Cold War Kids: Growing Up with the Bomb

When the Soviet Union detonated their first nuclear bomb in 1949, a terrifying stage of the cold war was ushered in. Tensions between the erstwhile WW II allies, the US and the Soviet Union were heightened, and the prospect of nuclear war became a sobering reality. Our government began to prepare to fight, and win, a nuclear war. The world lived on the brink.

Mine was one of the first generations under the nuclear shadow. We went from duck and cover to living life one day at a time. The prospect of being vaporized indeed had a profound subconscious effect on our collective psyches and it shaped our culture and mindset for which my generation was front row and center. It was never really discussed in such specific terms. No one really went around saying, “...screw it, we may all be dead tomorrow” but rather adopted a “live for the day, who cares about tomorrow” perspective. Instant pleasure and gratification became our world view.

In the early 1950’s, the Truman Administration established the Federal Civil Defense Administration. This agency implemented numerous measures to educate Americans on how to respond to the threat of nuclear war. These efforts combined civil defense strategies, public information campaigns, and school drills.

"Duck and Cover" drills, civil defense campaigns, and public information materials like booklets and instructional films abounded during the mid to late 1950’s and spilled over into the 60’s. These efforts promoted preparedness by encouraging fallout shelter construction, emergency planning, and participation in drills, while reassuring citizens that survival was achievable with proper precautions.

Although humanity possessed the capability of wiping out millennia of evolution and all of God’s creations, belligerents could never be foolish enough to unleash the power of a split atom and create hell on earth. Right? So why was the government trying to teach people how to survive such an apocalypse?

MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction, the 1962 concept coined by a defense department policy maker, began a dialogue that directly affected my generation.  The concept was simple, should nuclear war break out it would mean the mutual obliteration of combatants was to be expected. The concept of winning a nuclear war was being challenged.

In the wake of the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962 the threat of nuclear war with the Soviets was all too real. In 1967 I was in first grade. I vividly remember “duck and cover” drills in school. Ask anyone over the age of 50 and they are likely to remember them as well. Duck and cover drills were as frequent as fire drills in schools are now.

The drill would be announced over the classroom loudspeaker by the principal. The teachers instructed all the children to go under their desk. Sometimes we were instructed to grab our coats and walk into the hallway where we would sit on the floor along the walls and put our heads between our knees. We covered our heads with our coats. Nobody spoke. I remember the silence and it was a horrifying experience. You might expect five- and six-year-olds to giggle during such an unusual activity. Sitting on the floor covering our heads with our coats sounds more like fun rather than an exercise in survival.

Obviously if the bomb was dropped overhead there was no chance of surviving, but the concept held that if a bomb was delivered to a target many miles away you could possibly survive. The duck and cover exercises were developed to help you survive a distant atomic explosion.

New York City was a mere thirty miles west of where I grew up. New York was the western world’s financial nerve center. There was no question New York City would be one of the first targets. Ducking and covering under desks brings home what growing up under the bomb was like.

 

A five- or six-year-old in elementary school with such innocence and blissful ignorance could never comprehend the magnitude of destruction and death that a nuclear war would bring. I recall asking my parents why we had to do the duck and cover drills. I don’t recall getting an answer.

What was interesting was that none of the kids ever talked about the drills. No one asked each other on the playground why we went into the halls, sat on the floor and covered our heads with our coats. No one explained that it was an atomic bomb we were preparing for. The teachers never explained it to us either. They simply said we needed practice in case there was an “emergency”, but they never told us what the emergency might be. This added to the fears of young people, and I firmly believe it affected the maturation of my generation in many ways. Those affects manifested themselves during the next two decades.

These duck and cover drills lasted well into the 1980’s. We were following Bert the turtle’s advice all through high school.

 

My word! -  How lame is this ad?

 I became “politically aware” in the mid 1970’s. When I say politically aware I mean that I began to understand politics, international politics, and international relations. I understood the Vietnam War and why we were there. I understood that Russia was communist, and Russians were the bad guys. I understood that Russia wanted to rule the world.

How does a teenager become interested in world affairs? Without a doubt I became intrigued about the world and how the countries of the world “tried” to live together from my grandfather - Grandpa Fargione.  He was my influence. Grandpa Fargione was my mother’s stepfather. My grandmother divorced my mother’s biological father shortly after WWII and met Orlando Fargione in the mid 1950’s.

Grandpa Fargione was an urbane gentleman. He was born in New York City in the 1910’s. The specific year I do not know. Like almost all my grandparents, Grandpa Fargione was the youngest in his family. Like almost all my grandparents, he was the last born in the family, but the first born in America. 

His family emigrated from Northern Italy and likely had some money. I recall him telling me that his family sold produce in Manhattan. How novel - an Italian immigrant making a living selling produce in New York City. Unfortunately, that is all I know of his childhood and family history.

In WW II he served in Italy. He was in Army Intelligence and was fluent in English, French, Italian and Sicilian. And yes, Italian and Sicilian are two very distinct languages.

