Well, not exactly. Should either the US or Soviet missiles somehow fail in flight, or hit each other in the sky, guess where they would have landed? In addition, when you consider how far southern Ontario extends into the US, then if you were a Canadian living in that part of the coutry, you certainly worried. Sure, the nukes would hit the USA, but it was only a few miles away, as the crow–or the fallout-laden wind–flies. We were all convinced Toronto was a target anyway; it was home to companies that made such things as guidance systems for US ICBM and cruise missiles.
Additionally, in the early 1980s, the Canadian government gave the US government and weapons manufacturers permission to test cruise missiles in northern Alberta. The land there approximated the geography and conditions low-flying cruise missiles would have to deal with as they flew over the USSR. This testing worried a great many people in Canada, since in their minds, it made us not neutral and thus a target.
I was very small during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but both it and the escalation of the early 1980s had many people in southern Ontario quite worried, and feeling helpless. In the 1980s, anyway, there seemed to be anti-nuclear demonstrations and protests at least weekly (including die-ins on Hiroshima Day, when all of Toronto awoke to silhouettes painted on walls and sidewalks). No, the fear was real in Canada, probably because the danger was too. Like it or not, the US and Canada were tied at the hip in the cold war, and there was no way Canada could have maintained a “we’re not involved so we should be safe” mentality.
It is important to remember also that the early-warning systems for the United States’ defense were based in Canada. Both the DEW line and the Mid-Canada Line were constructed in the late 1950s and designed to detect Soviet bombers coming in over the North Pole. Wikipedia gives a good (if brief) overview of these lines and their place in North American air defense here. The sites went through a few changes over the years, but a number were still operational in the 1980s, and their presence and role in providing the US with information on Soviet air activity in the north made Canada a target.
I was definitely worried about it, but never lost sleep over it. In first or second grade, the morning after the first thunderstorm I’d experienced (thunderstorms being quite rare in the SF area- I think I’ve seen 3 there in 30 years) one of my classmates was had thought it was the Russians bombing us. Of course, Alameda, being home to at least one air craft carrier, and in the middle of a very strategic area, was supposedly in the top five on the list of targets, so we probably wouldn’t have known- just poofed.
Born in 1967. I wish I’d never seen the miniseries “The Day After.” It seriously bothered me, and I felt quite worried about the possibilities. I used to turn over possibilities in my mind, like say I was safe in a shelter but a family member or friend was on the outside, desperate to get in. I couldn’t let them in; I couldn’t even choose to leave the shelter to go out to die together, as just opening the door could doom everyone in the shelter. I devised endless variations on this kind of soul-torturing dilemma.
I also felt hopeless about the Cold War ever ending in anything but disaster.
The DEW line (which was essentially obsolete from the Mid-Sixties onward) was eventually merged into the North Warning System for ballistic missiles in polar trajectories.
Canada was a “full” partner in NORAD (full in the sense of sharing responsibility, though the United States pretty much called the shots), and although it’s not as well publicized as the Cheyenne Operations Center in Colorado, there was a second underground command station in Ontario. Although American ICBMs were never based in Canada (although there was, prior to deployment of the long range Minuteman II, discussion of doing so) there were at least a couple of SAGE sites in Canada, and of course BOMARC nuclear-tipped bomber interceptor missiles were based in Canada through the Sixties, the debate about which lead to the collapse of the Progressive Conservative government and rise of the Liberals.
In short, the US and Canada were joined at the hip when it came to nuclear strategy, and Canada would have suffered some significant losses in a nuclear exchange.
You have got to be kidding here. The Falklands Conflict was a minor note to both the US and the USSR, neither of whom had any interest whatsoever in Argentina at that point. (Reagan was disdainfully bemused by the fight over a small, cold island in the South Atlantic.) And if anything, the Falklands Conflict illustrated serious problems with British, and by extension, U.S. naval doctrine of the time. In any extended conflict in the European theatre the U.S. logistical command would have had its ass handed to it by the Soviets and their extensive submarine and surface attack capabilities, even as they incurred heavy losses. The Falklands Conflict had about the same impact on Soviet policy as the invasion of Grenada; that is to say, practically nil.
