Harvard professor: How MTV got today's students to understand the seriousness of the Cold War

"For decades, I have taught courses on nuclear weapons and the Cold War. Conveying what life was like with the everyday fear of immediate destruction, especially to younger students, has become more and more difficult over the years... But one medium from the Cold War, more than any other, gets through to my students: MTV, Music Television. When I show them videos from the age of glitter and spandex that are filled with images of nuclear destruction, they finally grasp how much the threat of instant and final war was woven into the daily life of young Americans" - Harvard professor Tom Nichols writes in the Atlantic about his latest addition to the curriculum. "In fact, messages about nuclear weapons, nuclear war, and the end of humanity, by some counts, appeared almost hourly on MTV, making nuclear destruction second only to sex as the most ubiquitous video theme flooding the eyes of America’s youth in the 1980s".