Yesterday, in between chores, I followed a link to a writeup about The Day After, the famous 1983 made-for-TV movie about a "nuclear exchange" (it sounds so upbeat, no?) between the United States and the Soviet Union. Which led, predictably, to following the Internets down the predictable Wikipedia rabbit hole, first to the Wikipedia article about the movie, and then to this little article about something called Able Archer 83 that, in retrospect, is absolutely chilling.
I'm approaching the point at which I'll soon be teaching students who are a full generation removed from my experiences. That said, even with the students I've been teaching most of my career, I may as well be from another century. Those of us born in the early 1970s are even a bit removed from those born later in the 1970s. Why? Because I remember growing up in absolute terror of nuclear war. For the kids I've taught most all my career, the Berlin Wall's always been gone and the Soviet Union is a trivia answer. For me, though, even the mention of the word "Soviet" or the mention of names like Brezhnev, Andropov or Chernenko bring back memories.
Which is why the passing reference to The Day After grabbed me. I remember the night that movie aired. My age had made it to double digits a few months before. I remember the buildup to it. I also remember that, geopolitically, the times weren't the happiest. I was no student of modern politics, but I could follow things closely enough to know Reagan and whatever Soviet premier was in charge that week (remember, this was about the time Brezhnev died, then Andropov took over and died, and then Chernenko took over and died) weren't exactly going to be drinking buddies. I remember watching President Reagan give an Oval Office address about the ongoing tensions with the Soviets one night, and I burst into tears talking with my mother afterwards because I was scared to death of war.
It's funny, because so often I think of the year 1983 and it makes me happy, because I was a kid and there was so much going on that I loved. But 1983 was a scary year. You didn't know who was going to be in charge in the Soviet Union (granted, Brezhnev was no huggy-bear, but at least he was a familiar face). There was all this tough talk going back and forth. Then something ultra-scary, like the shootdown of KAL 007, doesn't contribute to any feelings of security. I think I even vaguely remember the period surrounding the aforementioned Able Archer 83, like something didn't quite seem right about that time.
All of this meant I couldn't bear to watch The Day After when it aired. That night, NBC counterprogrammed the first half of a two-part movie about President Kennedy, and I watched that instead down in my parents' bedroom. My brother, though, watched The Day After in his bedroom. The next morning, ABC's movie was the lead story on all the morning programs, and it scared me a little more. I think I even wondered if the airing of The Day After was going to make it more likely to actually happen. Funny how your mind works when you're that young.
I wish I could say I outgrew it, that I got smarter as I aged, but the specter was never that far away. As I said, back then I wasn't wise to the ways of global politics, so any global episode, I feared, had the potential to get bad. I remember the raids on Libya in 1986, and sitting in homeroom the next morning wondering if war was going to erupt while I was there. I remember seeing drawings of nuclear missiles in boxcar launchers and feeling a little sick, wondering if it was all going to come to nothing sooner rather than later. I remember the frosty end to the summit in Reykjavik. I remember the Saturday afternoon that the siren at the volunteer fire department, controlled from the county seat, started blowing the "air raid" tone when a keyboard operator, meaning to send a fire signal to another fire department, punched in the wrong code and sent the "air raid" signal countywide.
And then I remember a night late in 1987, seeing Reagan and Gorbachev at the White House, having completed a successful summit meeting. I started to think that maybe there was some hope. A couple of years later, I remember watching the Berlin Wall start to come down on live television, and then buying a little chunk of it myself at a local store a few months later. And then I remember the day there wasn't a Soviet Union any more.
As with many things that frightened me when I was a kid, I now have a fascination with the Cold War. I've got a good many books about Soviet politics, about the arms race, about the cultural effects of the Cold War. I think my fear leads me to try to understand it. I have a few artifacts from those days, too, like a genuine government-issue "Fallout Shelter" sign that now hangs over my workbench. I have a bit of fascination with air-raid sirens, and think this miniature version of the Federal Signal Thunderbolt (like the one we had in my hometown) is downright neat. And though I couldn't bear to watch The Day After when I was a kid, I've seen it quite a few times since, and though in places its effects are cheesy by modern standards, there's still enough vivid memories of those days that the movie can still disturb me a little bit, and it's a movie that still packs a punch. And, as I posted some time ago, to this day I can never see a "Special Report" bulletin slide without my heart momentarily stopping.
I don't want to make it sound like my generation experienced a worse Cold War than did my parents' generation. I've heard their stories of the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, of practicing air raid drills at school, and of just how scary those days were. The Cold War I experienced was a little different, and in its own way, it added a certain amount of terror to my childhood, and to the childhoods of my peers. And I'll always believe it separates us from those who came after. To a later generation, Dr. Strangelove may be an interesting piece of comedy, or Fail-Safe may be a very brooding, dark drama, but to even those of us born in the early 1970s, it evokes an awful lot more.
The Cold War as we knew it is now part of history. Unfortunately, given the black market for weapons of mass destruction, and given that some of our new adversaries are very fond of surprise attacks and are not afraid to lose their own lives in the process, I'm not so sure that what has followed the Cold War is much of an improvement. Every generation faces the terror of potential annihilation; it's just that the cast of characters has changed.