I wasn’t scared but it did cross my mind quite often. Enough that I had ideas of what I would do if it happened. Its what you did back in the day before you had zombies and pedophiles and sparkly vampires to worrry about. Enough that if I did see the big shroom in the sky I don’t think I would have been shocked that if finally occured (though shocked that we were probably well fucked).
Then circa 1984 give or take I was working on my car. I had the radio on and the emergency broadcast system come on. Back then in theory the EBS could be used for every possible “emergency”. But most peoples thinking was it was the “bend over and kiss your ass goodbye because the nukes are falling” broadcast sytem.
For a few seconds I actually thought it was happening. Hearing something along the lines of “BEEEP BEEPPPP BEEEP. This is NOT a test of the EBS. Repeat, this is NOT a test of the EBS. Please stay tuned for official news and information…blah blah blah” made me go “ohhhh fuck, here we go”.
A few moments later it turned out it was for a severe thunderstorm nearby. Though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky where I was. And we had those things and tornadoes and hurricanes and floods happen on a regular basis in those parts. And I had NEVER heard the EBS used for them.
I know that I’ve made this point many times before, and that many people find it tiresome, but the basic tenets of Assured Destruction (the “Mutual” was added later by critics like Herman Kahn to make a risible acronym) have never been met at any time by the players during the Cold War, and the fact that either the United States or the Soviet Union was hours (and in at least two cases, minutes) from a launch order on at least half a dozen known occassions, most famously in the Petrov incident in which, due to faulty software, the Soviet early warning launch detection system indicated a full scale attack with high probability, argues strongly that the potential for error may overwhelm the most level-headed judgment when the consequences of delayed action are so grave.
During the waning days of the Soviet Union in the pre-Gorbechev era which enjoyed a succession of deathbed leaders it was unclear (then, and to some extent, even now) who was making decisions. Conversely, the Soviet leadership feared the strong language and military posing of Ronald Reagan, and the reality (that Reagan hated nuclear weapons with a passion and would never have ordered a preemptive strike) was lost on the Soviet military intelligence establishment which deliberately sought out (and “found”) evidence that the United States and NATO was preparing for a Eurpoean land war, evidence for which included the Able Archer '83 exercise, the intended deployment of the Pershing II missile with enhanced radiation (neutron) warheads, and the information gleaned in Operation RYAN (most of which was misconstrued or bogus.)
That a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union did not occur is at least as much luck as as level judgment. The scenario posed by Stanley Kubrick in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (based partially by the writings and lectures of Kahn, who was critical of the notion of brinkmanship as deterrence) was not as farfetched as it might seem, especially in light of the fact that for many years the PAL engagement codes of the Minuteman system were set to “00000000” because the Air Force general in charge of SAC felt that security of using elaborate codes was more of a risk than the possibility of an errant launch. The fact that nations had massive arsenals of ICBMs and SLBMs (which cannot be recalled after launch) and a policy of “launch on warning” of an apparent attack offered the opportunity for system error or intentional subterfuge to result in an escallating exchange regardless of the best intentions of calm consideration.
I personally lived about five miles from a major conventional munitions plant, and within thirty miles of once of the nation’s key nuclear weapon production facilities. Despite the fact that it would have been completely pointless in an attack, we did nuclear attack drills in grade school, and when The Day After… was filmed in the same area, not only the possibility but the consequences of an attack became very real. However, the day I found the The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (from the US Government Printing Office) in a back corner of the library archives and started doing calculations was when it became obvious to me that there was no consideration for survival in the case of an attack, and that the consequences for the nation would be grave. While I do not subscribe to the worst claims of resultant effects (I consider the consequences stated in the TTAPS report regarding climate effects and “nuclear winter” to be massively overstated) it would certainly spell the end for the United States as a coherent national entity, and would have resulted in the eventual deaths of hundreds of millions of people.
I think you mean “delimna” not “dimentia”. However, even if you posit that a terrorist organization can manage to acquire nuclear weapons and transport them to the United States, while the effect on morale may be substantial, the practical effect on the nation would not be as grave as a full on exchange between major nations, and after the the initial horror and shock the nation would move on. Frankly, from what we’ve seen of actual terrorist organizations–e.g., not as depicted on sensationalized fictional television and movies–planting a bunch of half-trained mopes on aircraft with box cutters represents the state of the art of their actual terroristic prowess. I would be vastly more concerned about a nation such as Iran or Venezuela acquiring the technology to produce both nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and then using this capability to destabilize the political balance of the region. Like a bullwhip, nuclear weapons are far more useful in the threat and political bargining chips than in actual use.
I’ve heard people go on about all the times we were close to launching, but I think the proof is in the eating so to speak. I don’t actually think it is just luck that brinksmanship never lead to an exchange. It’s easy to talk a big game, it’s far harder to pull the trigger of a gun pointed at another human being. Harder still to issue an order that will guarantee untold millions of humans die, many of them your own people.
