When I was in fourth grade circa 1958, my teacher was an intense woman who was obsessed with nuclear war. Our class project was a fallout shelter model, and a lot of our discussion centered on planning for that eventuality. Our school had air raid drills rather than fire drills. When the sirens went off, we all walked single-file downstairs to the basement, lined up covering our heads with our arms and faced the walls. No silly ‘duck and cover’ for us big kids.
I talked to my parents about getting a fallout shelter. We had a small yard that barely held a swingset and a wading pool, small details about where to put it didn’t occur to me.
All I knew was my teacher and the media said we needed it. My Dad felt the pressure to provide us that protection, and studied design and inventory suggestions. Mother insisted there was no way she would ever enter such a place – this terrified me.
Public conversation centered on how to behave if you had a shelter and your neighbors didn’t. Should you get a gun to keep them away? The horror of thinking about it got worse when I saw a Jerry Lewis movie in which he was in a test shelter and somehow eating irradiated peanut butter. It all became a blur to me.
By the time I was 13 and heard Bob Dylan sing Let Me Die In My Footsteps I forgave my mother for what she had said. Then came the sixties and as Dick says `other priorities.’
I had a beautiful childhood in a nice community with a loving family, but looking back, it was contaminated by fear inflicted by society. My home was in upstate New York. Now I find myself wondering if little george had a similar experience at Sam Houston elementary, and whether Shotgun Cheney was ever nine years old and uncertain of the future.
Once this stuff was a terribly important reality, but now I don’t know what young people think about nuclear weapons. I can guess what they learned about it in school. I remember a Boolady’s diary about watching the test blasts in Nevada (sorry- forgot who) and wish we could have a conversation about our nuclear situation, which seems to be unmentionable.
Interesting links: Britain’s Reliable Replacement Warhead
Nuclear Policy Research Institute
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization
Atomic Archive
…will have the Bomb. And someday, somewhere, one of those nations, or a “non-state actor,” will explode one or more of those Bombs and millions of people will die immediately or from lingering effects.
There might be no way around this. Even if the five big nuclear powers (U.S., Russia, China, France and Britain) actually worked on fulfilling ALL the articles of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, a nuclear “exchange” might still be inevitable. But it certainly is inevitable if we continue to have folks like those in the Dubyanocchio Administration pushing for new kinds of nukes, the kinds that, if they’re actually built, everybody will want some of in their arsenals.
I suspect a nuclear event between India and Pakistan will occur long before 2020, and that the facilitation of such an event has been on the drawing board of the neconservative warmongers for quite a while.
The combination of no oil, lots of religious extremism, lots of poor people, strategic geography, (direct damage to China would be virtually inevitable), makes this region perfect for the reintroduction of nuclear weapons deployment to modern conflict.
The neocons and their predecessors have been seeking to legitimize the use of nuclear weaponry since their ideology was first defined, and it is my belief that they would much prefer another country use nukes first in order to provide the pretext for the US to claim they/we need to use them as well to maintain military supremacy.
Obviously I’m speculating, but IMHO this seems clear as a bell.
When I was young(er) and (more) impressionable — maybe 12 years old? — a made-for-TV movie was filmed in my hometown. It portrayed the aftermath in rural Kansas of a widespread nuclear strike — every big city hit, Kansas City wiped off the map, fallout and radiation poisoning.
I was active in community theater, and knew people who worked as extras or with bit roles in the movie. A neighbor’s farmhouse was photographed for film publicity. This was all big news in our small town.
The movie itself gave me nightmares for months.
Barbara Kingsolver has an excellent essay about the “forgotten” issue of nuclear war. I’m not sure how we all learned to live with this undercurrent of insanity in our culture.
Testament was far better than The Day After, both made the same year, 1983. That was partly just a function of the made-for-TV-movie shallowness of the ’80s. But TDA also was filled with technical mistakes which I was especially attuned to because I was then serving on the Boulder County (Colorado) Nuclear War Education Committee, which over nine months put together a 48-page booklet on the effects of nuclear war that was delivered to every country household.
I saw it when I was older, and am still haunted by the scene in which the mother is silently tearing her house apart looking for her son’s teddy bear — to bury him with.
I was around the same age too, but wasn’t allowed to see it. I do remember that just the promos for the show gave me nightmares. I can still picture the nuclear ‘wave’ as it came thundering across the prairie fields…
That movie gave me nightmares too. But what I remember most was a panel discussion with “experts” after the movie aired.
There was a lot of talk about how to survive a nuclear attack/war that went on for quite a while. Eventually, Elie Weisel, who had sat silently through all of this, said something like, “This is crazy talk. If what you are describing happens, its too late. How are we going to PREVENT this from happening.”
A voice of sanity that I never forgot.
Today there are so many things to fear that nuclear weapons are just one of a list of things. We happen to live just a few miles from a nuclear power plant that has the worst record in the US. (Indian Point) I am more fearful of this than any of the other things that could be named. I wonder what kids are thinking about these days.
she worries most that some Bush supporter will kill me at a march, meeting, protest. That’s her fear.
“Nuclear war, it’s a motherfucker/ If they push that button, your ass gotta go”
I grew up in the 70s and 80s, so the threat of nuclear annihilation was never far from my mind.
The way the issue has more or less disappeared frightens me. There has been no substantial change in the size of the US and Russian arsenals, and both countries are working on enhancing them. The idea that we’re safe because of a lull in US-Russian rivalry is nonsense. The US and the Soviet Union went from being allies to enemies in a matter of months at the end of WW2, and it could happen again. Peace doesn’t last, and those tens of thousands of warheads are still there, waiting to be used.
Alice,
When I was in first and second grade in the late sixties, they were still doing air raid drills. I clearly remember the bells and being made to go into the interior hallways to crouch, covering our heads with our hands along the base of the walls. Scary shit, but a normal part of American life even then.
What worries me most today are several scenarios where a device is detonated within this country. Either by outside terrorists or by our unelected terrorists as another 911 Pearl Harbor event meant to blast us all into a nationalistic war footing, or that we initiate a nuclear response against this country when Cheney really goes off the deep end by launching a strike against Iran or even N. Korea.
Ah, Super – some days I want to fret about it, and some days just dream about going sailing.
I guess it’s just about learning our own mortality.
While India and Pakistan could indeed manoeuvre themselves into a nuclear impasse, only the US has held the view that nuclear war can be waged “successfully.” (Even the Soviets concentrated on “survival,” which is not quite the same thing.) We still do, as the talk about bunker-buster bombs attests.
When Einstein recommended an A-bomb project to the US government, he was of course deeply worried about the German Nazis achieving such a thing first. He may have had no choice, but he certainly did not realize what he was offering to a people possessed by childish dreams of omnipotence and dominance.
The most likely way that nuclear war is avoided is through collapse of the US in the absence of targets for nuclear reprisals. This is what asymmetrical war against the US is designed to achieve.
Certainly the risks now are greater than any time in history, greater than either 1950’s or 1980’s.