President John F. Kennedy was photographed in the Oval Office during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
I wasn't even a teenager yet when we learned the principles of "duck and cover" in elementary school.
I was born during World War II, but I have no memories of the war. By the time I started school, in the late 1940s, I might have had some vague understanding of nuclear weapons. But my world was a safe place, I believed, and the duck and cover exercises we practiced in elementary school seemed like a game.
(As a practical matter, hiding under our desks in the event of a nuclear attack would have been about as useless as tits on a boar hog, as my grandfather used to say. But that's beside the point.)
I was never really scared by world events as a young child. I had too little understanding of them. Overhearing parents and relatives talking about the horrors of the Great Depression and World War II made me anxious, to be sure, but I rationalized my fears by believing, as children do, that those things happened a l-o-n-g time ago and would never happen again.
Naïveté can be so comforting.
But when I was 20, the Cuban Missile Crisis scared the bejesus out of me.
And I knew by then that ducking and covering wouldn't do much good.
On Oct. 14, 1962, a U.S. reconnaissance flight over Cuba discovered the presence of what turned out to be an SS-4 construction site. The SS-4 was a Soviet Union ballistic missile deployed during the Cold War. It was capable of attacking targets at medium ranges with a megaton-class nuclear warhead. If there were Soviet SS-4s in Cuba, most of the eastern United States would be within range.
Richmond didn't seem like much of a target to me. But Washington was. And so was Norfolk, with its massive military bases. That was profoundly scary.
For the next few weeks, the U.S. was on the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
Like most Americans my age, I'd never been so frightened before. And I don't think I've been so scared since.
Unlike the Great Depression and World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis was something of my own time, and naïveté was no longer a comfort.
It didn't help matters any that I had read "Alas, Babylon," the 1959 novel by Pat Frank that was one of the first apocalyptic stories of the nuclear era. (The novel centers on the aftermath of a nuclear attack in a small town in Florida.) Having seen the movie "On the Beach," based on Nevil Shute's 1957 novel, which I had also read, was no comfort either. (The story, set in Australia, envisions the aftermath of a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere and a slow and inexorable cloud of fallout that dooms the planet.)
The Cold War spawned its own style of "entertainment," and none of it offered much solace.
If you're a few decades younger than I am, you probably learned all about the Cuban Missile Crisis in history class.
We're all alive today, and we know that the clash between the Soviet Union and the United States was resolved within a few weeks of those U.S. reconnaissance flights in 1962. There have been no nuclear attacks on the U.S. The Soviet Union is no more. Nuclear arms stockpiles are being reduced. The Cold War ended in 1990.
The world is a safer place.
Right.
If you believe that, you're as naïve as I was in the 1950s.
* * *
By the way, I highly recommend "Alas, Babylon" and "On the Beach." They are today, as they were then, compelling and thought provoking.
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It's interesting to me that, though I was 14 and remember the crisis well, I have no memory of being scared. Perhaps the six year difference accounts for it -- you used to be 7 years older than I; when did that change? More likely, it was that we were far away in Japan and didn't feel personally threatened. On the other hand, I also remember "On the Beach", the film -- and that scared me a lot. Funny that fiction was scarier than reality; that's certainly not true anymore.
ReplyDeleteAnd aren't tits of great use to a female boar hog who might want to raise a family?
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language defines a boar as "an uncastrated male of the swine species." The female of the species is a sow.
ReplyDeleteBeing a native of the Appalachian foothills, my grandfather had a slew of pithy farm-related sayings. He would often describe a heavy rain as being "like a cow pissing on a flat rock."
Now that he's no longer with us, I find myself using his old sayings as a cultural touchstone.
Oh well, just waiting for "that dog won't hunt" and we'll have the complete trifecta of things our grandparents said in the way of "woods wisdom". No comment on tits, however, as much as I might be the expert on that subject here.
ReplyDelete