I was born in 1965 - I felt like I should have been scared, but I felt kind of numb.
I was born in 1967 and didn’t worry about it much at all. Oh, I went through a “nukes are fascinating” stage and read up on preparations, some books like Alas Babylon, and watched The Day After.
But I was never scared that the bombs would start falling. There was nothing I could do about it, so why worry?
Actually, that philosophy has helped me avoid a lot of problems that apparently keep other people up at night. But that’s another thread… 
Good post. This was pretty much me. Of course living in the capital of Australia and being a significant Pacific ally of the US meant that if the balloon went up we would almost certainly get hit.
Around the time The Day After hit cinemas I remember a whole bunch of TV documentaries and newspaper stories about the effects of a nuke war and how to survive :smack: Scary stuff at the time.
Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, I was less concerned about Global Thermonuclear Warfare than people from The Cuban Missile Crisis Era.
But I was generally concerned that the “proxy wars” would turn serious if the “Big Boys” had to get involved, and that a conventinal conflict would then spiral into a limited, then general, exchange of nukes.
And then there were incidents like KAL 007. Always good for ratcheting up the pucker factor.
ETA: voted “6” in the poll.
The Day After was a cinema release in Australia? I had no idea…
ETA: I voted “3”
I crapped my pants when I saw this on TV in the early 80’s. I knew it was over!
Link safe for work besides possible sound.
Yep. I can still remember seeing the ads for it in the movies section of the local paper (a quick check on IMDB confirms the theatrical release here). Australia was a funny place back then, Canberra even more so - we had two TV channels (one commercial, the other Govt. run and three cinemas). The place was really just a big country town 
I am ashamed to admit that was me also. I use to have a pouch of emergency supplies (knife, can opener, one of those metal survival blankets, etc.) I carried with me everywhere. After the movie Red Dawn came out, I bought a shotgun in cash because of the scene in the movie where the Cuban commander tells his aide to get all the gun ownership records from the sporting goods stores. My father thought it was hysterical.
Born in 1961. Voted 4. We had the bomb drills in school, etc, but we also had fore drills and I never reallynworried about a fire at school. I guess I’m not a worrier, I probably should change my vote to 2. Not that I didn’t think it could happen, but I was never really scared about it or gave it any thought.
Born in 1968 - voted “4”, but could just as easily have been a 3. It wasn’t all that worrying, other than in the possibility of an accidental exchange which I considered possible but not particularly likely. Most of the time I didn’t give it much thought.
I’m not all that worried these days either. Just not much of a worrier in that sense. I consider the likelihood of a geopolitical catastrophe being either localized enough or severe enough on a global scale to significantly impact my day to day life to be low enough not to sweat bullets over most issues. Of course I sympathize with ordinary folks who do end up randomly getting fucked by politics, but usually that does not correlate with any sort of personal fear.
My dad came down more on the side of thinking I was dangerously insane. Looking back, I should have concentrated more on subsistance farming, field expedient dentistry and medicine, and genereral mechanical tinkering. I put too much of my resources into shelf stable food, firearms, and such. Being able to pull a bad tooth without causing excessive damage or infection would have been way more useful, had the balloon actually gone up, than a couple extra cases of ammo or another crate of c or t rations. What the hell did I know? I was at that stage of robust good health enjoyed by the young where, though you may occaisionally be injured, you basically never get sick. I did come away from it pretty certain that rugged individualists will die early and alone, though.
Born 1951. Ditto except for watching Alas, Babylon, Fail-Safe, and a couple of incidents.
Lived through Cuban Missile Crisis AND Chicago sounding the air raid sirens at 10:30 PM on September 22, 1959.
So you think we can absorb another terrorist attack (like some politician whose name escapes me)? :mad:
I was born in '56. The idea of a nuclear apocalypse was a huge part of the culture as I was growing up. Pop culture was full of stories and musings about mushroom clouds and nuclear doom.
But for some reason I never really felt any fear about it. Maybe it was just such a constant for my whole existence that it was part of reality along with every other danger in the world. I never really believed it would happen. I think emotionally it almost seemed like some bigger than life Hollywood thing.
The biggest fear I ever felt about anything nuclear was during the Three Mile Island crisis. I lived about 100 miles from there so those fears were probably overblown.