There is no objective proof of what any Cold War leader was really thinking, the ones who wrote official memoirs obviously can be trusted about as much as any self-history can be trusted.
An accidental exchange would be more likely, but even then the fact that we had several close calls but nothing happened is actually proof to me the process still had enough lag built in that realistically the risk was not high.
State leaders tend to act in theory in the self interest of their state, terrorist leaders are stateless and thus some things that would almost never be in a state’s self interest might be in a terrorist groups self interest. With countries like Iran and North Korea building nuclear weapons and then potentially selling them to terrorist groups I think you have more genuine danger of a nuclear attack than you ever did during the Cold War.
I chose six. I think I would have been more scared except I had nightmares all childhood about Vietnam, and by the age of 10 I’d figured out that dying by nuke was a relatively painless way to go in comparison. Of course I assumed I’d be ground zero and gone before I knew what happened. I honestly just took it as a matter of course. But yeah, nobody, not even the kindergartners, thought hiding under your desk was going to save you from a nuke, and the air raid sirens we heard every Tuesday at 11 a.m., well…nobody thought those were gonna save us either.
You should read The Black Swan. Nothing happening N times is no proof that nothing will happen the N + 1st. As for brinksmanship, the only true case was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then there were calls for a first strike. I hope that if Nixon were president he would have resisted them like JFK did, but we can’t be sure.
Now, if it weren’t for MAD there would have been a conventional WW III very likely, so I’m not someone who thinks it was a bad strategy. But there were risks.
Not scared about the cold war at all, but the paranoia might have gotten to me because I was awfully prone to getting really REALLY scared about other things (tornadoes, volcanoes). I guess in Oklahoma fear of tornadoes might have been legitimate, but…volcanoes? Really? I’ll bet a Freudian could make something out of that.
See global warming, though that will take more time to happen.
I was born in '51, and remember being scared stiff during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I answered 7 - certainly more scared than today, but not petrified all the time.
Long before The Day After there were tons of novels about the aftermath of a war, not all of which included mutants and giant ants. Examples are Alas, Babylon and Shadows on the Hearth by Judith Merrill - and very short, “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Bradbury.
Born in '55, and have lived almost my entire life next to primary targets. I remember the “duck and cover” drills. That has definitely influenced my paranoia.
I was in 5th grade in Los Angeles at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even here on the West Coast, far away from the center of the crisis, there was significant public hysteria. Backyard underground bomb shelters sales were brisk – we had a neighbor on the block who had one installed. (Wonder if it is still there to this day?) One day my mother came home from shopping and announced that the shelves at the store were BARE.
My father called bullshit. He said Khrushchev would never go to war with the United States over a two-bit pip-squeak rock in the Caribbean. The crisis was over in just a few days, and he was right. Russia backed off.
In those days, the civil defense sirens were tested once a month, and everyone still called them “air raid sirens”. In my hyper-logical young mind, I wondered what was to stop Russia from sending the bombers to annihilate us at the predictable scheduled time of those tests, when we would all be ignoring those sirens. We had occasional “drop drills” in the schools, where the teacher would suddenly and without warning yell DROP! and we were all supposed to dive under the tables or desks. Only one teacher I had actually discussed it with us afterward – also, when I was in 5th grade. His evaluation:
[QUOTE=Mr. Lambert]
You’re all dead.
[/quote]
Point being, if the Bomb hits and you’re anywhere near ground zero, diving under the furniture isn’t going to help. But it’s good if you’re some number of miles away, where diving under the tables could make the difference of being / not being injured by flying glass.
On the contrary, it was met by the USA and USSR by the mid-1960s, when both had arsenals big enough to target every enemy city of 50,000 several times. Of course one detonation over every metro area of 500,000 or greater would have been far too much. That takes care of the “destruction” part.
As for “assurance” the US, with its triad ICBM-SLBM-Manned bomber delivery systems was certain to get through with enough payload to provide deterrence, and I doubt the USSR ICBM-SLBM dyad could have failed to kill 10s of millions of Americans in return.
I have heard of the Petrov incident, what was the other?
I do not concede even in the Petrov case that luck played a more important role than institutional and individual responsibly, and an institutional and individual sense of self-preservation.
Without the care that I maintain the leaders exercised luck would never have had a chance to play any role in our salvation.
Oh really? My impression has always been that the healthy members of the Politburo were making the decisions, with Gorbachev eventually winning out for the top job over the hard-liner Grigory Romanov, but that is a subject for another thread.
I do not recall the chronology exactly, but am sure the Pershing II and neutron bombs being a matter of public debate in the West, so I am a bit confused about how it was dressed up as an intelligence finding the Soviet military intel. Apparently the KGB was not convinced, and I expect it would have been essential to get them on board.
