- This topic has 4 voices and 5 replies.
-
Posts
-
As a child in the 1960's I remember signs for fallout shelters everywhere and air raid and “take cover” drills in school. I have vague recollections of the missile crisis…mostly the worried adults and the stockpiles of canned food (yuck!).Of course I also remember Nixon's trips to China and the USSR, the fall of the wall and the break-up the "evil empire".
I was born in 1970. My memories are of the end of it. The fall of the berlin wall and communisism will always stick out in my mind.
As a child going to school in the '80s, I can remember being quite fearful of being nuked at about any moment. I think that one of my grade school teachers mentioned something about this, so I lived in constant fear (well, relatively speaking). However, I don't think it was anything like the fear that kids of the 1950s lived under. Haven't we all seen those clips of kids getting under their desks in unison as part of a school atomic bomb drill?
“How many of you really remember the cold war?” – Vividly. Not much time just now, but yeah. Duck?n-cover drills were the biggest joke. I remember thinking, at around age five or six, ?how in the world will hiding under my desk in class, save me from a thermonuclear weapon??Canned water in the cupboard, our cistern was built to double as a temporary bomb shelter, standard issue yellow Geiger counter, and lots more. Then I joined SAC in ?78 (Minuteman Missiles) and gained a slightly different perspective on thermonuclear combat. And, for the younger crowd, if you?ve never seen it, rent ?Dr Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb? Great dark humor flick. Another is called, ?Threads?. It's a British flick, and may best reflect how limited nuclear war could have changed a small industrial town in England. It makes ?The Day After? (mostly tripe) look like a hockey fight.The KLA-007 / Ruskie attack & downing was a trip too. I'll save that for later...
If it's the same one, I remember The Day After which was shown on network television in the 1980s, right?? At the time it was a big thing, and I remember being frightful of it, and I couldn't watch it.? I was still a kid growing up in those days.? As nuclear weapons increased in power through fusion, I recall trying to figure out how far their effect area would be, and whether it would affect my house.? I also remember trying to figure out what the likelihood of the Soviets launching a nuke at the nearest major city would be.This is interesting, since the Soviet children were likely in just as much fear, if not more, than we were.? That is, if they were told similar things about the U.S. as we were about the USSR.
If it's the same one, I remember The Day After which was shown on network television in the 1980s, right? At the time it was a big thing, and I remember being frightful of it, and I couldn't watch it. I was still a kid growing up in those days.
Yup, that?s the one. It was meant to scare the crap out of us, at least as much as Nick Meyer could get away with in a made for TV movie. It even had Whiteman AFB (my first duty station. All the ICBMs are gone now. B-2s have taken their place) as the nearby missile base in the story. A few geographic problems are found in the movie. Whiteman is not outside of Lawrence KS, but Knob Noster. Understandable why they wouldn?t use that name. And the Soviet throw-weight was much higher than ours, and would have done far more damage than depicted in the movie.
As nuclear weapons increased in power through fusion, I recall trying to figure out how far their effect area would be, and whether it would affect my house. I also remember trying to figure out what the likelihood of the Soviets launching a nuke at the nearest major city would be.This is interesting, since the Soviet children were likely in just as much fear, if not more, than we were. That is, if they were told similar things about the U.S. as we were about the USSR.
It?s interesting to talk to Russians about those times. I know an ex-Spetsnaz, and an ex-Russian Air Force navigator that are now US citizens, and both are mine engineers. We?ve had many conversations over lunch about what we were all thinking back in the day. Russians were raised to be paranoid about foreign invaders (and almost everything else), but of course, who could blame them for that. In our first meeting, I was quickly reprimanded for using the words ?Russian? and ?Soviet? interchangeably in conversation. Not so sure they would have made the distinction before the fall of the USSR.Both expressed the same thoughts as you, Phid. ?How close to my parents home would a US ICBM explode? How good was the targeting? How far outside the blast radius could they survive? How big were the bombs? Would the Americans target cities, or only military installations?? Etc. Kids are kids, I think, and adults only tell them what they?re supposed to believe or fear, at least until they?re old enough to start questioning authority. Not at all a good thing to do in the Soviet Union. We all worried about the same things, even if not for the same reasons.
