I said afraid, but I was only slightly afraid. I’m old enough to have known what was going on during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Movies and TV were full of after the war scenarios, as were a lot of sf books I read, where the people lived in a post-war environment. (For instance Andre Norton’s “Star Main’s Son.”
By nuclear war I mean one that sets civilization back hundreds or thousands of years. World War II was a nuclear war in the strict sense. Two countries heaving a few bombs at each other is not going to affect the world much in the long run, except maybe to lead to even more disarmament.
We’re a lot more likely to kill ourselves off with coal than with the bomb.
…I don’t get it. Let’s say that, say, India and Pakistan do “heave a few bombs at each other”. What happens after that? If other nations respond by taking sides, it quickly becomes a World War. And if other nations don’t respond by taking sides, then everyone else with nukes will get the message that it’s OK for them to start heaving them, too, and instead of one big war, we get fifty small ones. But either way, inevitably, everyone gets involved.
I don’t see the US, Russia or China starting to hurl bombs at one another because India and Pakistan did. Once the level of destruction became clear, they would probably both be treated as pariahs.
One big reason we were scared of a war back in the '50s and '60s is that we saw what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was a lot more impactful than movies of fake villages in Nevada getting blown up. I suspect most people today haven’t internalized the effect of a war as much as we did 65 years ago.
It was always somewhere in the back of my head: we may not have any future. That sense probably affected — and may still affect — some of my decisions, if not always consciously. But I didn’t go around in terror about it all the time.
Spending one’s whole life half expecting The End Of Civilization As We Know It (for that or several other possible reasons) isn’t the same thing as expecting, that whole time, that Oh Shit This Is The Moment. You kind of get in the habit of thinking that this probably isn’t the moment. But the back of the head sense remains.
I was in grade school during the ‘50’s. We didn’t hide under our desks. We went out into the hallway, lined up facing the wall, and crouched down with our arms over our heads. I think I remember that it was supposed to matter which wall, but if so I don’t remember which was the right wall or the reason given. I think I was under the vague impression that if you were in just the right position next to the right wall, then if the school fell down around you, you’d be protected by the wall. It seemed to make sense at the time, when I was about six.
I was born in the mid-70s, and thus my growing up period was the 80s - while it was almost certainly due to the media / movies / etc. I just kind of assumed it was going to happen most of my formative years - and that it would be horrible, where being dead seemed better than living through it.
Most of those years were spent living close to high value targets, so I assumed I’d be gone in a flash though - so I didn’t dwell on it much. Playing TT-RPGs like Twilight 2000 didn’t help though.
I’m still worried about it, but for different reasons. I assumed during the 80s we’d all be dead in some MAD pact after something escalated a bit too far. These days, I worry that various autocrats who feel personally slighted or at risk will launch a strike with everything they can access and their toadies --won’t-- stop them.
We may avoid a MAD level exchange, but even a few dozen to a few hundred is going to likely wreck the world’s ability to transport goods, harvests, and lead into an increasing spiral of conflict with the possible use of additional nukes.
Born 1947, and as has been mentioned above it was more background noise than an active concern (the most obvious sign was the weekly air raid siren test). The only time it seemed “real” was during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962: I was in a Catholic high school, and after the embargo was announced classes were suspended in favor of meditation and opportunities to go to Confession. Just in case.
I was a pre-teen in the early 80’s when there was a lot of era-specific anxiety. I wasn’t around in the 50’s or 60’s so I’m not sure how it was then, but in the 1982-1984 era there was a lot of cultural awareness. The Day After came out right around then, there was also Red Dawn and also WarGames. It was in a lot of the sci-fi books, both new ones and stuff I’d inherited from my cousin’s attics. Not to mention the bonkers stuff Reagan was shooting his mouth off about.
I don’t know if I was afraid of it per se. It seemed like an inevitability, so why worry. The old cliche rang true, “if it’s going to happen, please let it happen before the Algebra test.” Wherever I was, I maintained awareness of the heading of the biggest target around (the international airport), and how I might walk home if needed. That’s a habit I never really dropped. I know the rule of 7’s, I’m not a prepper but I have rudimentary contingencuy plans in mind.
Lots of people tell me that’s crazy, that I was an overly anxious kid, that the powers-that-be would never permit such a thing to happen. But literally right at the time I was at my peak anxiety, the Stanislav Petrov event occurred, and right after that Able Archer 83 happened.
It really was that close. Reagan really was an off-the-rails cowboy. We weren’t nuts, it could’ve happened at any moment, and it almost did. It still could.
The hair-trigger MAD situation is unlikely to unfold, but I still think it’s inevitable that a set of unstable regional powers will trade paint at some point, and nobody can say what would happen after. There are lots of reasons that could happen, and no reason we can confidently say it won’t. Neither the US nor Russia wants to take that gamble, but there are a number of current and future nuclear powers that aren’t so reliable.
I have no memory of this. I was in my 30s in this period. I didn’t like Reagan but I don’t remember him rattling sabers or anything like that. Would you care to refresh my memory?
