Fiona Hill

Please stop.

So I thought, well, you know, I don't necessarily want to go in that direction.

But it was the timing that really cinched things for me.

I was very lucky that the region that I grew up, County Durham, despite the massive decline, deindustrialization and the complete collapse of the local government system around me, still maintained money for education.

And they also paid for exchanges.

And we had exchange programs with cities in Germany, in France, also in Russia, in Kostroma, near Yaroslavl, for example, an old textile town similar, you know, down in its kind of region, but, you know, quite historic in the Russian context.

In fact, the original birthplace of the Romanov dynasty in Kostroma, just as County Durham, you know, was quite a distinguished historic area in the British context.

So it was an idea that I could go on exchanges, I could learn languages.

I studied German, I studied French.

And then in 1983, there was the WASCA.

basically provoked by the Euromissile Crisis.

So the stationing of new categories of strategic nuclear weapons and intermediate nuclear weapons in Western Europe and in Eastern Europe during the height of the Cold War.

And this Euromissile Crisis over SS-20 and Pershing missiles went on from 1977, so when I was about 11 or 12, all the way through into the later part of the 1980s.

And in 1983, we came extraordinarily close to a nuclear conflict.

It was very much another rerun of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

So 20 years on, same kind of thing.

The Soviets misread, although I didn't know this at the time.

I know a lot of this, you know, after the fact.

But the tension was palpable.

But what happened was the Soviets misread the intentions of a series of exercises that