Generation X, Gen Y, and the Bomb

Factual Questions
1

(I don’t know which forum to put this in,Manny, so feel free to move it as you see fit.)

I was born in 1969, and was one of the last generation to grow up knowing that the world could end at any time via nuclear war. At a guess, people born after 1978 weren’t old enough to be cognizant of the very real threat.

I don’t have a real question, but just want to get feedback from people of both generations, from you young’ns about whether you understand what it was like or whether you think we were all just paranoid, and from people of my age on whether y’all have gotten over it yet.

Sua

2

I was born in 1967 and I’m more scared now than I was in the 70’s/80’s.

Back when ths USSR was strong and the big bad boy on the block they kept their cronies in line. You didn’t say boo without Moscows ok. As for the US and the USSR, with the notable exception of the Cuba Missile Crisis, they both knew better than to really piss the other one off. To some extent MAD as a doctrine worked. Anyone screws up and we’re ALL dead.

Now, however, you have more and more states obtaining nuclear weapons. India, Pakistan being the two most recent and I bet there are a bunch more who just don’t admit to it. Certainly, getting at least a few nukes seems to be an overriding goal of most countries even if they must do so covertly (or not so covertly like North Korea).

Now, you are left with a situation of small countries in hot spot areas weilding nukes without poppa Russia there to kick their ass if they step out of line. In addition, places like North Korea and Iraq truly scare the piss out of me. North Korea might be making more rational noises just recently but mostly their government has been one of the most bizarre and unpredictable in the world and they have a nuclear AND ballistic missile program. Saddam Hussein? If that guy EVER gets a nuke he’ll whip it at the US in a New York minute just for spite.

I truly am more worried now than before. The US and Russia simply had too much to lose in a nuclear exchange and both we’re generally straightforward, stable, intelligent governments. Now with some wacko states waving the things around and other countries that are probably stable but have hot-button issues with neighbors (India and Pakistan over Kashmir, China over Taiwan, etc.) the world is a more dangerous place.

No one is left to put the brakes on…

3

As someone born several years after you ,I can say the Bomb wasn’t really that big a deal to us. We were aware that it could possibly drop and kill us, but our whole lives seemed to be based around everything that was killing us.
The sun is killing you, the air is killing you, the water is killing you, sex will kill you, fat will kill you, preservatives, apples, grapes, oranges, rare meat, radon, all killing you. The insecticide will kill you, but so will the insects, beer, wine , whiskey, marijuana, are all killing you, TVs were killing us with radiation, the ozone is disappering, the earth is overheating, and species are disapperaing.

I wish the bomb had been our biggest concern, at least it is a nice tangible threat, rather than the vague conspiracy of everything that exists trying to kill us.

4

Jeff, your post should be the OP, with this question added – Do those who entered their formative years after the Wall fell have the same fear of rogue nuclear states you and I share?

I mean, our fear is, to some extent, irrational. Rogue states may be able to hit us with one or two bombs, but you and I are not likely to be under that bomb, unlike in the days of the USSR, when all of us where going to die, if not from the bomb itself, then from fallout or nuclear winter.

Sua

5

I have to agree with Jeff here. I was born in '75 so my earliest memories of the bona fide cold war were right before Andropoff kicked it. Then when Gorbechev came to power and Glastnost and Perestroika started to make there appearance, well as a twelve year old that seemed to be enough to keep me satisfied that nuclear war wasn’t going to happen. And now that info is coming out of the Kremlin, seems that guess was right.

Butnowadays things are quite different. Yes I do worry about some damn fool Asian country doing something stupid in a boarder skirmish, but more than that a nuclear disaster doesn’t not have to be initiated by a sovereign government. Hamas, Hiz b’allah, and Ben Laden scare me more than Iraq or N. Korea.

The destruction of the entire world is not the concern that it might have been at one time, but New York, London, D.C. etc. are in more danger now than ever.

6

Born in 1966 - and I can hardly remember what it felt like to live under the threat, only that I was decidedly unhappy about it. It’s like recalling a nightmare - the details are clear enough, but I can’t recall the fear. Living in a place that would be fought over with conventional weapons, probably gas and definitely tactical warheads didn’t do anything to make one feel better.

Sorry, can’t resist:

[Tom Lehrer]
When you attend a funeral,
It is sad to think that sooner or’l
Later those you love will do the same for you.
And you may have thought it tragic,
Not to mention other adjec-
Tives, to think of all the weeping they will do.
(But don’t you worry.)

No more ashes, no more sackcloth,
And an arm band made of black cloth
Will some day nevermore adorn a sleeve.

For if the bomb that drops on you
Gets your friends and neighbors too,
There’ll be nobody left behind to grieve.

