Not really concerned at all. Partly it was the arrogance and ignorance of youth, but also the realisation that I couldn’t do anything about it so why waste energy worrying? By the end of my school years (1985), the Soviet Empire was fast collapsing, and did collapse by the time I left university in 1989.
I was born in the very early 60s, and we (my family and I, not me and my tapeworms) had absolutely no concern about the Russians. We knew for sure that there wouldn’t be a nuclear war. My father wasn’t a member of the John Birch Society, but he certainly agreed with them completely, and he had None Dare Call It Conspiracy in his library, so it wasn’t that he liked them Commies, it was because we had something else.
Yup, as a Mormon growing up in that era, we expected Jesus to come in the year 2000, plus or minus a couple of years. So, no nuclear holocaust for us, thank you. We’re Mormon; we don’t drink or smoke or get worried about things which aren’t planned by God.
Ah, the careless days of yore, when all you had to worry about was that final war and needed to have two years’ supply of wheat and powdered milk.
Now that was something my parents strongly believed in, was having the two years’ worth of food which the Mormon church insisted everyone have.
One of my earliest memories is hiding under the coffee table during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as Walter Cronkite told me the Russians had missiles pointed at us, and by “us,” I thought he meant our house.
“That’s not going to help, you know,” my mother crouched down to tell me.
Pretty well the same. Even growing up in central Kansas, we figured there’d probably be some strikes near us too, given that we had nuclear plants, military bases, and more than one military airplane manufacturer around us.
Born in 1963 and lived in a city with a large number of bigtime defense contractors. There was a legend going around that we were #3 or 4 on the list of Soviet targets. I was really scared. The “disaster” drills didn’t help much either. I voted 9.
I was 15 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Plus, my dad was in the Air Force and we lived at an Air Force Missile Site. We were told to stockpile food and water in the basement and families were assigned to us to shelter in our basement if need be. Yeah, I was terrified for many years.
I heard Krushchev say on TV: “We will bury you!” and I believed him.
I was born in 1960. I voted “4” on the scale.
I wasn’t exactly terrified, but it was a gnawing feeling in the back of my mind.
I always figured that, even in a worst-case scenario, there would be survivors in both what was left of the United States and the Soviet Union (some of my friends thought that the whole planet would be destroyed), but most of the major cities would be in radioactive ruins.
I knew several people who were not worried at all, because they were very religious, and knew that God would never let people destroy the world. That was his job!
Born in 1949 so I lived my whole life in the cold war (until it ended).
What I remember is that it didn’t seem very real to me. Yes, we had air raid drills in grade school, but I think we all realized they were kind of silly. I was about 13 during the Cuban missile crisis, and I still didn’t really take it in as a real danger. Movies like Dr Strangelove and Failsafe didn’t make me any more nervous (somewhat less so, if we could have a president like Henry Fonda).
During my teen years the country was all exercised about civil rights and Viet Nam and hippies and free love and stuff like that. Nuclear annihilation still didn’t seem like a real possibility.
As I think back on it, it seems to me that all the externally-visible concern about the possibility of accidental or unintentional nuclear war, where the huge majority of comments made it clear that intentional nuclear war was unthinkable, just made me feel safer. Perhaps my sense of irony was not sufficiently well established, but I just could not believe that the world would come to an end because some guy tripped and spilled his coffee on a circuit board, or whatever.
So I voted a 3. It was there, but it was way in the background.
Roddy
eta: we lived in an important port city that we all knew was targeted, even if it might have been #30 or higher on the list. Didn’t seem to matter. If there was going to be a war, I much preferred the idea of being annihilated at ground zero, to surviving the aftermath. Now THAT was a scary idea.
The Cold War wasn’t really bipolar after the 1960s when the Chinese separately developed an atomic bomb and broke with the Soviets. A couple of writings from the '70s and '80s talked about a three-way conflict not a two way one. In addition, a Cold War going on wouldn’t have prevented the Indians and the Pakistanis from developing their own nukes eventually (after all the South Africans and the Brazilians were also working on nuclear weapons).
World geopolitics currently is stable with the exceptions of rogue states and those undergoing civil war-all the major countries of the world have a stake in the world economy and will not rock the boat. Even countries like Iran or North Korea are kept in line by their sponsers.