The problem is that this viewpoint assumes complete knowledge and assured control (two of the tenets of Assured Destruction), neither of which is practically achievable on a global level. Naturally, the leaders of nations would not, in theory, elect to pull the temple down upon their heads…unless they are of the sincere belief that an opposing nation has already launched a disarming attack. In such a case, not only may they respond, but by the doctrine of “Launch on Warning” (another tenet of Assured Destruction) they are committed to responding. At such a point, it isn’t even an option. Like Dr. Strangelove’s “Plan R” it should be an automatic response.
This is not a theoretical point. Until the publication of The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy, it was unknown by the general public that the Soviet Union had developed a semi-automatic defense system which, when activated, would assess conditions that were indicative of a nuclear attack and respond by issuing launch orders…completely free of any human intervention. Indeed, while the CIA and the NSC were aware that such a system was developed, the Western world was unaware that the system had actually been activated on a number of different occasions, and on at least one of those occasions actually indicated a imminent attack. (The system was fortunately on standby mode and could not issue direct orders.) Human beings are often flawed in their judgments, especially under pressure, and the reliance upon “systems of systems” for information and control often hides errors and blind spots, a condition known to military commanders through the ages as “the fog of war”. With conventional weapons, even powerful and long range weapons, the extent of damage is limited. With nuclear weapons, whole nations can be destroyed in less time than it takes to read an action report.
Of even greater concern is the deployment of nuclear weapons in a “tactical” capacity, with the assumption that use of such weapons would be limited to a battlefield theater. The reality, backed by numerous war games simulations run by strategy theorists at RAND, MITRE, the Hudson Institute, Army War College, et cetera (none of which are bastions of liberal-minded anti-nuclear-weapon thinking), is that the distiction between strategic nuclear weapons and battlefield “tactical” weapons is arbitrary at best, and disingeneous at worst. Any use of nuclear weapons, by virtue of their destructiveness and essential unstoppability, encourages a nuclear response of equal or greater magnitude. There is no scenario in which nuclear weapons could be assuredly used in a battlefield context that could not expand to a strategic exchange.
As with most people who cite “MAD” as a demonstratively effective strategy, you don’t really understand the fundamental requirements and mechanics of Assured Destruction as a deterrence strategy. Having an overwhelmingly large arsenal of nuclear weapons, and even being able to weather a first strike and respond with a massive retaliatory counterstrike does not satisfy the necessary conditions for Assured Destruction as an effective strategy for deterrence, and a lack of real or percieved parity (which can occur due to superabundance) may actually be more destablizing that having smaller arsenals of roughly equal destructive capacity. The size of arsenal necessary to support Assured Destruction is fundamentally a variation on the Diner’s Delimma, and like that game, is only marginally stable for two players, and unstable for three or more players. If you don’t understand the above statements, you need to educated yourself on deterrence theory before making bold statements of how effective such a strategy is.
In the case of the Petrov incident, it was very fortunate that Petrov was involved with the development of this warning system and conversent with the particular errors that the system generated in response to satellite flares (transitory reflections of sunlight off of solar panels or other reflective components), and therefore discounted the warning based upon his prior experience and the small number of apparent tracks. Another duty officer who was not conversant with the flaws of the system may have followed his duty to directly relay the warning of attack to the Soviet leadership without filter or comment.
Recall that this incident happened less than a month after the Soviet shoot down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, which some members of the Soviet military leadership believed to be an intentional provocation to “test” the effectiveness of Soviet defense systems, and also as a plot to embarass the Soviet Union on the world scene. General Secretary Yuri Andropov was in hospital in terminal renal failure, and the real leadership was managed by a small inner sanctum of Politburo power brokers. (It suprises many people to learn that Andropov was not the head of government–the Premier or Head of the Council of Ministers–and had no legitimate authority to directly dictate government function, and questionable legitimacy as the ostensible head of state.) The leadership of the Soviet Union was unclear to the Western world, and even within the Politburo it was like a turbulent fluid with factions vying to grab control as soon as Andropov exhaled his last breath. Relying on such “leadership” to react with knowledgable and rational authority–especially given the considerable fear at the unmetered bombast of Reagan, who decryed the KAL 007 incident as a “crime against humanity” and “act of barbarism”–is not a very reliable strategy.
The fact it is that it only takes one error of knowledge, judgment, or security to start a chain of events that could have easily led to global nuclear war–and, in war similations, as contrived as they are, often has resulted in a full exchange despite the best efforts of the players–argues that the notion that “rationality will save us” is a falsehood.
