We had to get under our desks and then watched the film of the Bikini Island bomb tests where an old battleship is more or less obliterated in a brilliant flash of light. Since our school desks were going to save us, maybe the Navy should have built its warships out of the same material used in school desks. 
Yes, I thought the US was capable of starting WWIII.
What a bizarre belief.
Actually, Reagan’s joke during a microphone test when he ordered the bombing of the Soviet Union to start in five minutes 
revealed him to be pretty level headed sort of fellow. It’s the kind of thing I’d do in his position. He had far too much levitas to be the Armageddon type of fanatic that lives in your nightmares.
As for your claim that “the Russians admitted” (that his election) “was nearly enough to provoke a nuclear first strike”, that does not come close to being plausible.
From the Wikipedia article, Reagan comes off as quite level headed, if initially naive or misguided:
I was born in 1969. Spent way too many hours of my late childhood through adolescence worrying about a nuclear war. Yes, I believed it was a likely possibility, most likely started by accident or by a misunderstanding.
Schoolyard scuttlebutt would have it that our otherwise unremarkable city was #22 on the Soviet Hit List, which of course was complete nonsense, but when you’ve got an already-worried kid with an overactive imagination…
About the same age as flodnak. Oh yeah, as middle schoolers we would be calculating the distance to the nearest major military installation, and figuring which “ring” of damage we’d fall into.
Can’t imagine what it would have been like to grow up in North Dakota or Washington DC.
I never thought it was inevitable but yeah, I thought it was possible and had nightmares about it. Until the Berlin Wall fell anyway.
I was born in 1941, not old enough to remember the actual bombings but I can quite clearly remember the bombed out buildings and the many bomb sites around Manchester.
As I grew older and began reading about WW2 I realised that nuclear war was a very distinct possibility, indeed I even thought it inevitable.
When news of the Cuban crisis was broadcast my first thoughts were “Oh shit, here it comes, the Russians just aint gonna back down”.
When they did the relief I felt cannot be explained and it was then I realised that no country, US or USSR wanted to bring death and destruction upon its people, I slept much easier after that.
However: I am,these days, increasingly concerned about events in Iran or for that matter the whole of the ME. If WW3 is going to kick off it’s going to kick off there
We had to run home (and we were timed) as part of our school’s nuclear threat drills. When I was very young, I was truly worried about it. However, as I got older I got over it.
There was (and is) nothing of strategic value in New Zealand worth dropping an A-bomb on, so even though I grew up in the tail end of the Cold War (born 1981) I don’t ever regarding the Russians as anything more than the bad guys in James Bond movies.
Born 1978, on the red side of Iron Curtain.
I never really bought propaganda and never seriously considered nuclear war. I mean, I knew it is possible - like in more than 0.0% chances - but very improbable. Like asteroids hitting Earth or something on that scale - “not within my lifetime”. It could happened, but almost certainly it wouldn’t. It just didn’t make sense for me obliterate Earth in order to… well, obliterate Earth. If US (or USSR) were serious about all that, they would do it long, long ago, during these decades since WWII. But instead they were setting all that wars-by-proxy in various places in the world, never directly hitting each other. That was what I was thinking then, and in hindsight, I was mostly right, although in retrospect I was underestimating chances of software glitch or some kind catastrophic misunderstanding.
On the other hand, a lot of kids of my age were seriously afraid and many of them believed that it’s inevitable.
I did. I suspected that the most likely cause would be a mistake, and there has actually been a number of false alarms.
I remember little of the Cold War, being born in 1979. All I recall are images of long lines of Soviet vehicles leaving Afghanistan, I’m not sure why it stuck with me but stick with me it did.
The only concern I had about being blown up was here in Northern Ireland by our own home grown terrorists. Even then it was rather mild, we lived in a small town and ventured into Belfast only occasionally to do some shopping. Concern was limited to where we would meet up after a bomb scare or if we’d get to the tills in time.
All my class mates worried about the nuclear exchange we had a good chance of having, when I was a kid in the 70’s. The most likely reason being a mistake starting something that would trigger a holocaust. We knew there was a strong possibility of an exchange, but did not think it was inevitable. We also worried about the People’s Republic of China or Red China. It wasn’t just the USSR and USA that was a worry. We figured any exchange could be started by any of the three countries and would involve all of them sending out nukes. My friends and I had no intent on seeking shelters, because we knew it was futile.
I was born in 1970 in the UK and seem to recall spending most of the 80s expecting to be annihilated at any time.
I think, IMHO, that it was equally likely that either side could have started it and we would be drawn in.
I also remember reading about meteoroids exploding in the upper atmosphere potentially being mistaken for nuclear explosions and triggering a response. Cite.
Luckily, we’re still here, for now.
