This Is Not A Test [Tommy Shaw]

This Is Not A Test
Written by Tommy Shaw
Lead Vocals by Tommy Shaw

The music's interuppted by an old
Familiar sound
We've heard it all our lives
Who paid attention

Then the radio announcer tells us
This has been a test
I never heard the rest
I always changed the station

Mr. President our radar shows
An image in the skies
And we believe it's headed our
Direction
The Russions aren't responding
And we're up against the clock
It seems there's no avoiding
This deadly confrontation

And this is not a test
No video effect

No science fiction quest for glory
And this is not a test
There'll be no turning back
The hour is at hand
And this is not a test
You can ignore
We've not been here before
Let's hear it for the war

How did peace and freedom
Disappear before our very eyes
And leave us in this desperate situation
There is no way to justify
For country or for God
The heavens are a battlefield
And now this confrontation

Interpretation

When this song was written in the early 1980's, tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States were extremely high, and anxiety about the possibility of armed conflict, possibly involving a nuclear exchange, was correspondingly high. This song comments on the irony that we have prepared so completely and for so long during the Cold War that we have become desensitized, ignoring the familiar tests of the Emergency Broadcast System on the radio and television to the point that we wouldn't know what to do if we heard "this is not a test."

The Emergency Broadcast System was replaced with the Emergency Alert System in 1997, seven years after the Cold War ended in 1989 with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies behind the "Iron Curtain." The fall of the Berlin Wall was the symbolic end of that 40 year struggle.