One for Cold War Dopers. When you were growing up, if the hammer had fallen and all out nuclear war occurred between the USA and USSR, on a scale of dying to dead how fucked would you be? Were you living next to a Minuteman silos, or were you far from where the strikes would have been?
I lived near the Navy Base in a Chicago suburb. I don’t know that it was used for much, but planes would come and go and servicemen lived there, so between the base and the city, I think my school desk that I was crouching under wouldn’t have protected me much.
From the map of likely Soviet warhead targets found here on page 4 (warning, pdf) it looks like Chicago is in some serious shit.
I grew up dead east of San Francisco, on the eastern side of the Berkeley hills, so if they nuked SF, the fallout would probably have been a problem. About five miles as the mushroom cloud flies from where they kept the nuclear wessels.
I voted not sure, wind-dependent. I’m in Cleveland, which might be downwind from Detroit depending on the prevailing winds. And Detroit is utterly f*cked. That’s the one city they they always used for those blast/fallout scenario maps back in the day, so you knew that if the hammer dropped, they were going to get it, and get it good.
I lived between NAS JAX, Mayport Naval Station, Camp Blanding, an Air Force Base (now closed) whose name escapes me, someplace with Marine training facilities, and the nuclear sub base Kings Bay Naval Station.
Also, Florida has Naval/Air Force bases all over because of its huge coastline.
Maybe I should’ve picked the deader-than-dead-dead option.
I don’t remember worrying much during the Cold War Era, but 9/11 was scary. Probably due to age difference.
I grew up near a major SAC base which was very high on the target list.
Probably depended on when; if I was visiting my grandparents, dead as a doornail, considering that both sets lived within a few miles of the Texas City port, refinery and chemical plant complex (which would almost certainly be a target)
At home? Probably not- I grew up 15 miles or so west of downtown Houston, and until probably 1984 or so, we were some of the farthest suburbs out. I can’t think of any potential targets nearby either.
According to this site:
I’d need something a hair larger than a 3.3 megaton nuke on downtown Houston to actually cause 3rd degree burns at my parents’ house when we were growing up.
Vaporized. We lived just a couple of miles from Norton AFB, March AFB and the Fontana rail yards. At the height of the Cold War, Norton was doing ICBM depot support as well as being one of the 6 major MAC bases. March AFB was a SAC base with plenty of B-52s to target.
Poof.
NAS Glenview? Home of the 4th Marine Aircraft Wing - their Reserves. I think the base in particular and Chicago in general would have been on the target list.
I was a Marine brat, Dad was a pilot, so except for the year he went to college, we always lived on/near a Marine or Navy air station or major port. Then I went to college in Tucson - Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, joined the Navy and was on an aircraft carrier out of Alameda/the Bay area, then moved to Las Vegas - Nellis Air Force Base. Yeah, I was a marked man :eek:
We had Nike Hercules anti-ballistic missile sites near Anchorage, along with an AF fighter base and an Army base. We would likely have been toast, as the air base was strategically significant.
If you mean Cecil Field, that was a Navy facility. Unless you mean somewhere else, I believe the Marine base on Blount Island is just a logistics center. I don’t think they do training there.
Right outside Washington DC. I’d survive by crawling under my desk and covering my head.
Me and TriPolar. Close in DC suburbs equals a short bright flash and done.
Nice Queen reference, though.
Probably poof - we lived between two AFBs, one secondary, one tertiary, and the secondary was a tanker base, meaning it would have been hit with a ring of bombs to try and knock down launched tankers. Also major state capital, a target in its own right.
It’s interesting on several levels to try and convey to our kids that yes, we grew into adulthood with the possibility of at least a limited nuclear exchange a continual threat. Whether accidental, nutcase-induced (Mr. Nixon, I am thinking of you again) or from traditional causes, I was 30 before the odds of hearing real air raid sirens dropped to nil values.
Grew up in the suburbs of New Orleans. I’d guess New Orleans was a tertiary target, so I might have time to get out into the rural parts of Louisiana. If I’m really lucky, the war is in the summer and we’re visiting my grandparents’ ranch in rural Alberta Canada (as we did each summer), and we’ll be fine.
I was far enough away from any targets that blast effect wasn’t a worry. However, prevailing winds would have been carrying radioactive materials from numerous blast sites all over the midwest in my direction. Death would have claimed me, but it would have been the slow, agonizing radiation-poisoning kind, not the shadow burned into a wall kind.
I voted for “Probably Not Dead,” because from 1979 until the end of the Cold War my family lived about 120 miles from the nearest large cities (Denver and Colorado Springs).
From 1975 to 1978, though, my dad was stationed at Fort Carson (U.S. Army) in Colorado Springs – home of Peterson Air Force Base (Falcon AFB, now Schreiver AFB, wasn’t built until the early '80s), the aforementioned Fort Carson, and the Air Force Academy (home of many future Air Force officers). Oh yeah, and NORAD (which is under Cheyenne Mountain, but if I’d been the Russians I’d have sent a missile there anyway). My World War III experience during those years would have been brief.
Yeah, the idiocy of “duck and cover” became clear, especially since required reading in 8th or 9th grade was “Alas, Babylon”, and then “The Day After” was televised.
I lived near an armory and we were basically told, if the bomb falls, you’re toast. Saved us having to build a fall-out shelter anyhow.