Not that I was that articulate through most of it, of course. I do remember watching the first stages of Glasnost unfold and clearly understanding the enormous consequences of what Gorbachev was doing, though - and feeling relieved and being surprised at being relieved of a nervousness I hadn’t realized i was suffering from.
I’m a 1968 vintage.
The documentary Fog of War is an interesting one for those interested in this topic. I believe it can be viewed on googlevideo.
I am answering this cold to give you my opinion without influence from other posters. I will read the thread after.
I was born in 1966. As I was growing up in the 70s, I saw a world where my family fled the near complete chaos of the Bronx (New York City). The President of the US seemed willing to let our greatest city default and go down in flames. A President that was not even elected as the prior President and VP were forced out in complete disgrace. The Soviets and China appeared to have a military advantage over us and the completely inept response in the failed rescue attempt of the hostages by Jimmy Carter was a huge blow to those that believed in America. It looked like World Population was going to outstrip the ability to provide for it and that we would be heading towards more severe oil crisis. Unemployment and inflation was horrible. On top of all this air and water pollution were far worse than now. We had multiple rivers that would catch fire and burn, the love canal type corporate made disasters were becoming known. GE openly used the Hudson River as a chemical dump for decades. Acid rain was killing trees and fish. Birds of Prey were dying out as their shells had gotten too thin from pollutants in the eco-system and then 3-mile Island happened.
Meanwhile our best and closest allies, the UK and Canada had their own problems. There was building rebellion in Quebec and by several large native groups. Great Britain seemed to be in worse shape than we were and collapsing under the weight of too much socialism with an anemic economy. The constant reports of the terrorism of the IRA made Ireland sound like a war zone.
The Middle East of course looked like a huge flash point and we will still smarting over losing and losing ugly in Vietnam. There were also terrorist groups throughout Europe and frequent jet hijackings and of course the memory of Munich. The World appeared to be in chaos.
I honestly believed that there were too many pressures on peace and too much chaos and sooner or later the nuclear war would happen. I doubted I would live to see 40 as I expected to either be living somewhere where the bombs would fall or to be in the military. So yes I thought Nuclear War was inevitable.
I look forward to reading the other responses to see how paranoid I was.
Jim
Wow, great summary of the 70s.
(ETA: I mean that non-ironically. Also, you might have mentioned our next president being attacked in a boat by a rabbit, and advising us all to put on sweaters, but otherwise the leisure-suit clad judges give it a 9.9.)
I was 10 when the Berlin Wall came down, but a bright kid and I’d seen movies like Wargames and the one where a Russian submariner is washed up on shore and taken in by a pack of kids (no idea what movie that is), and of course all the Timothy Dalton Bond films and so on. Essentially, most action movies of the time had Ruskies as the bad guys. And at school, my teacher read through the newspaper every day and kept us up to date on what was happening politically throughout the world and described the Star Wars defense system and the football and whatnot.
Overall, while I wasn’t afraid really, I did basically understand that essentially–most likely–both sides were actively working towards making sure that a nuclear exchange wouldn’t happen. That no one wanted it to happen, Russian or American. But that it was only a matter of time until it did, unless the Cold War could be ended.
And I’ll note that I still think it’s just a matter of time. Star Wars needs to be completed and made available to anyone who could be trusted to have it.
checks Wikipedia to see what all ever happened to ol’ Gorbachev
I did believe it would happen. I’m not going to try to tell you that as a young teenager I had ny sophisticated understanding of current events on the geopolitical stage. However, I did grasp that both sides had thousands of missiles pointed at each other, wired to a hair-trigger that would trigger a massive launch if any threat was perceived. And I understood that in addition to the cold-war tensions, the world was boiling with regional armed conflict that could erupt in unanticipated ways.
I went to school ever day wondering if this would be the day the world ended. I watched the contrails of jets in the sky wondering if they didn’t look a little different today. I got a magnetic compass to note the direction of the nearest target (the international airport, with its long runways suitable for landing bombers) just in case that was a useful thing to know (like to run the other way). I was a walking enyclopedia of knowledge about how to survive a nuclear war.
People thought my obsession was a little weird, and eventually I settled down and decided that was just a quirky childhood fear, the monster in the closet of the 80’s. But just this year I found out that apparently we owe our survival to a Russian missile commander who saw a false alarm and courageously held back on retaliating for 10 minutes until he determined they didn’t actually detonate on impact :eek: Holy shit. It’s as if I took a nostalgic look into my childhood anxieties closet and found the shed skin of a 20-foot python. The shit was actually real and almost happened. Now I feel like I can’t rule out Bigfoot or giant spiders either.
I still dream about nuclear war often and I find myself absentmindedly glancing in the direction of the airport now and then just to make sure it’s still there.