Board Thread:The Reference Desk/@comment-188432-20130716032018

So I'm watching Robot. The Brig in episode 3 refers to the Think Tank bunker as something "built in the Cold War days". Even if we assume that it's 1980, as Sarah later suggests in Pyramids of Mars, it's still the Cold War. Is this a bit of optimism on Terrance Dicks' part that the Cold War would be over by the 1980s, or do the British narrowly think of the Cold War as something that effectively ended in the 1960s, sometime relatively soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis?

I'm not pointing out a misfit between the real world and the DWU. I'm asking if the British have a different idea of the length of the Cold War, just as Americans do of the two World Wars. 