I’m not really clear on where you get the notion of the “invincibility of the Red Army,” either. The numerical superiority of Soviet forces in Europe was certainly acknowledged (and generally exaggerated) but NATO considered them far from invincible, and in a conventional shooting conflict it was generally assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that the NATO forces would win air superiority, and thus overall control of the European theatre. (In the Middle East it was somewhat a different story.) NATO armies also had a better command and control structure, while the Soviets instisted on centralized control that likely would have crippled their theatre operations. The Red Army certainly had a lot of “successes” in putting down insurrections like the Hungarian Uprising and Prague Spring, but this was tanks against protesters. And for all the damage that the invasion of Afghanistan did to both international reputation of the Soviets and their own internal morale, nobody assumed that a European conflict would be anything like the hit-and-run mountain fighting in Afghanistan.
The Soviet Union did not collapse because of external factors, though some influences, like the invasion of Afghanistan, economic crises in Warsaw Pact states (specifically the increasingly liberalized Yugoslavia after Broz Tito’s death), “losing” the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Sino-Soviet Rift, certainly contributed to internal instability and loss of external channels and trade. The USSR collapsed because it was a fiscially nonviable system and had been so for decades before 1991, a fact long recognized by the less ideological members of the ruling party, but which would have required redupation of Marxist/Leninist doctrine to fully address. The often reviled Khrushchev attempted progressive market reforms, but following his removal from office the Soviet economy fell into a slump from which it never recovered. Arguments that the early Eighties Western defense infrastructure buildup caused the collapse have a small amount of merit, but the Soviets never really curtailed military spending the way the West did post-Vietnam, so their budgetary collapse had more of the character of a continuing drain rather than a sudden glurge of spending that undercut their economy. The one line item that could be said to have singly devestated their economy was the Buran program, the Soviet space shuttle, on which they spent 4-5 times as much as the United States (with a vastly more extensive test program) and which only flew, unmanned, once.
By and large, though, the Soviet Union came apart because they just couldn’t produce enough domestic goods to keep their economy viable without massive inflow from foreign sources. This had absolutely nothing to do with Margaret Thatcher or the fight over the Falklands Islands.
Less fearful than the seventies. Greatly relieved weeks after the Berlin Wall came down. I still don’t feel anywhere as fearful as the seventies. The world situation will have to get a lot worse for me to get that worried again. I and my school mates expected an explosion any time, and didn’t plan on taking shelter, as it was ridiculous to expect to live after the exchange. Many of the nuclear devastated USA movies were from the 70’s.
This pretty well sums up my experience - born in 1966. I also freaked out over “The Day After” - I was very upset, and cried when talking to my mom about it. I had the same scenarios you did about family being killed as well - it was horrible.
I call it “Generation Cell Phone”, although “Generation Dumb Ass” is gaining ground.
Anyway. . .born in '72. When I outgrew my early fears (like someone releasing snakes into my bedroom at night), I definitely stayed up at night worrying about nuclear war, and worse. . .surviving it. Wandering around without parents, starving and burned.
Oddly, I didn’t fear the Russians. Even young, I figured they didn’t want to end the world any more than we did.
Born in '74. Saw the Nostrodamus thing when I was maybe 7 years old. It scared me awfully - I thought sure I’d never get to be a grownup. Lying in my bed at night, unable to sleep, I’d torment myself with nightmarish death scenarios. That pretty much sums up a large part of my childhood, though, for various reasons. To my mind at that age it was just as likely I might be the antichrist, because I’d seen The Omen and The Exorcist on TV too and gotten the pants scared off me. So, I am thinking that it might well have been free-form anxiety looking for something to latch on to. TV’s great for that.
Yes it was a small scale conflict, but it had a major impact psychologically. For the past 30-odd years, Britain and the West had been in decline - remember that it was only a few years previously that Dennis Healey, the then Chancellor, had to go cap in hand to the IMF, and only a few years before that that America had made its ignominious exit from Vietnam. Britain and the West were at a low. Consider that despite ballooning unemployment, the Conservatives won the next election handily. Maggie stopped the rot.
I was convinced, & so were all my grade school classmates, that a nuclear war was inevitable, & that none of us would live to grow old.
