I was born prior to 1960 and I was worried about nuclear war.
I was born prior to 1960 and I was never worried about nuclear war.
I was born between 1960 and 1970 and I was worried about nuclear war.
I was born between 1960 and 1970 and I was never worried about nuclear war.
I was born between 1970 and 1975 and I was worried about nuclear war
I was born between 1970 and 1975 and I was never worried about nuclear war
I was born between 1975 and 1980 and I was worried about nuclear war
I was born between 1975 and 1980 and I was never worried about nuclear war
I was born after 1980 and I was worried about nuclear war
I was born after 1980 and I was never worried about nuclear war
0voters
Inspired by this post, did you grow up during the Cold War? If so, did you fear nuclear attack? Not intellectually, but did you have any emotional reaction to the threat of nuclear war?
Is anyone not afraid of nuclear war now? Last I checked, global stockpiles have not been eliminated.
The Cold War may have spurred development, but the world has not gotten more peaceful, nor is that always a direct factor in some scenarios like “accidental” nuclear war.
Born in 1968. I remember my first “air raid drills” in kindergarten, and picturing scenes from Pearl Harbor, because that was my idea of what an “air raid” was. I though the Fallout Shelter signs on the school meant that pilots would be parachuting out of their planes and taking shelter with us. As I got older, I learned what those things really meant. I entered high school terrified of nuclear war, such that one afternoon in the 80s when I saw the sun’s reflection on the Mir space station I was convinced that missiles were incoming. When I graduated and joined the Navy I chose my specialty (Russian linguist) specifically because I was convinced nuclear war was inevitable and I wanted to do whatever I could to prevent it.
I remain convinced it is inevitable, but I think the likelihood of a cataclysmic nuclear war is significantly lower than it was when the threat of such an event was probably what kept it from happening. As such, use of nuclear weapons is probably even more likely to happen, but probably not on the scale we once feared.
Possibly thanks to the way it was treated in movies and TV shows, the prospect of nuclear war never seemed quite real to me. Even during the Cuban missile crisis, for which I was 13 years old, I was curious what would happen next, but I didn’t expect the sirens and panic of actual attack.
On the other hand, I was also somewhat fatalistic – if there’s a nuclear war, I’ll be dead, so there won’t be anything to worry about. I lived in the middle of Portland, Oregon, which was surely at least a secondary target city, and sure to be annihilated. Intellectually at least, I was much more afraid of surviving and trying to live in the aftermath.
Born in 1970 (so as Gen-X as Gen-X can be). There were no of those silly drills where we had to hide under our desks. But the threat of nuclear war was ever present with Reagan in Washington. The movie The Day After sure as hell didn’t help.
“Never worried” covers too much ground. Did I live in constant fear? Not a bit. Did I think we were two minutes from midnight (the hand that threatened doom) and could all die in an instant? No. Did movies like On The Beach upset me? You bet! But so did Soylent Green.
Did I think it was possible? Yes. But I trusted cooler heads. Maybe I was naive. But here we are, as of now, unnuked.
And we never had drills or duck and cover. Probably by then the adults figured 1) you can’t hide from an H-bomb, and 2) no one was going to nuke Wautoma, Wi (pop. ~2000) anyway.
I was FAR more scared of having to go to Viet Nam. I mean, really worried. I was 12 when the war ended.
I was born in 1958 and did duck and cover drills throughout elementary school. Then the US government sort of lost interest in nuclear defense despite effectively nothing being done that reduced the actual threat from what it had been in 1958 or 1963. They changed the subject because it was uncomfortable to talk about.
Did I worry about it? No; worry is not something I do hardly at all about anything. I don’t worry about current US politics or AGW. In each case IMO we’re going to screw the pooch thoroughly and I can make only teeny tiny adjustments to best react to that. But will I worry about any of that? No. Worry is a defective unhelpful reaction to any situation, minor or major.
And this:
A war involving nukes someday somewhere involving somebody is IMO statistically inevitable. The US / Soviet comprehensive wargasm we all feared in 1963 or 1973 is somewhat less likely than it was then. And is probably one of the less-likely scenarios today. But would still sucketh greatly if it did happen.
FTR: I did not vote because I think the OP’s definition of “worry about” is probably very different from my own.
So what are you thinking? Iran attacks Tel-Aviv and then? Israel blasts the country into memory? Or maybe North Korea attacks Anchorage, to the same result (only the US and not Israel)? A missing Soviet nuke winds up in the hands of a terrorist cell and they detonate it in a Western city?
I’m not being snarky or picking a fight. I’m genuinely curious how you think this will play out.
I still fear it, then, both because of the (sky-high) risk of nuclear escalation, and, even if that does not happen, the normalization of someone, somewhere, tossing a couple of hundred kilotons at a target whenever they feel like it.
There are so many possible, and even war-gamed, scenarios. Also, maybe it is the US launching first… historically, that has been the case, the Soviets certainly worried about it during the Cold War, and I do not see that the risk of that has diminished.
Before 1960. . .hell, before 1950. . .and don’t ever recall being worried about nuclear war. We never did the drills in school, either. Living in Alaska, I think we just felt removed from all of that somehow.
I know someone whose school had an engineer from a nuclear sub come and give a talk and answer questions. Not to scare the bejeezus out of the kids, nor to overtly try and recruit them all into the Navy, but it was just presented as a Career Day neutral type of thing, apparently.
That’s an interesting subtlety I didn’t pick up on. I think I was responding mostly to the question in the title, which used the word ‘afraid’. Worry and Fear are indeed different concepts for me. Worrying about something means constantly thinking about it and Fear is the emotion you feel when you do think about it. I absolutely was afraid, but I didn’t constantly think about it unless prompted to. So worry, not so much. I’ll leave my vote intact though, because that’s what I think the OP meant.
I voted “worry,” but it was more like “always vaguely aware in the background that this was a possibility, and that I was in a city that would be nuked if such a war started.” It was really too big and abstract to worry about, though: it’s more or less exactly how I worried about earthquakes. Smaller incidents made me think about it, but mostly it was so far beyond my control that there was nothing to be done.
I don’t worry about modern “nuclear war”, because if it happens, it’s going to be limited. I think the days of 3000 nukes flying overhead is gone. Limited nuclear war isn’t good, but to the extent I was worried, I was worried about ending civilization.
What I do honestly worry about is one day, we’ll wake up, and NYC will have been nuked by a terrorist. One-and-done. And no one will know for sure who, and no one will know how to respond. The damage done to modern civilization by one rogue nuke will dwarf 911. One can only imagine how bad.
I remember one time when I was a kid, that there was some crisis or another (not one of the big ones like the Cuban Missile Crisis, because the timing was wrong, but d’you think I understood that?) that made the news, and I went to bed that night genuinely unsure of whether I would wake up the next morning. So yes, I was afraid.