1968er here. I have voted in the poll, but haven’t read the thread yet. I lived (and still do) in close approximation of the infamous Fulda Gap, the place where WW III was expected to start and all the early nukes would fly to. Every day, very low flying Nato jets crossed our skies, and kilometers long military convoys passing through my tiny home town were a regular thing. Yes, I was scared, but I already took it as a child and teenager as I take the still existing nuclear threat today: I’m fatalistic and cynical about it, when it happens I’ll soon be gone, so what to worry about?
Born in the seventies, never worried much about the potential for nuclear war. The Cold War was cold, dammit.
And yes. I recall the Gorbachev years.
The most afraid of nuclear war I’ve ever been was about the first three days after Putin invaded Ukraine.
I didn’t see what would stop him from using nuclear weapons, and I didn’t see how it could be a tactical thing and stop without full on mutual destruction.
And then, well. Living in that level of fear was unsustainable. And over time, I quit worrying about that.
I was sufficiently worried to join a no-nukes group when I was in college the first time, in the early 1980s.
Nowadays, I’m more worried about a rogue state or terrorist group getting a warhead and setting it off, a la this. I never saw it until it landed on YouTube, and TBH, it’s also not broadcasted in real time (neither was the radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds).
What I recall is the anti-communist hysteria in the 50s and 60s, compared to which even Brezhnev seems, in retrospect at least, cold potatoes. I think historical perspective has something to say about whether Reagan was an out-of-control cowboy or a pretty straight-line Republican.
Are you suggesting that McCarthy was likely to start a nuclear war? Or that blacklisting was worse than the current ICE concentration camps? I’m not sure where your comparison is trying to go here, but I hardly think it qualifies as apples-to-apples in either case.
I have absolutely no comment on this. I can’t even
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The google suggestions don’t seem applicable.
It’s an honest and direct question. I don’t understand what you expect us to infer.
He was a loon, and not careful at all.
When I was an early teen in the early 80s, I worried about it a bit in the “nagging thing you thought about every few days” level. Once I was a later teen, I realized that the DFW area was going to get pummeled because of its aircraft industry and its two airbases at the time. I figured that any nuclear war for me would probably last about 30 minutes or so. I still live in the same area, so I must not be fearing it that much, but I do think about it.
But. the drills for nuclear war mentioned above are identical to the tornado drills my schools did. Get to the heaviest, most reinforced structural wall you can find furthest to the interior of the building, put your head down and your ass up. I suspect that the local school staff wisely realized that a tornado was probably more likely to happen than nuclear war, and so they decided to train us for that. If nuclear war happened, just pretend it’s a tornado. If nothing else, the preparation is going to be the same.
And yeah, that’s kind of how I feel about nuclear war these days, like I do tornadoes. It’s going to be terrible to be in one but the odds of you getting struck are generally pretty low. One is low because the effect is in a narrow area, the other is low because a general exchange is still pretty unlikely to happen at the moment (in my estimation). Try to know where it would be safest to go in the event of one at home and at work, other than that it’s kind of a crapshoot.
I was born in 1963, and I considered it a near certainty nuclear annihilation would occur before the end of the century. I was also pretty certain the cause would be something completely unintended by either side. I didn’t “worry” about it because there was nothing I could do about it. It wasn’t until the 1990s I actually started listening to advise about how to plan for retirement; before that, it seemed pretty pointless.
Born in late 50s in regional Australia so at the time the concept of missiles targeting us was fanciful. No duck and cover drills for us. Even now the estimates of range for silo based missile launches are “capable of reaching northern Australia” which puts a couple of thousand miles between us.
It’s only recently that anything other than US nuclear armed submarines have been cruising our offshore economic zone and I presume we are not yet on 45/47s bomb or extort listing.
Don’t know how worried my parents were about to being collateral damage from the Cuban Crisis
The difference is that, if the problem is a tornado, that technique might actually help.
Ehh, even in a nuclear blast, it’s (at least for the moment) better than stripping naked and running outside.
In my current house, the bottom level is underground, bordered on the west by earth for at least a quarter mile. That’s conveniently the direction where the aforementioned aircraft factories, missile and fire control, and the remaining air base are all located. I’m getting in the steel bathtub in the lower level in the event of either nuclear war or a tornado. It might buy me a few days.
I checked that I worried, because there was no “worried a little bit, but mostly didn’t think of it,” option. I did two types of air raid drills in school (based on how much warning we got, I believe) and heard over and over on TV, "Khrushchev says, “we will bury you.” So the Soviet Union was a bogeyman, for sure. But at 4 or 5 I had more important fears, like the (actually quite gentle) dog next door or having to eat scrambled eggs.
I was born in 1957, and got to participate in a few “Duck and Cover” exercises in grade school in Bremerton. I didn’t get reccuring nuclear nightmares until right after I left the USAF in 1980, mainly because of a couple of incidents involving nukes being loaded onto B-52s. We lived on the bay in Bremerton down the street from the Bremerton-Seattle ferry, and I would dream that it was around noonish, I was staring out of the big picture window that faced out in the general direction of Seattle, when there was a flash of light and a large wave of light, heat and death rushed towards me.
Had this dream a few times, usually with a few small variations…but aways the same finale.
What a time for a variation of this to pop up on my Facebook wall:
Living close to the Inner German Border through a lot of that period, we were told not to worry. If it kicked off there would be a big bright flash and we would take no further part in the proceedings…
Rule of 7’s for decay of radioactivity - after 7 hours, the radiation will have decreased to 1/10th its initial level, after 7x7 hours it will be down to 1/100th, and after 7x7x7 hours (about 2 weeks) it will be down to about 1/1000th.
So that’s a rough guide as you’re hiding in your fallout hole. Don’t go outdoors in the first 7 hours after the attack, in the next 1-2 days continue to stay in unless it’s a life-or-death emergency, and it’s fairly safe after 2 weeks or so.
page 23 in this doc for the curious.
It’s a documented fact from journalism at the time. Reagan was uniquely reckless at a particularly dangerous point in human history. The primary sources are in the open if you care to educate yourself.
Maybe the most chilling thing is actually his conscious pivot. He watched The Day After and had a “holy shit, this is real” moment and changed his approach. But not until after he’d done a lot of military saber-rattling and held a major provocative NATO-wide military exercise during the most dangerous point in the Cold War regarding an accidental launch-on-warning attack (Cuban Missile Crisis doesn’t count, that was intentional). And even though we were all anxious and felt it was close, it was actually much, much closer than anyone outside Russia knew at the time.
That is the historical perspective. It’s actually worse than we knew. At the time, nobody in the West knew of the Stanislav Petrov event, or the Soviet’s internal reaction to Able Archer '83.
So Reagan was clearly playing with fire in ways he didn’t fully grasp until he watched a movie about it. A movie. Not to diminish the very useful movie, but a POTUS had the resources to have informed himself a little better, and should’ve done so before messing around and shooting his fool mouth off.
Also, Reagan was heavily influenced by “Rapture” believers, who actively wanted a nuclear war because they thought they’d be Raptured into Heaven while the rest of use burned and tried pushing Reagan into starting one. He used to talk in very Apocalyptic terms, like comparing Russian and China to “Gog and Magog” from the Book of Revelations. I recall it coming out after the collapse of the USSR that the election of Reagan caused the Politburo to seriously debate launching a nuclear first strike, because they genuinely feared Reagan might burn civilization down for Jesus.
I think that there’s an excellent chance that Gorbachev saved the world from a nuclear exchange between the US and USSR.