And we will all go together when we go.
What a comforting fact that is to know.
Universal bereavement,An inspiring achievement,
Yes, we will all go together when we go.

We will all go together when we go.
All suffused with an incandescent glow.
No one will have the endurance
To collect on his insurance,
Lloyd’s of London will be loaded when they go.

Oh we will all fry together when we fry.
We’ll be french fried potatoes by and by.
There will be no more misery
When the world is our rotisserie,
Yes, we will all fry together when we fry.

Down by the old maelstrom,
There’ll be a storm before the calm.

And we will all bake together when we bake.
There’ll be nobody present at the wake.
With complete participation
In that grand incineration,
Nearly three billion hunks of well-done steak.

Oh we will all char together when we char.
And let there be no moaning of the bar.
Just sing out a Te Deum
When you see that I.C.B.M.,
And the party will be come-as-you-are.

Oh, we will all burn together when we burn.
There’ll be no need to stand and wait your turn.
When it’s time for the fallout
And Saint Peter calls us all out,
We’ll just drop our agendas and adjourn.

You will all go directly to your respective Valhallas.
Go directly, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollahs.

And we will all go together when we go.
Every Hottentot and every Eskimo.
When the air becomes uranious,
We will all go simultaneous.

Yes, we all will go together
When we all go together,
Yes we all will go together when we go.

[/Tom Lehrer]

So, at the risk of sounding callous: If India and Pakistan decides to lob nukes at each other, they’re idiots, but it won’t destroy civilization. If <insert favorite terrorist group here> get their hands on a nuclear weapon, they might blow up a major city, but again, it’s not the end of the world - it’s not the end of civilization, even. It’s a risk several orders of magnitudes less. Stability has decreased, but so has the consequences of instability.

Yeah, I feel better now than I did. I’ll feel even better when Russia gets it act together.

S. Norman

7

Jeez, this makes me feel old. I was born in 1955. Thatr makes me one of those born at the PEAK of the Baby Boomer years (It also makes me and MOST fellow Boomers too young for Davy Crockett, Howdt Doody, Hippies, Woodstock, and all the other so-called defining moments of the Boomer Years. But that’s another rant, one I’ve done already.)

I remember Bomb Drills. The town Air-Raid siren would go off, and you’d have to duck under the desk or out in the hall. “Duck and Cover” films with that damned turtle. Civil Defence shelters in public buildings. Our high school had biscuits and canned water and a whole emergency generator in the basement. Twilight Zone episodes about Fallout Shelters. The mvie “Rodan” with its tacked-on prologue of atomic bomb footage, not to mention all the other MST3K-fodder monster films of the period, with their footage. The culture was suffused with images and reminders of the Bomb.

I suspect that most people didn’t RALLY take it seriously, though. Like the mother of the narrator in H.G. Wells’ “In the Days f the Comet”, who believed in the existence of Hell, bt not that anyone would actually GO there.
If you want to get the feel, rent “The Atomic Cafe”, my favorite documentary. Or the aforementioned Twilight Zone episodes.

If you want to see what it would RLLY be like, get hold of a copy of the movie “The War Game” (Not the Matthew Broderick “Wargames”) – it was made on a tiny udget for the BBC in the 1960’s, but they’ve never put it on the air. Scary as hell. Scarier than Nicholas Meyer’s “The Day After”, by far.

8

Both Jackanapes and Spiny Norman have pointed out that we are more likely looking at just a nuke or two being used here and there for terrorist purposes and that this is a far cry from nuclear holocaust as was envisaged in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s.

It is an important distinction because certainly 5,000+ nukes going off all over the place is the nightmare of all nightmares. That said, while the consequences of such a thing happening are inconceivably hideous, I still feel (felt) the chances of such a thing occuring to be remote. No matter how mad the US or the USSR got they both new that nukes nowhere approached a solution. Such things were to be used only in the final defense of their own nations and neither country was dumb enough to try and fight directly. The Cold War was fought via proxy in other countries in part due to this.

On the other hand I believe there is a good chance we will all see a nuke detonated in anger in the next 50 years. Worldwide nuclear holocaust is the bottom line in destruction but don’t discount the destruction of just one bomb in the wrong place. One suitcase nuke in New York will instantly be the worse one day loss of life in human HISTORY. Roughly 6,000,000* people go poof. It’d make Nagasaki and Hiroshima seem like fond memories. Do not belittle the horror of such a thing happening simply because it’s a lesser evil than a worldwide exchange that whacks 1,000,000,000 in one go.