As for other incidents, here is a partial list, although it is neither complete nor current. I actually know a couple of people who were “down in the hole” during the 1979 NORAD simulation error, and while an official launch order was never imminent, they had guidance programs loaded and were one key turn away from launch. In fact, part of the impetus for developing the LGM-118A “Peacekeeper” system was that the two to three minutes that it took at bring the Minuteman II and III systems to launch readiness ate into the time to discriminate before launch and may force a response before the threat was fully validated. I know of several others that are not listed here, and some of those that are listed are not really explained in the full depth of horror, such as how Fidel Castro urged Khruschev to issue strike orders if American bombers were spotted in Cuban airspace. The latest incident that caused a hightened alert was in 1995 (the Noregian rocket launch) and with greater proliferation of warning systems and strategic-capable launch vehicles, the likelihood of a misidentified launch rises to certainty.
Such an attack launched against a major metropolitan center would have a horrific human cost in addition to a loss of hundreds of billions of dollars of real estate value, not to mention the fear it would provoke in the citizerny and doubtless further erosion of civil liberties and protections experienced since the September 2001 attacks. However, it would not fundamentally alter the national infrastructure for manufacturing and agriculture. Even a strike to Washington, D.C. and dissolution of government would be potentially recoverable. However, a full nuclear exchange such as that possible in the post-'Sixties era of ICBM-delivered multi-megaton “city busters” and highly accurate MIRV capable systems such as the SS-20 ‘Satan’ would have essentially destroyed North America. The population remaining after the initial attacks will likely suffer famine and disease without any coherent response and no way to rebuild from substinence level. The United States, the Soviet Union, and most of Europe would be delivered back to the medieval period.
I do not welcome a terrorist nuclear attack (especially since I live in one of the areas most likely to be targetted for such an attack) but it doesn’t pose the same magnitude of threat as a strategic exchange, and realistically, is not more or less preventable or predictable. Wherever they are employed, either as a deterrent or as a deliberate tool of battle (e.g. tactical weapons) they are inherently destabilizing regardless of who the owners are and how presumably rationale they are presumed to be.
Stranger
We called it “the twelve o’clock whistle” and I thought it had something to do with the fire station… but I really don’t know what it was, maybe it was for an air raid and my mother was protecting me!
Scared? Moi?
Hah, I laugh in the face of death, tweak the nipples of terror, poke panic and french-kiss fear!
Actually I was too young to really appreciate the whole Cold War potential global megadeath thing before it ended…I remain a man that knows not the meaning of fear though and laugh mockingly at your “thermonuclear weapons”…
No, that viewpoint dies not assume complete knowledge and assured control, and by saying so you create a Straw Man.
Neither leadership fooled itself into supposing complete knowledge and assured control could be attained. They recognized the obvious: nuclear WMD were an unavoidable fact of life, and it was vital to devise the best means to avoid accidental launch.
“Launch on Warning” might have been part of the (M)AD concept as conceived at some point by RAND, but RAND did not have a copyright on the term, and other observers are permitted to use it differently. Furthermore, those responsible for the actual launching demurred when warned on every occasion, including those mentioned in all of your citations.
“Semi-automatic”? What does that mean? If the system was segregated from the ultimate, real-time responsibility and control of human beings then it was not “semi“. I doubt such a system was ever contemplated.
The human beings responsible for WMD launch knew a launch by them assured destruction of their own country regardless of how effective their own launch might be, or who started the exchange. That is what you call “deterrence.” It was staring every responsible human agent in the face on every close call, producing odds against accidental nuclear war far outweighing mere good luck.
Military “fog” can never be fully lifted. However, earlier commanders did not have satellite, radar and other surveillance assets 1000s of times more capable than anything available “through the ages”.
The outcome desired by NATO from tactical WMDs reduction the threat that the Warsaw Pact might launch an aggressive attack with its overwhelmingly superior ground forces. NATO leaders knew of and weighed the risk of deployment. Are you saying that in doing so they rejected the unanimous advice of RAND, etc? I find it hard to believe there was no dissent amongst the advisors.
The Diner’s “Delimma” [sic] sounds fascinating and I will certainly consider educating myself somewhat on its niceties via Google.
Later, that is, because I do not need to for the purpose of this debate.
I am fully entitled to adopt the phrase “Mutual Assured Destruction” in a way at odds with the usage adopted by RAND etc. as long as my usage provides an accurate description of historical reality. It was historically real that destructive potential was mutual and was assured, and did have a deterrent effect. That would have been true even if the rival arsenals were had been much smaller, something I alluded previously to, before your “educational” suggestion. It might also be that the oversized arsenals increased the role of luck in our preservation. However, that does nothing to further your contention that luck was the dominant element, and if you don’t understand that then you could use some more education yourself on the basics of effective argumentation.
