Smart and Final Iris (Historical Context)

Historical Context

Tate wrote this poem in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president of the United States. A conservative Republican and staunch advocate of a strong defense, Reagan was a militant Cold War politician who once called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” In 1981, a year after Reagan’s election, Congress approved an $18 billion increase in defense spending. Part of this increase included the creation of a rapid deployment force, and the construction of the neutron bomb, a nuclear weapon that maximizes damage to people but minimizes damage to buildings and equipment. Reagan’s hard-line stance against arms control as a means of dealing with the Soviet military threat included public statements about the Unites States’ chances of winning a “limited” nuclear war by confining losses to Europe. However, the nuclear freeze movement, a group dedicated to halting the production and proliferation of nuclear weapons, made it more difficult for Reagan to maintain his hardline stance. Although Congress passed Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (dubbed “Star Wars”), based on the use of space satellites equipped with lasers to shoot down Soviet missiles in the air, it appropriated only a fraction of the Reagan administration’s requested budget for SDI. In 1986, Congress prohibited further SDI tests and cut the SDI budget by one-third. Although the military budget under the Reagan administration increased from $157 billion in 1981 to $233 billion in 1986, Americans were no more secure than before.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was undergoing tremendous changes, as the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was pushing for reforms to liberalize the country. Reagan and Gorbachev met in Geneva in 1985 in a superpower summit, and Reagan agreed, in principle, to Gorbachev’s proposal for both countries to cut nuclear weapons by fifty percent. In 1987, the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Intermediate Nuclear Force treaty (INF), in which both countries agreed to dismantle more than 2,500 Soviet and American short range missiles based in Europe.

The subject of nuclear war pervaded the music of the 1980s as well, whether it was heavy metal, reggae, rock, or folk. Pink Floyd sang about the finality of nuclear war in “Two Suns in the Sunset,” while Underworld’s “Underneath the Radar” used early warning systems for nuclear war as a metaphor for love. Many songs protested the Reagan administration’s pronuclear stance in their lyrics, such as Escape Club’s tune, “Wild, Wild West”: “Gotta live it up, live it up / Ronnie’s got a new gun / Headin’ for the nineties, livin’ in the eighties, / screamin’ in the backroom, / waitin’ for the big boom.” Reagan didn’t help matters when, before one of his weekly Saturday radio addresses in 1984, he jokingly said into the microphone (which he thought was turned off), “We are going to bomb Russia in fifteen minutes.” His gaffe was later incorporated into a number of rap and pop songs of the era.

Compare & Contrast

• 1983: President Ronald Reagan announces plans for an extensive program to examine the feasibility of a missile defense program. The concept — derided as “Star Wars” by opponents in Congress — revises the nation’s 35-year-old nuclear strategy by focusing on missile defense rather than the ability to retaliate against nuclear attack.

  2001: Although Russia, China, and North Korea tell the U.N. Disarmament Commission that a U.S. missile defense system would threaten international security, trigger a new arms race, and undermine the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, President Bush advocates further developing the system. The proposed 2002 defense budget allots $8.3 billion for missile defense.

• 1986: Washington severs all economic and commercial relations with Libya, accusing it of giving aid to international terrorists.

  2001: Following the Libyan handover of two suspects in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 to stand trial before a Scottish Court in the Netherlands, the United States modifies its Libya sanctions to allow shipments of donated clothing, food, and medicine for humanitarian reasons. All other U.S. sanctions against Libya remain in force.

• 1986: The Soviet nuclear plant at Chernobyl in the Ukraine is destroyed by fire, sending a large radiation cloud over much of Europe and contaminating vast areas of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus.

  2001: Ukrainian officials say that 400,000 adults and 1.1 million children are currently entitled to state aid, as a result of the Chernobyl accident.

• 1986: President Reagan signs the tax reform bill into law, the first full scale remodification since 1954.

  2001: President Bush signs into law the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001. The 10-year, $1.35 trillion package provides for the biggest tax cut since 1981 and the most sweeping changes to the tax system since the Tax Reform Act of 1986.