Besides, living in Chicago makes the prospect of being a target for a terrorist nuke more than a possibility in the abstract for me. Certainly New York, Washington D.C. and perhaps L.A. may be more tempting targets but that still leaves Chicago 4th on the list. Indeed, in some ways I feel Chicago getting nuked might edge up a terrorists list just because it seems like the ‘heart’ of the country compared to New York’s/Washington’s brain. You also get a nuclear fallout cloud spreading damage between Chicago and the Atlantic Ocean for added effect as opposed to just floating out to see in New York.

Do I lose sleep over this? Nope. I only pray that if it happens in the city I’m living in that I’m standing within a few hundred yards of the bomb so I don’t know what hit me (assuming I have to be in the city at all…definitely my first choice would be to be FAR away and upwind of the bomb).

(*-The 6,000,000 number is a WAG. It depends on the size of the bomb, if it’s detonated during business hours in Manhattan, etc. Suffice it to say it’d be a helluva lot of people.)

9

I’m a gen-X’er. I don’t think that nuclear holocaust is very likely anymore, but I’d say that in today’s climate, it’s almost a certainty that there will be at least one nuclear detonation within my lifetime. All of those Asian countries with the bomb scare me. I can easily see India and Pakistan lobbing their nukes in a border skirmish, and China has openly promised to use nuclear weapons in any conquest of Taiwan. A nuclear war between the US and China wouldn’t be the end of the world, but the Chinese could probably hit several of the US’s major cities. After Tienamen(sp?) Square, I have no doubt that the Chinese wouldn’t hesitate to aim nukes at the cities with the largest Chinese-american populations. I’m sure they’d hit Hawaii because it’s a major naval center, and of course Washington, DC would be at the top of the list.

10

I was born in 1969, and was an Army brat, so I was always made acutely aware of the nuclear menace, especially when we were stationed in Europe. Nothing, though, has ever made me as absolutely pants-shittingly scared as the recent India/Pakistan flare-ups and the concomitant possibility of somebody lobbing a nuke. Up until that, I think the movie “The Day After” was the most vivid depiction of potential nuclear war for many people of my generation.

11

I think you may be overestimating the danger of terrorist nuclear attacks, particularly in the US. It’s hard enough for large nation-states to get a hold of enough fissionable material and technical know-how to build a bomb, the prospect of a terrorist organization doing so is not terribly likely just yet. People worry a lot about ‘suitcase nukes,’ but the simple fact is that it took the USA, with the world’s largest defense budget, over 50 years to develop the meter-long MIRV warheads you see in the movies (and even those would be pretty hard to get through an airport metal detector). And unlike conventional weapons, which come in widely and continuously variable sizes and destructive capacities, nuclear weapons are only possible in certain ranges. Any terrorist organization would probably be desperately trying to steal a critical mass of plutonium (not an inconsiderable task, considering how much material that is), and would have even more engineering problems trying to design a shaped charge and containment device strong and focussed enough to detonate before it blew itself harmlessly apart. In addition, there is a very real upper limit on the destructive capacity of fission bombs, because only so much radioactive fuel can be made to hold together long enough for fission to occur. Devastating, yes, but hardly enough to kill 6 million in New York, especially with the shock-absorption capability of all those buildings. Although NYC is somewhat denser in population than, say, Nagasaki (the only city ever hit with a plutonium bomb), some of that would be mitigated by the poor positioning of the bomb (likely near the ground, or inside a building, where much of its force would be absorbed) so I’m thinking that no more than a few hundred thousand would die even IF such a nearly impossible device were constructed, and were set off in the worst place imaginable.

Horrible? Yes, especially with many lingering deaths resulting from radiation sickness and later cancers. But not something that’s nearly as likely as ballistic missile warfare between two nations.

That said, I personally was born in '77, and although I was very aware of the possibility of nuclear war (I knew where the nearest fallout shelter was, for instance, and understood that it was unlikely to help in the event of a nuclear war, since my industrial hometown of Cincinnati would probably be high on the list of targets) I never believed that a nuclear war would actually happen, especially with the consequences of nuclear winter laid out in the early 80’s. It was something I knew about, and understood cerebrally, but not a real factor in my daily life, not something that frightened me.

12

One of the most serious, lengthy, frightening, and chilling conversations I’ve ever had was regarding nuclear war, and how/if it would be survived. Not worth going into any/all of the details right now, but we considered it an interesting enough topic to be rather exclusively concerned about it for 48 hours (amazing what you can pull off at college :slight_smile: ).

For the record, we’d managed to convince ourselves that some sort of far reaching nuclear cataclysm was possible, physicists and poly-sci majors among us. Frankly, I dont’ remember details.