I probably started as an 8, and then The Day After jacked things up to 9. I was a kid when the Cold War ended, and I wasn’t the brightest little kid, either. So I was very scared, and felt it was only a matter of time … but looking back now I see that some of my fears were, you know, being afraid of the actual thing you were supposed to be afraid of while others were more like being afraid of things from science fiction. I didn’t really discern between them, I just lived in a constant state of low-grade terror with spikes of anxiety whenever the USSR seemed particular aggressive in the news.
I grew up about 2 miles from a NIKE base and used to see missiles going down the street. I voted 8 because I was a worryful child. We used to have nuclear attack drills in gradeschool where we all went down into the basement. Seriously, who thought going into the basement would save you??
Born in 1972, voted “5” in the poll. That may have spiked when we* watched “The Day After” to a 9 or so, but not for too long.
I grew up in (and still live in) the nearest suburbs of Chicago, less than five miles from O’Hare, so I always knew that if The Big One happened, I and everyone I knew would be dust, not shambling through a post-apocalyptic landscape.
On the other hand, the Cold War more-or-less ended when I graduated from high school, 1989. Nonetheless, I still reflexively think of the weekly siren test as the “civil defense test” of the “air raid sirens” though the only times they’ve gone off in my lifetime in my area for an actual alert/warning have been for tornadoes and similar high-wind bad weather. I’m sure I’m in the last/youngest generation that doesn’t reflexively think of them as the “tornado sirens.”
Oh, and on the whole issue of whether there’s more risk now than back then, there’s more risk A bomb will go off**, but a whole lot less risk of The Big One. There’s a world of difference between “one of our cities is gone” and “all of our cities – and their cities, and human civilization, and eventually, human population – is gone.” :smack: IMHO, the Russians and/or the U.S. are a whole lot less likely to let fly with all their missiles if a mushroom cloud appears over its territory now than the Cold-War-era MAD-based belief that it’s a first strike presaging a massive followup strike so “we have to use-it-or-lose-it”.
- “We” is the appropriate word when your grade-school teacher [del]instructs[/del] strongly suggests that her class watch a particular television program as it will be discussed the next day in class.
** Pun intended. Not the first time dark humor has arisen on this subject. 
Born in 1968, grew up in DC. Never gave it a thought.
Born in '55 – We also had the drills in school, and we could see a Nike missile base from the schoolyard and often talked about it. I gave it a “7”. It was more than just a possibility but in a weird way, being so young, it was kind of exciting. I used to pretend to myself that my parents were Russian spies and that there was a hidden microphone in the stove.
Born in '53. I had those, too.
I voted it as a 7. Even as a little kid, I guess I felt that nobody, nobody would be so stupid as to launch nukes.
Some of my parents’ neighbors did build fallout shelters. I wanted one, too. Coolest fort evar! (Never got one. 
)
I love how everybody figured wherever they were was a top target. I mean, I lived in BFE, but it had a couple of things that made us sure that WE would be one of the top targets. Yeah.
About 10 thousand give or take Russian nukes go a long way distribution wise. The large majority of Americans live “mushroom cloud close enough” to a decent sized city or a target the Russians would want hit.
I was born in '61, and gave it a 4. Before 1970, I remember seeing fallout shelter signs, and was worried when I learned what they were, but as time went on, I became less scared. It just wasn’t a big worry, especially through jr high and high school (I graduated high school in 1980).
We also had an air raid siren every Saturday at noon, and some years later, heard Robert Klein’s bit about those. IIRC, he said something like, “The Russians aren’t crazy, they don’t say to each other, ‘We’ll bomb at 12 o’clock Ivan, they won’t know, they’ll think it’s lunch!’”
I was born in the late 60s. I wasn’t worried at all. I don’t tend to worry much. I was in the Army in Germany before and when the Wall fell. We would get weekly briefings on which Soviet units were against us over the border. I was prepared but not worried.
I was 10 during the Cuban Missile Crisis and my father had just come home from a business trip through Arkansas totally shaken. He had seen Army convoys on the road, troops entering and leaving those “country roads” with gates and guards that were the driveways to missile sites, and more activity at the Blytheville AFB than most commercial airports.
When you’re 10 years old and your Dad doesn’t think you’ll live to see Halloween, you get pretty scared.