On this day, the 60th anniversary of the use of the Atomic bomb, I thought I'd take a moment to reflect on the neuroses instilled in several generations as a result of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I wonder if the omnipresence of fear is the "gift" given us all in the post A-bomb era.
I guess the first thing I recall after the start of the Atomic Age was those duck and cover drills we'd practice in grade school. While down on the floor, I'd sometimes wonder if we were to be nuked, a carbon stain of my backside on the underside of my desk and another carbon stain of my frontside on the topside of the floor upon which I was cowering might be all that would be left of me.
Sometimes I'd pass those moments wondering if 10,000 years from then some anthropologist might uncover the desk with my carbon stain burned into it. If they might hang me in some museum of antiquities as testament to ancient man's stupidity--IF mankind survived at all.
We'd all seen pictures of what we could expect beneath a fallen Atomic Bomb. By then though, they'd developed even bigger and better bombs. The model "A" had given way to the model "H" bomb. Sometimes we'd see tests of them illuminating the Las Vegas night skies on TV.
While down there on the floor, covering, quivering and giggling, I suspect it was not unique to just me to wonder if these seemingly puny efforts could really save our asses from vaporization. But we were just kids following the instructions of our mentors. They obviously knew better than we.
The next few years saw the increasing popularity of bomb shelters among some in surburbia. They provided more private, intimate accommodations for those who would otherwise have to seek shelter in crowded, impersonal subways and church basements. I also wondered, if the local Catholic church had a basement, would local Catholics be given preference over Jews and Protestants and vice versa.
I actually knew a family with a bomb shelter. They once gave me a "tour". It wasn't much. Cramped, with a few books, water supply, a larder of canned and dried foodstuffs, toilet and a gun. While I never saw it, I just knew there was probably a gun. It would gently remind would-be guests--when the time came--they were not invited to share in the occupant's survival. (To save precious time, better I should head directly to a church basement and pray they would be merciful.)
In the meantime, I'd moved up to high school. And even during the most exciting time, the Cuban missile crisis and that brink of nuclear annihilation, there was no taking cover under our desks practiced during algebra or social studies. Maybe because we had grown a bit large to be ducking under desks; maybe a bit too dignified or worse, just too damn smart.
If the human race was to be saved, it'd be the little kids who still fit under those desks that'd have to save it. Besides, as high schoolers in hormonal meltdown, the thought of kneeling beneath one's desk and staring squarely at Ruthy Gallimore's derrière directly ahead of me was probably something high school administrators did not want to risk.
In time a gradual acceptance of nuclear annihilation overtook us. After all, we'd made it through the Cuban thing. The movie "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" in the mid-sixties made nuclear war laughable.
In the seventies and eighties we'd read an occasional story of how a computer malfunction (always the Soviet's, of course) or some meteorite entering Earth's atmosphere over the Pacific had placed us within minutes or seconds of erasing all life on the planet. It was good edgy entertainment.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late eighties, it was over. Man had passed through the most dangerous period of his brief history. Today we remember the early victims of the Atomic Age while commemorating 60 years since its dawning. But we also celebrate the end, forever, of nuclear war as a possibility! Time to bury our fear borne neuroses.
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