Glancing back at the Cold War

[mithriltabby]

I was born in 1971. I grew up in Northern California knowing what a fallout shelter sign was for, but I never went through a “duck and cover” drill or heard a live air raid siren. I saw nuclear armageddon as a sort of natural disaster, something that might happen, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so I might as well not worry about it. I didn’t consider it likely, but while growing up I had a gut estimate that there was about a 10% probability that I might be nuked out of existence along with most of the rest of humanity. One of my mother’s friends once remarked that he made a point of always living within the firestorm range of a military base or population center, so it would be quick; I remember thinking, “That’s comforting.” The usual item of speculation, on the rare occasions that the subject came up, was not “how could I survive?” but “how could I make my last moments really good?” Films like The Day After were sobering, but what could you do about it?

A while ago, I was watching an episode of Secret Passages on the preparations people took during the Cold War, and I suddenly noticed: I had, at some point in my life, quietly revised that chance of death-by-atomic-bomb down to “negligible”. I recognize that a rogue nation or terrorist group might get their hands on a handful of nukes, but I estimate the probability as too low to bother with— just keep the standard earthquake preparedness kit handy and don’t fret. I think somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, my hindbrain just wrote off the prospect of nuclear annihilation.

So shows like Secret Passages, or a chapter in The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, which I’m reading now, can remind me of those days. Looking back on the Cold War, now that I have a lot more perspective, I get a mixture of the chills at how close we came and relief at how far we’ve come and I don’t know what all else— it’s muddled. Weird. And then I remember how “weird” used to be much more related to the notion of “fate”, and that, I think, is the cherry on this peculiar emotional sundae.