No, it doesn’t go straight from India and Pakistan nuking each other to Russia and the US nuking each other. There are intermediate steps. Like, after India and Pakistan nuke each other and nobody else in the world takes action, then Russia nukes Kyiv, and North Korea nukes Seoul. They’ll become pariah states? So what, they are already. So, what happens after that?
I worried during the Cold War, and I’m even more worried now.
I had a brief period of respite in the early ‘90s when the USSR collapsed and Russia contemplated joining NATO. I naively thought that the risk of nuclear war would diminish along with the nuclear stockpiles.
Instead, Putin morphed into an authoritarian nutcase, and I have no confidence in the wisdom and judgement of the current Trump administration.
I’m still worried about the end of civilization. Both the U.S. and Russia still have a launch-on-warning posture. Due to a computer glitch or misunderstanding, either side could still initiate a massive attack which would result in the other side responding in kind. Civilization as we know it could end 30 minutes from now, with tens of millions dead in the short term (hours to days), and billions dead in the coming months—mostly due to the ensuing famine. We have a sword of Damocles hanging over our collective heads right now.
My biggest fear regarding nukes (which in the grand scheme of things is still pretty far down on my list of what I’m actually afraid of) is that Russia experiences a sudden collapse due to the economic problems they are having as a result of the Ukraine war. After that their nukes could get scattered to who knows where. Even one or two set off in a major city would be enough to alter our entire way of life.
In terms of the classic US vs. Russia, that’s even further down on my list. Given the way things stand between the US and Russia, I think the US is pretty far down on the list of potential targets. Should Putin go fully bonkers, most likely Kyiv would get hit first, and after that the list would likely be the major cities in European countries without their own nukes (Berlin, Warsaw, Madrid, etc.) and then possibly after that London or Paris. Of course even one of those getting nuked would cause massive changes for the worse for pretty much everyone on the planet.
As far as back during my youth in the Cold War (for me that was during the Reagan years), it just wasn’t on my list of things to be scared about.
I attended a kind of youth club at my Episcopal Church in Wisconsin, in the 1970s.
When we talked about the Meek inheriting the Earth, I pointed out that a radioactive husk was not worth inheriting, and about 80% of the class were on board with that.
Born in 1948. Went to elementary/high school from 1954 to 1966. During several of those years we lived on military bases. Yeah, I was afraid of nuclear war and especially the aftermath.
Like @OttoDaFe I was 14 and in a Catholic high school during the Cuban missile crisis and I was terrified. Don’t remember if we were offered the opportunity for Confession…
I was born in the early 50’s and went to catholic school . My 2nd grade teacher explained that "
“godless russia” was certainly going to confront our country and we would have to choose our faith or become communists. The exact quote was:..“Just as your parents fought fascism. YOU will have to confront godless russia” Sister tarcisia (sp?) I believe. My repsonse was to ask for a BB gun,…I wanted to have something to defend myself with
There are no words to describe how terrified I was of nuclear war as a kid in the 1980s (growing up next to the main American nuclear weapons base in the UK didn’t help)
Elder GenX here. Lived most of my life in the Washington, DC suburbs. The first time I can recall being aware of the subject I was four years old. My Dad was stationed at the Pentagon, and he bought me a hotdog in the courtyard canteen. Unwisely, he explained to me why it was called the “Ground Zero Bar” by the workers there.
I have always known that if the bombs come they are coming to my neighborhood. That has driven a deep awareness of foreign policy and world politics. There have been days when I didn’t think of it, but probably never more than ten or fifteen in a row.
I saw a neighborhood get destroyed in the 1957 Dallas tornado, and my school’s nuclear attack drills were basically the same as the tornado drills, so I had a kid’s concept that a nuclear attack would be a really bad thing.
But it wasn’t until the Cuban Missile Crisis, when my father saw an Army convoy rolling down U.S. 67 in Arkansas and came home white as a sheet that the adults were terrified of what could happen.
Born in '54 and the cold war didn’t even register for me. I suppose we must have had some kind of “duck and cover” drill in school but I don’t remember one. The only cold war-related memory I have is one of our neighbors had basement bomb shelter and one year at Halloween he decorated it with spooky stuff as sort of a haunted house for trick or treaters.
If you want an exhaustive list there’s Google, but some bullets:
Aggressive expansion of nuclear missile deployments in Germany
Big spending on new bomber and missile programs
The SDI “Star Wars” boondoggle which was a highly provocative waste of money
Boneheaded mic-check joke about “We’re going to begin bombing the Soviet Union in 5 minutes”
Pursuing Able Archer '83 at a time of maximum nuclear tension, making the Soviets fear a first strike might have been underway
Giving the famous “The USSR is an Evil Empire” speech
There’s more to it. Some like to say there’s a method in the madness, and Reagan’s posture made the Soviets spend themselves into an unrecoverable hole, but a careful reading of history shows that the collapse of the USSR was more likely triggered by Reagan’s later pivot to diplomacy that lured Gorbachev into taking on too much economic and political reform, too fast for the USSR to digest safely. But really it was a rotting hulk that was bound for collapse independent of what any other country was doing at the time (other than Afghanistan I mean).
I was in high school and I certainly do. I was dating the son of his private secretary and met him a few times. He was alternately confused and hardline when it came to Soviet Union discussions.