I recall a Sunday School session, in which I asked the Episcopal Minister why God promised that the meek would inherit the Earth, when Earth was going to be a burnt-out radioactive wasteland. Did God have it in for the Meek?
I wasn’t joking. Not in the least. And all my fellow Sunday School students took it just as seriously as I did.
:rolleyes: Bully for Britain, but this had nothing to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was formented by a stagnant economy, unviable industry, imbalance in foreign trade, and increasing political dissent in the “client states” of the Warsaw Pact. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn has more claim on bringing down the Soviet Union than Margaret. Hell, John le Carré probably has a stronger case for impacting Soviet collapse.
You think you young whippersnappers were afraid of nuclear war? Why, when I was your age…
But seriously. I was 8 in 1959. On September 22, at about 10:30 PM, the White Sox won the American League pennant. In celebration, Chicago air raid sirens were sounded. For a few minutes many people thought a nuclear war had started.
Also, I remember watching the TV adaptation of Alas, Babylon. And I remember the Cuban missile crisis.
But I have to admit that what scared me the most was Alas, Babylon. I just wasn’t mature enough to fully realize the import of the real-life events.
I can’t be the only one here who had direct experience with refugees from behind the Iron or Bamboo Curtains, can I? My city was full of Soviet emigres, some Jewish, some intellectuals; one of my teachers had survived a gulag after getting through WWII (his youth sucked). My aunt’s folks were Hungarian refugees from the 40s and she remembered them sheltering compatriots in the basement after they fled from the uprising in '56. My first roommate in college was a 30-year-old woman who’d come over from China after her father had been denounced and she’d been sent to work in the fields instead of high school. Never mind watching the Vietnam War wind down when I was little.
So yeah, I was scared. The Soviets were real and their politics had affected people I knew. If they could do such nasty things to their own people, nice people, hell yeah they’d blast their enemies if they had a chance.
Personally, though, I’d already had the shit scared out of me by the energy crisis and by the time the whole anti-nuke thing started in the early 80s, I was in my mid-teens and had already seen plenty of dire scenarios not happen. I also lived in a place where I’d probably never have known what happened, and by the time ‘The Day After’ aired and we gathered to watch it in my college living room, we were so cynical that we spent the last half rooting for which poorly written character we wanted to die next. But yeah, nuclear winter, etc. etc. was on our minds.
I think we were also the last generation to learn to save ourselves from, as our teachers all called them, “the atomic bombs” by going into the hallways and sitting down (school had no basement or gym. I love NY!)
Born in '64. I ignored the nuclear threat when I was little but became somewhat concerned about it when I was a teen ager. When I was in the 10th grade someone in my school said that there was a list of cities the Russians were going to bomb and ours (Lexington, KY) was number 50. Why it was number 50 and where this kid even got his information was unknown. We were all sure that the people in Eastern Kentucky would survive the war because even the Russians knew not to mess with them.
I had a few nightmares about nuclear war, the most memorable being when I was awakened from a sound sleep by a loud explosion and thought it was the big one. I was surprised when I didn’t evaporate (I was even more surprised to learn that no one else had heard the explosion–I found out years later it was a type of hallucination known as “exploding head syndrome.”)
There was also the time everything started shaking and I thought the Russians had nuked us, but it turned out just to be an earthquake.
Much of my concern disappeared by the late 80’s, but just a couple nights ago I had a nightmare that we’d gotten into a nuclear war with China.
Born in '67 and growing up in the Netherlands, I can’t recall being scared much. I figured that if the Big One dropped, it would be a relatively quick and easy way to go. I was vaguely depressed as a kid, so anything that promised a quick and unshameful death sounded even vaguely attractive.
I can’t be the only one here who had direct experience with refugees from behind the Iron or Bamboo Curtains, can I? My city was full of Soviet emigres, some Jewish, some intellectuals; one of my teachers had survived a gulag after getting through WWII (his youth sucked). My aunt’s folks were Hungarian refugees from the 40s and she remembered them sheltering compatriots in the basement after they fled from the uprising in '56. My first roommate in college was a 30-year-old woman who’d come over from China after her father had been denounced and she’d been sent to work in the fields instead of high school. Never mind watching the Vietnam War wind down when I was little.