Even if Petrov was the only conversant officer available for this vital duty, which I doubt, Wiki informs us, among other things, that procedure called for multiple-source corroboration of an attack, and ground radar showed no sign of an attack in progress.
That sounds like rational procedure and properly working devices doing what they were supposed to do, and it sounds like the luck preeminently featured in this episode was the bad luck of unusual atmospheric conditions triggering a false alarm.
Your irrelevant literary flourishes (“turbulent fluid”, “unmetered bombast”) do not help your case.
Whatever the state of the “fluid” regarding succession, surely the entire Politburo was committed to the utmost collegial regard for fact and reason in the entirely separate realm of WMP deployment, where one mistake could leave each of them without a country to lead even if they themselves survived.
“Contrived”? Something “contrived” cannot falsify something else.
Unacceptable. The article provides no evidence that Suez, the first item on the list, ever led to a nuclear WMD threat, and it informs us that as a result of the SAC-NORAD episode only manned bombers were alerted, and they did not even leave the ground. I am not going to parse the rest of an article which begins so poorly.
Stop right there.
You are going to have to do better than cite an episode where launch was never imminent as evidence of inadequate procedure or overriding significance of luck.
This sounds more like a commitment to continous improvement of fail-safe capacity than anything else. If we operated on three-second margins for so long, then as I said before it would have taken not luck but a miracle to save us if our procedures and the people chosen to operate them were as inadequate as you suggest.
Fidel Castro was not giving any orders, and the people who were giving orders were not going to commit mass suicide by nuclear WMD for Fidel Castro’s sake.
I do not wish to extend this conversation past Cold War events.
However, I will say here that It is ludicrous to imagine any former Cold War power launching a no-warning nuclear WMD attack on any other, and if the false alarms from an earlier time when mutual hostility was so much greater did not set off a WMD catastrophe then it is reasonable to assume we are considerably safer now, even though USA-Russia relations are not as good as they were in 1995.
Also, I repeat what I said earlier about proliferation being a cause of grave concern.
Born in 1967, this is pretty much me, too.
The immense horror of WWII was well before my time so I never really experienced a world in which the leaders of major nations actually demonstrated a commitment to full-scale, carpet-bomb-the-civilians-and-flatten-major-cities warfare. Maybe we did that sort of thing in East Asia when I was still in diapers, but my impression of 'Nam was of defending against guerilla attacks and blowing the snot out of suspicious sections of jungle. The very idea of one developed country blazing another, fully understanding it would be suicidal to do so, seemed beyond unrealistic to me. It made no sense–what would either side gain, and why would they do it in the first place? Certainly not to occupy the now vacant and toxic territory. So I just counted up as a BS half-story we’d been fed for reasons I’d never understand. Real or not, I figured, there was nothing I could do about it anyway.
I want to be sacared of Jihad, but I’m suspicious because we never had the nuke war. Any items currently in the wrong hands are not getting upgraded or maintained and are becoming less reliable every day. I’m quite sure the US alone will lose more people this year to heart disease than the world will lose to Jihad in the next 100 years. It’s just not even on my radar.
colonial, you are of course free to apply whatever kind of terminology you like to any argument you wish–you can define a mouse to be an elephant if it pleases you–but Assured Destruction has a specific technical meaning in the venue of deterrence strategy and a set of prerequisite conditions that are generally agreed upon by professional strategists. Not only is the strategy you insist upon–which is ambiguously defined as the historical US position–inconsistent with the defined provisions of Assured Destruction, but it is also inconsistent with both the United States and former Soviet Union positions on deterrence strategy as neither have avowed the use of “MAD” as their respective strategic doctrines, or that the degree of excess capacity was intended to serve any other function than to ensure counterstrike capability of strategic assets, not complete destruction of national civilian infrastructure. Even a cursory review of US doctrine through the decades shows that US deterrence strategy has almost invariably followed rather than guided the development, acquisition, and deployment of strategic nuclear systems which are typically made based upon political and fiscal concerns. Such doctrine is then backfilled into “confirming” that the size, deployment plan, and quantity meets some theoretical deterrent capability. “Launch on warning”, however, was a definite provision of the strategic plans of both nations, and is widely regarded, even by advocates of nuclear armament, as problematic, which drove the development of early warning systems which cost as much or more than the launch systems and weapons they supported.
