I had school friends that were very paranoid about it. Myself, I just couldn’t see it happening. While our governments have been responsible for great acts of stupidity, I just couldn’t fathom them being THAT stupid.
How’s bout you?
As a kid, it scared the bejeezus out of me. Half of me seriously expected there to be nuclear winter before I had the chance to get my driver’s license.
Yeah, I was pretty seriously scared of it.
I was terrified of it and had good reason to be. I lived within reasonable distance of Barksdale AFB in Bossier City, LA. People always said that they had the highest concentration of nukes in the world there and that it was a primary target even above most major cities. I am not sure how people knew but web searches revealed that was correct. Bush was flown there during 9/11 so I assume they have some kind of end of the world facilities.
It is foolish to believe that the nuclear war threat wasn’t real. It came down to the wire at least twice. Most people know about the Bay of Pigs but that turned out to by mere child’s play. In 1983, the year Wargames came out, Soviet early warning systems detected repeated launched of Intercontinental Ballistic Missles from the U.S. into Russia. Systems and procedures dictated that the Colonel in command of the early warning facilty immediately initiate WWIII but he defied all all of that and ordered those under him to stand down and not communicate anything to those outside the facility. He lost his career but saved the world. The systems really were that fragile and solar flares almost ended civilization. ICBM’s coming over the North Pole in both directions can destroy whole countries with less than an hour between start to finish.
I was very scared of it. I have had a few nightmares about it, though the ones I can remember happened years later (just a couple of years ago).
Not much scared of nuclear war at all (born 1966).
In grade school (Reagan years) I was pretty convinced I wouldn’t see 30 (dad was going through a millennarian phase). When they were going through that fast string of new Soviet Premiers I was worried. I think I watched too much CNN for a 4th grader.
I don’t think I would be either if I was Canadian. You could just sit back and watch the fireworks going south over the North Pole knowing tomorrow that you would be the new big kid on the block.
My best friend and I got geared up to watch Star Wars on TV. We were young and didn’t realize that NBC probably wasn’t going to show the actual Star Wars movie with Han Solo and Chewy.
It was the Reagan address. We were scared to death after that. Later, it just kind of faded away.
I would not go as far as to say scared. I would say I fully expected it to happen before I was 40. I am 40 now and I am happy to say I was wrong. I saw tensions as being high, America appeared to be in a sharp decline pre-Reagan with the Fiasco that was Vietnam by both Johnson & Nixon, all of the Watergate embarrassment and Carter’s general ineptness as President. The gas shortages and NYC being bankrupt along with the sharp decline in many of our cities made me fear the something would end MAD and cause the Mutually assured destruction to actually happen.
I found the world much scarier in the late 70s and early 80s than currently. I really felt Nuclear war would happen then. I joined the Navy shortly after I graduated as I took hope in Reagan’s build up.
Jim
For some reason, I have the opposite memory. As a child of the 1980s, I remember Gorbachev being a sensible man who was promoting Perostroika and Glasnost. It never occurred to me that he would be a madman bent on world domination.
And Ronnie Reagan was the calm, fearless leader who had things under control (so naive I was!)
Granted, I was a kid (born in '78)! It’s not that these were sensible feelings, but how I remember feeling.
I can remember being pretty terrified from about 1982-83 (2nd grade) through about 5th-6th grade, at which point, I read some books on the Soviet Union and on their military, and realized that in all likelihood, the Russians were as scared of us as we were of them, or possibly even more so, considering their WWII experiences.
After that, I realized that neither side actively wanted war, and that the only thing that was going to cause a war was something stupid on one side or another, or some kind of accident.
I wasn’t particularly worried through middle school or high school, and the Soviet Union collapsed during my first semester in college, so that was that.
I, too, was born in 1978. I don’t have any memories of thinking about the possibility of nuclear-assisted death from Russia. Certainly never a fear. There were more pressing concerns. I do remember thinking Portland, OR ( I lived in Lake Oswego) was an unlikely target for a first-wave attack, though. Most of what I remember about the topic are post-apocolyptic survival fantasies during play.
I think my parents kept me in the dark when it came to news. I was a kiddie in the 80’s and I never even knew there was a threat of nuclear war.
Although maybe my brother was. He kept up on news even as a little dude. He was also scared of tornadoes.
You just caught the tail end of it. Gorbachev was a blessing and most people saw him as such especially at the end. The scary time was the early 80’s which you probably don’t remember well.
I laugh at young people now that think we are in decline or even headed to end time. Today’s terrorist are also pitiful compared to the threats back in the day. We had to worry about all of civilzation ending with almost no notice or the entire U.S. economy collapsing un upon itself and the Japanese waltzing in and buying up most of the country. Today we worry about shoes and Swiss Army knives. It just doesn’t have the same effect to me.
I was not the least bit frightened. I don’t think I knew anyone who was, or admitted it. My brother was helpful enough to explain to me when I was five that our proximity to an arms depot that everyone knew housed nuclear weapons guaranteed that we would killed instantly on the first strike. At that point, I really quit worrying about it. The Cold War had been going on for so long, by the time I was old enough to work out the likelihood of an attack, that I just couldn’t see it happening. If it was going to happen, it would have in '61.
I was concerned, to the point that I wouldn’t have voluntarily brought a child into the world during that time.
I grew up close enough to Rocky Flats that we probably would have been vaporized instantly, which was a great comfort to me, and still remember watching The Day After with the family.
Born '68
I was bonr in seventy five. AS a child, I was terrified of nuclear war. It meant all kinds of horrid things. My dad reassured me that living only eighteen miles from the White House, we’d be killed in the first strike and not have to worry about the aftermath. When I was old enough to understand Mutually Assured Destruction, I stopped worrying.
Born in '76.
I was terrified of nuclear war with Russia when I was a young child. I was also convinced I was going to die of cancer and/or AIDS, so that shows you how irrational a fear it was. 
That reminds me–one night my older cousin was babysitting, and there was a made for TV movie on where there’s a nuclear attack on all the major US cities. In the movie, Boston gets hit, and my cousin said “Well, we’d be dead!”
I lived in dread fear of living near Boston for a long time after that.