rules – defined so many things about life from 1945 to 1990 that even quantifying it into that grim and incomprehensible figure above denies it its true place. And not just for Americans and Russians; perhaps not even chiefly for Americans and Russians. Ask a Guatemalan with a knowledge of her country's history about that, or a North Korean with an honest knowledge of his.

It touched everything – philosophy, fiction, film, art, advertising, comedy, you name it. And it seemed, didn't it, so immutable; when the East finally crumbled, it was one of those events that was simultaneously unsurprising (the whole apparatus had been standing on toothpicks for years) and completely shocking (history simply doesn't change like that before our eyes). Watching the hammer and sickle lowered for the last time from above the Kremlin – incredibly, it was Christmas Day 1991 – remains one of the most startling sights of my life, I think.

Loads of material, in other words. Twelve questions will barely hint at it. Since I know many of you are around my age or older, it would be fun to hear your memories of your personal cold war. And remember the rule of Friday-quiz threads. No political arguments! Let's not re-litigate the questions of who started it and who won it. All that said, let's go.

1. George Orwell was evidently the first to use the phrase "cold war" to describe the new US-USSR dominated era, in a 1945 essay. The American financier and statesman Bernard Baruch then used it in a speech in 1947. But this famous US journalist, who used the phrase as the title of a book of essays on the new world situation, is considered the person who really made it stick.
a. James Reston
b. Drew Pearson
c. Walter Lippmann

2. Probably the single most famous speech of the 1940s was given at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri in March 1946. The speaker was being given an honorary degree, and he warned that "an Iron Curtain" had descended across Europe, "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic." Who gave this speech?
a. General Dwight Eisenhower
b. Winston Churchill
c. General Bernard Law Montgomery

3. US Secretary of State Dean Acheson told President Truman, regarding a spring 1947 crisis situation, that his arguments to the American people had to be "clearer than truth," a phrase that some have argued opened the door to cold-war propaganda. About what countries was Acheson then concerned?
a. Greece and Turkey
b. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia
c. Greece and Yugoslavia

4. Joseph Rotblat, a native of Poland but a British citizen who during and after World War II worked in America, is the only physicist to have left what on moral grounds?
a. The then-newly formed National Security Council
b. The Manhattan Project
c. The staff of the House Un-American Activities Committee

5. A helmet-wearing turtle named Bert was used in films and newsreels produced by the US Civil Defense Administration to alert American schoolchildren to the fact that if they saw a flash of blinding light as might be produced by an atomic weapon, they should:
a. Splay and pray
b. Crouch and count to 20
c. Duck and cover

6. Identify each of these third-world heads of state as a client of either East or West:
a. Syngman Rhee
b. Haile Selassie
c. Jose Eduardo dos Santos
d. Patrice Lumumba
e. Norodom Sihanouk
f. Suharto

7. For the 1962 premier of this work, it was intended that the principal soloists would be from Germany, Britain and Russia, as a show of global unity. But at the last minute, Russia refused to permit its soloist to travel to Coventry, and a substitute was found.
a. Benjamin Britten's War Requiem
b. Igor Stravinsky's The Flood
c. Aaron Copland's Third Symphony

8. Yulian Semyonov is not a name known to many Westerners, but he was very famous in Soviet Russia as what:
a. That rare figure, a defector from West (where he'd been the American scientist Julian Semon) to East
b. A spy novelist – basically the USSR's answer to John LeCarre
c. The USSR's first rock star, who recorded in 1967 a complete Russian-language version of Dylan's Blonde on Blonde

9. True or false: Joseph Stalin is the 20th-century world leader responsible for the most deaths.

10. What incident ended detente, the thaw in US-USSR relations during the 1970s?
a. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
b. The Mayaguez incident
c. The Moscow-backed Sandinista overthrow of Somoza in Nicaragua

11. Who joked during a radio sound-check that "we begin bombing in five minutes"?
a. Leonid Brezhnev
b. Margaret Thatcher
c. Ronald Reagan

12. The beginning of the end of the East, little-remembered today, came when border guards of what Eastern bloc country began snipping the border fence, permitting people to cross into the West?
a. Czechoslovakia
b. Poland
c. Hungary

So much I'd wanted to ask but didn't get to. Which leaves a lot for you all to discuss. Let's look at the answers.

Answers:
1-c; 2-b; 3-a; 4-b; 5-c; 6: a, West; b, West; c, East; d, East; e, East; f, West; 7-a; 8-b; 9-false; 10-a; 11-c; 12-c.

Notes:
1. The fake answers are both plausible, but Lippmann seems common-sense-ish to me.
2. Should have been easy. Certainly this was drilled into Americans, and I'm guessing into Britons too?
3. Resulting in the Truman Doctrine, the language of which ultimately committed the US to the war in Vietnam.
4. Interesting story, ripe for biography or screenplay.
5. Gimme for the Yanks, at least of a certain age. Did you have a similar figure in England? Here's a little Bert video.
6. Rhee (South Korea) should have been easy. Selassie, it might have been hard to remember which side he was on, but he sent troops to fight with the US in Korea. Dos Santos may have thrown many of you – sound Latin American but was actually the leader of the Marxist MPLA in Angola (Jonas Savimbi was the West's guy, from Unita). Lumumba should have been easy. Sihanouk and Suharto are confuse-able. The former was Cambodian, pre-Khmer Rouge, and tilted toward Moscow; the latter Indonesian and solidly pro-West (and yes, he had only one name).
7. I like this question. "Coventry" should have helped.
8. I never heard of this guy until this morning. Bears more looking into from the sound of things. My fake answers kinda rock here, though I figure if c) had happened, you'd have heard of it.
9. Not even all that close to Mao Zedong. Numbers are disputed but Mao comes out on top (as it were) in every list I've ever seen.
10. Remember the US boycott of the 1980 Olympics?
11. Total gimme, thought you might want one at this point.
12. The unsung role of Hungary is one of history's most untold stories, as I've probably mentioned on this blog before.

As always, tell us how you did, and share with the rest of us your non-belligerent cold-war thoughts and memories.

United StatesMichael Tomasky
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