It should be noted that many of the former architects and hawks of strategic nuclear systems and their specific implementations, such as the Hans Bethe, the late Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, William Perry, and others have since admitted that the deterrence value of the systems is overstated, the potential for accidential or unauthorized launch is significant, and that we were as much or more lucky than good that a nuclear exchange did not occur. McNamara in particular–who championed the original Minuteman ICBM and Polaris SLBM systems as cost-effective strategic deterrent–openly admitted that the proliferation of nuclear weapons during the Cold War did not increase security and resulted in numerous “near miss” incidents. The specifics can be found in Wilson’s Ghost: Reducing The Risk Of Conflict, Killing, And Catastrophe In The 21st Century, and in more abbreviated form in the Errol Morris documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.
The argument of “MAD worked, therefore it was effective” is a form of the causal fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. Even if we could line up previously occurring conflicts on some kind of statistical distribution, we cannot make a definitive claim regarding what could not have happened based upon what did happen, especially at the extrema. We can review particular incidents and look at what caused them to not spiral out of control, and what different conditions might not have provided an arresting condition. From that review, it is clear that the potential for catastrophic error certainly exists.
The Soviet “Dead Hand” system discussed previously (known in defensive circles as “Perimeter”) does in fact exist. There is extensive documentation about the system in addition to the book listed previously, and in strategic deterrence vernacular this is known as a “fail-deadly” system. It is “semi-automatic” in the sense that it is only activated when it is felt that the potential for a disarming first strike may be possible, but once activated the system does in fact have the capability of issuing launch orders free of human intervention. The Soviet Union did not have extensive satellite surveillance systems in the late 'Seventies and their over-the-horizon (OTH) early warning systems were neither as extensive nor as high fidelity as comparable US systems of the era, and many of their ICBM systems required a warm-up time of several minutes, hence the need for rapid decision making. Today, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and budget problems of the successor Russian state, modern systems are poorly maintained, and their satellite constellation of surveillance systems is incomplete. In some ways, despite START reductions, we are in a worse situation in regard to potential error than we were even in the early 'Eoighties, a fact not widely publicized by either party.
Stranger
Not sure if already mentioned, but the story of Vasili Arkhipov during the Cuban Missile Crisis is surely relevant to the discussion of whether nuclear weapons would actually have been used during the Cold War. Short version: he prevented a nuclear-tipped torpedo from being launched at a USN destroyer group that was harassing his submarine at the height of the Crisis, October 27th. This was the same day that Anderson’s U-2 got shot down, incidentally.
Re, whether Soviet forces in Cuba would have used their nuclear weapons against the U.S., naturally, I can’t find my friggin’ copy of Dark Sun. (But Google Books has the quote I’m looking for.) In it, Richard Rhodes writes that Gen. LeMay advocated an airstrike to try and destroy the IRBMs on the ground. Kennedy thought that was a bad idea, and said no. Good thing too, as at Page 575, Rhodes writes:
PALs are methods for ensuring nuclear command and control. R-12 missiles (NATO SS-4, “Sandal”) missiles required a bit of time to make ready for launch—anywhere from a low of 5-15 minutes to 1-3 hours, so LeMay’s strike might have caught them all. Maybe. If not, then, well, each warhead per the wiki for the SS-4, was anywhere from 1-3 Mt… 29 warheads, FWIW, was about 1% of the total Soviet nuclear arsenal in 1962, per this link. (It could have been more. An account from the CIA of the Crisis lists one ship, the Indigirka, as carrying 99 ‘nuclear charges’, whatever that means.)
If I’m interpreting Rhodes’s statement correctly, that means the IRBMs could have been launched at any time the field commander, (General Issa Pliyev, IIRC) wished. I do not know whether Pliyev’s orders were to wait until bombs actually were falling or if he felt that his command was sufficiently endangered. I also don’t know whether a nuke detonating within the blockade group would have spooked Pliyev enough to think he was about to be attacked, and thereby give the launch order.
Finally, Rhodes interviews a retired SAC wing commander who claimed that,
All of this is just to say that I disagree with your statement, “I will say here that It is ludicrous to imagine any former Cold War power launching a no-warning nuclear WMD attack on any other.” Dark Sun, if you haven’t read it, is an really interesting read, on par with his The Making Of the Atomic Bomb.
FWIW, the Russian ‘Perimeter’, or ‘Dead-Hand’ system (and elements of it) has been discussed in multiple places on the Web. I’m confident it exists; IMHO, mainly due to fears of zero-warning-time decapitation strike methods like bombs from the F-117 or B-2 or a terrorist strike.
Off to the library to read Wilson’s Ghost.