Not to bore my dear reader but the history of Sicily is worthy of further intellectual journeying. Sicily is the land mass just off the coast of Eastern North Africa and just west of the boot shaped peninsula that jettisons south into the Mediterranean Sea known as Italy. Sicily has historically been a noted conquered piece of real estate. The birth and evolution of Sicilian, this unique tongue, was influenced by the philology of its conquerors throughout centuries. It is a linguistic marriage of Greek, Italian, Latin, and Arabic.

But I digress, after the war Grandpa Fargione went to Columbia University and had a lucrative career in the insurance industry. He met my grandmother somehow. I never knew the circumstances of their courtship.

My grandfather was very worldly and an avid reader. Growing up we would go to my grandmother’s house for dinner almost every Sunday. It’s an Italian thing. When the adults were finished with dinner, the men would indulge in after dinner drinks and the favorite Italian pass time – arguing. The woman cleaned up and prepared coffee and desert and that’s when I would slip away to the basement.

Down in the basement was a treasure trove of my grandfather’s National Geographic magazines. Oh, how I fell in love with them. I randomly selected one of the mustard-colored periodicals among the musty smelling piles of them that lined the back of his basement. Many issues were from the 1950’s and early 60’s. The brilliant photography transported me to the exotic locations that were featured in the magazine. This is where my interests and passions for geography, international relations, and natural history were ignited. As I got older Grandpa Fargione continued to feed that passion with gifts of magazine subscriptions to US News and World Report, Foreign Affairs, and my own subscription of National Geographic. Hence, my interest in all things geography, international politics and the world in general.

“Duck and cover drills” were but one aspect of living under the bomb. The Doomsday Clock was another. It was very real. The Doomsday Clock is a concept. It originated in 1947 shortly after the dawn of the nuclear age. It was meant to depict, in a simple way, how close the world was to nuclear annihilation. The closer the minute hand was to the stroke of midnight symbolized how close we were to destroying ourselves. The more tension in the world the closer to midnight the clock read. From its inception in 1947 the clock was set at 7 minutes to midnight. In 1972 it was 12 minutes to midnight but in 1984 it was only 3 minutes to midnight. In 2023 and 2024 the clock is 90 seconds to midnight!

Imagine living with the thought in the back of your mind that you could be incinerated at any given moment. How would you live your life? Live for today because you might die tomorrow?

This apocalyptic mindset manifested itself in many ways during my impressionable years. Protest music from artists like Bob Dylan, Crosby, Stills Nash and Young in the 1970’s and U2 and the Clash in the 80’s spoke to nuclear annihilation and influenced activism and anti-war sentiments.

The media and Hollywood also played a part in stoking our collective fears with movies like The Day After and Threads that provided a glimpse into nuclear scenarios and gave rise to an increase in public fear. These films also help start conversation among young people furthering a carefree sense of abandon that no doubt was a reason for a collective embrace of drugs, and promiscuity.

Fear of global destruction was further fueled by the production of post-apocalyptic films such as Mad Max and Blade Runner. My generation loved those movies. Punk music was born and bands like the Dead Kennedys and Crass became popular for confronting the threat of mass destruction head on. Other genres of music also addressed the looming threat. Peter Gabriel’s song Games Without Frontiers drew attention to the world leaders who treated the possibility of a nuclear confrontation as a big chess game. Kate Bush wrote a song about a fetus who did not want to be born into a nuclear war-torn world. The Fixx ‘s Red Skies was about exploding nuclear warheads and Men at Work put out a song called It’s a Mistake and the accompanying rather disturbing music video depicted military commander extinguishing a cigarette on the nuclear launch button instead of in an ashtray that was right next to it.

Cynicism prevailed, and our generation developed a fatalistic attitude toward life. Drugs were prevalent. Pot was the main drug at the time. There was an abundance of cocaine, and speed and quaaludes. Not so much heroine but it was there. Getting high was what we did. Marijuana use, or “partying” as we referred to it, was very different back then. Marijuana was not professionally farmed or cultivated like today. It was not as powerful and it was not legal, but it was everywhere. You could be stopped at a red light in the passenger seat of your friend’s car and another car would pull up next to you. The sweet aroma of burning cannabis would meet your olfactory and you’d give a glance over and say, “Smells good man”. The smoking driver would reach out and hand you his joint, you would take a hit, hand it to your driver to take a hit and then back to the car that handed it you and then finally move through the light.

Drinking was also done in excess. I still can compare my generation from the next one with a story about one of the first parties I went to at my then future wife’s’ friends. They had this very alien thing called a “designated driver”. My generation never had such a thing. We drank and drove with reckless abandonment. How did we survive?

I realize that my reader may call BS on this. Some might say that we were just a generation of stoners and drunks who didn’t worry too much about chastity, but I say we were a product of our environment.  We lived carefree and wild. Living life day to day because tomorrow might not come. This was life growing up under the bomb.