Also, it was NATO’s job to prepare for a land war; you cannot possibly mean that Soviet intelligence was trying to say NATO intended to start such a war, can you? If so the premise was sufficiently absurd for the Politburo majority to dismiss it as internally directed disinformation.
Finally, and this is from a short blurb I cannot site, I have read that during the Anti-Gorbachev coup and the death throes of the USSR that the Soviet military made an agreement within itself to take control of the nuclear arsenal for the purpose of making a nuclear exchange less likley. I expect a moderate faction always exisited, and was always influential, even if it could not keep the paranoiacs and hawks suppressed.
Addressed.
Who was this irresponsible character?
But whoever he was, I do not see why avoidance of calamity despite him is evidence of luck rather than evidence of compensating due diligence on the part of the perhaps hundreds of other people, starting with the 2-3 dozen at the top.
Both sides were careful enough for ~30 years not to display enough threatening behavior to trip anyone’s “warning” circuit, right? That sounds like best intentions doing what they are supposed to do. If our leaders had been maniacs and clowns all those years it would have taken more than luck for us to survive, it would have taken a miracle. God knows they made enough mistakes without people like you tarring them with exagerrations.
Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye, eh?
The drills and shelters were temporary fads and not practiced where I went to school or by anyone I knew.
I agree, but I do not see any challenge here to anything I have written.
“Delimna”? That a typo?
What I meant was “dementia”
“Morale”?! How about the effect on the health and lives of several 100,000 blast victims?!!!
All you display here is a talent for stating the obvious. Of course a terrorist attack would not be as grave as an exchange between nations.
However, it is IMO a much greater risk because even the demented leadership of North Korea could hardly wish to survive in the ruins of a nuclear aftermath. I am skeptical that that kind of deterrence applies to al-Qaeda types.
I am not sure about Venezuela specifically, but ongoing proliferation is very worrying wherever it occurs.
The deterrent effect has always been predominant, thankfully.
However, the more of them there are, and the longer they exist, the greater the chances are that we will run out of luck some day, and I am very worried, long-term.
I was born in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis happened during my first birthday. And my family lived in Plattsburgh, NY which was the location of a major SAC base - we would have been one of the top targets for a nuclear attack.
I was never worried. First, the Russians had just gone through a war with Germany-over 20 million Russians died! WE Americans cannot imagine the scope of this tragedy. So no, the Russians were never eager for a nuclear war.
I grew up in Squantum, MA-just up the road was a US Army Nike Missile base-these Nike missiles were designed to shoot down Russian bombers. The guys at this base were 100% laid back-the sentries would just wave you onto the base.
The Cold War was good for defense contractors-getting rich building weapons that would never be used.
I voted 6, born in '71 - as a frontline anticommunist state, it was considered likely that Apartheid South Africa might be targeted for one or two nukes we otherwise would never have seen. This did give me some minor concern, of the “idly plan how and where could I hold out from the leather&spike-clad Australian biker hordes”-daydream variety.
But on the other hand, it was Apartheid South Africa, nuclear war wasn’t the biggest concern for me.
Born at the end of the '50s, voted an 8. When I was a kid, I had nightmares about 2 things, nuclear war and bees (usually not in the same dream). I was pretty sure a global nuclear war would occur in my lifetime, and I’m not convinced yet that it won’t.
Scared isn’t really the right word. We felt pretty sure it would happen. Either as an accident or as a limited engagement. But it didn’t actively cause us daily worry. It more so seemed to affect our perception of life. “Get all you can now, cause nothin’s gonna last anyways.” The rampant Me First-ism of the 80s in my generation may have been caused by this attitude.
Born in the early 70s. Nuclear war was definitely near the top of the list of things I worried about. I find today’s global political situation much less worrisome, largely because it seems so much smaller in scale.
Born in 1968, and voted “7”. It just seemed inevitable, I guess. For a few days after the initial broadcast of Threads, the vote would have been a solid “10” though. That’s a very powerful piece of television.
Born in 70 and voted 9
I felt that an all out exchange was going to happen by misunderstanding/miscalculation. No one really wanted a war but it was going to happen by accident. KAL Incident, Able Archer to name two were both incidents where we came close any little mistake , by any one and poof.
I was in Germany a couple of years ago and passed through Fulda on the train. All I could think was this is the place where the Soviet tanks were going to come through. I cannot imagine what it was like to live there during the CW. I believe we were lucky and blessed with cool headed, rational actors on both sides.
That said I do believe that we are much more likely now to see Nukes used in anger, just not an all out exchange between the Russians and the US. The CW actually kept nations in check because of the risk of the big two getting involved, this is just not relevant today. What do we do if Pakistan nukes New Delhi? Sue?
I voted a ten because at the worst time of my fear I was convinced it would happen. Not to say the entire cold war had me that worried but at times I was.
Born in '52