99 Red Balloons - Nena, 1984

 
 

You and I in a little toy shop
Buy a bag of balloons with the money we've got
Set them free at the break of dawn
Til one by one, they were gone
Back at base bugs in the software
Flash the message, something's out there
Floating in the summer sky
99 red balloons go by

99 red balloons
Floating in the summer sky
Panic bells it's red alert
There's something here from somewhere else
The war machine springs to life
Opens up one eager eye
Focusing it on the sky as 99 red balloons go by

99 decision street
99 ministers meet
To worry, worry, super flurry
Call the troops out in a hurry
This is what we've waited for
This is it boys, this is war
The president is on the line
As 99 red balloons go by

99 knights of the air
Ride super high tech jet fighters
Everyone's a super hero
Everyone's a Captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify, and classify
Scramble in the summer sky
99 red balloons go by (x2)

99 dreams I have had
In every one a red balloon
It's all over and I'm standing pretty
In this dust that was a city
If I could find a souvenir
Just to prove the world was here
And here is a red balloon
I think of you, and let it go

 
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Originally released as "99 Luftballons", the band Nena re-recorded one of the most successful German pop songs in English. It tells of a complete over-reaction to the peaceful releasing of 99 balloons. On the surface, it must sound implausible today, but what about back then?

The year was 1984, at the height of the cold war. Ronald Reagan was in the Whitehouse, and we all feared the possibility of some sort of accident - I mean, two superpowers wouldn't deliberately go to war with nuclear weapons, right? Politicians had a philosophy, and a name for why this could never happen: MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) ...Well, we didn't destroy ourselves, and Nena's song, in both languages, sold a lot of records.

Here's the funny part - it was revealed a few years later that in 1980, the moon rising on the horizon actually send NORAD's computers on high alert, thinking there were Soviet ICBMs coming towards the United States.

YIKES!!!