But, that aside (and the ocasional shivers when it’s resurrected), it’s not an overwhelming concern in my life. I consider it very likely that there will be some sort of detonation in my life time, but I don’t really expect to be thrust into the middle of a nuclear war. I think there are dozens, if not hundreds, of ways I am more likely to die.

So I gues it IS difficult to understand the rampant fear of nuclear war that some of you guys lived under. I think that the things we’re told we should fear are so numerous and change so often that we can very easily just choose not to be “afraid” of them. Concerned enough to wear sunscreen, perhaps, but not fearful.

13

Well, another GenXer checking in here. I was born in '72, and I certainly remember the fears of nuclear war. I was 12 when “The Day After” was on TV; a few years earlier I had seen “War Games” with my father, and he told me that were there ever to be a nuclear war, he would hope that our family was killed in the first blast so that none of us would have to suffer the agony of surviving such a thing.

Of course, we lived right outside of Washington D.C., so we were target numbero uno were the buttons to be pressed; that may well have colored my perceptions. But I do remember watching Brezhnev’s funeral on TV and later listening to the radio reports of increased tensions as Andropov took over and took a hard line with the US… I really think that anyone who was born before 1977 felt the impending apocalypse as much as any child of the '50’s did.

14

Thanks for all the posts. I have a follow-up question: what do y’all think about how the psyches and outlooks of the various generations were affected by the threat of nuclear war, or lack thereof. Personally, I often feel more in tune with my elders, rather than people just a few years younger than me, and I suspect the Bomb may have something to do with it.

Sua

15

This thread reminded me of the Onion headline in Our Dumb Century: Threat of Nuclear War Over; Bomb Now Safely in the Hands of Countless Tiny Warring Factions.

16

Read some newspapers:

*Source: http://www.cnn.com/US/9911/19/china.spy/index.html *
And then…

*Source: http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/07/19/iran.missile.test/ *

There is little need for a ballistic missile except to carry nuclear/biological/chemical weapons. They are simply too expensive and inaccurate to be worth it to deliver a conventional payload. This particular Iranian missile is said to have a payload of about 1 ton. A 2,000 lbs. bomb, while damaging, just isn’t going to get the job done when placed on a ballistic missile unless you fire hundreds of them.
And then…(emphasis added by me)

*Source: http://www.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/06/05/curbing.terrorism.02/index.html *

So, tell me again how terrorists can’t get nukes?

Why bother going through airport metal detectors? Put it on a cargo ship and detonate it as it enters New York harbor. Unless the CIA or NSA gets wind of it as it’s being shipped that’s it. I believe our government’s intelligence is good but they didn’t see Iraq preparing to attack Kuwait and that was moving armor divisions around. Why should it be a problem to pack a nuke in a crate, drive it to the docks and load it on a ship with no one being the wiser?

Finally, while 6,000,000 people may be an overestimate I did say it was a WAG on my part. In the end the devastation would be stupendous even from a low-yeild ground burst nuke.

While I don’t think you should go bury yourself in your backyard just yet I think there is legitimate reson for concern.

17

As posted, this thread belongs in IMHO. But it seems to be taking a GQ or perhaps GD twist to it. I’m gonna leave it here for a while and see what happens.

18

Minor nit: there already has been a nuclear detonation. At least two, in fact; remember all that ruckus with India and Pakistan?

19

born in '75 which puts me just on the x/y cusp, I believe (with Virgo rising). I, too, only vaguely recall anything before Gorbechev… I’m going to go out on a limb and agree with a previous poster that AIDS is my generation’s Bomb. It was very formative thing in my 12-18 yearold period.

20

Suitcase nukes are nothing. How about this: Some group of zealots buys a Cessna. Off the shelf (no underhanded deals yet). Any reasonably rich person can buy his own. That same group manages to buy an unspecified amount of nuclear warhead(s) small enough to be carried one to a Cessna. BTW, this group has no qualms about killing its own members (nothing new there) or blowing its own profits (it just knocked over a few third-world nations). Here’s the evil part: The group puts a warhead on a Cessna and takes out San Francisco. Horrible bomb, terrible loss of life, etc. You, as a president, have no idea exactly who is doing this or, more importantly, how many times they can keep doing this. The act of flying over a large city is not illegal. The act of owning a Cessna is not illegal. The act of owning a warhead is very illegal, but this group can keep secrets. You just recieved some e-mail, e-mail routed through so many intermediary servers as to be untraceable, that says New York will be next unless you pull all soldiers out of various hotspots worldwide, giving the signal to other terrorist groups that the Big Boy is making deals. Last note: Don’t think you can trace this group. Their intelligence group is at least as good as yours is. Tracing them is an act of war that will be punished. What, exactly, do you do?