I always thought that this song was about the escalation of the cold war, and the propaganda, rationalizations and justifications surrounding it. Sort of about how the US among others has developed / stockpiled atomic, hydrogen, chemical weapons enough to destroy the world dozens of times over. That trying to stuff these weapons back into pandora's box and put a lid on it is "Like breathing blood through the lungs of a czar's child" (reference to the assasination of the Romanovs, machine gunned to death during the Bolshekvic revolution that led to the Soviet Union, so trying to ressusitate someone whose been shot)
I always thought that this song was about the escalation of the cold war, and the propaganda, rationalizations and justifications surrounding it. Sort of about how the US among others has developed / stockpiled atomic, hydrogen, chemical weapons enough to destroy the world dozens of times over. That trying to stuff these weapons back into pandora's box and put a lid on it is "Like breathing blood through the lungs of a czar's child" (reference to the assasination of the Romanovs, machine gunned to death during the Bolshekvic revolution that led to the Soviet Union, so trying to ressusitate someone whose been shot)