I was in elementary school during the height of the Cold War. My dad was in the Army Reserves and worked as a chemist at White Sands Missile Range. He'd bring home pamphlets about how to survive a nuclear attack and the aftermath of radioactive fallout. These pubs reinforced public service announcements I'd seen on TV where anonymous cartoon characters would seek shelter in the event of an "emergency," which we all knew meant Armageddon. Being a young geek interested in the military, I could identify delivery systems in the world's arsenal of nuclear weapons at the time like the Hercules, Honest John, Davy Crockett, Redstone, Thor, Jupiter, Snark, Poseidon, B-47, B-52, British Vulcan (the MacGuffin in 007's Thunderball), French Mirage IV, Soviet Tu-95 Bear. Movies like Fail Safe, On the Beach, Dr. Strangelove weighed heavy on my mind. It didn't help my anxieties to read illustrated books about the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Did I fear WWIII? Hell, yes.
I was ten years old when I was jolted awake in the middle of the night by a loud siren. I knew that sound. It was the wail of the Civil Defense alarm and meant that atomic annihilation was imminent. Enemy missiles were on the way to destroy us. We were all going to die terrible deaths. I began to sob, gushing tears and snot. Why? Why?
After several frightful minutes, the wail faded and stopped. I waited for my parents to rush through the house and gather us kids, then take the family to a local Civil Defense shelter. I'd seen the yellow and black placards all over town but at the moment couldn't remember where any were. I expected to hear emergency vehicles, loud speakers advising the public what to do. And the commotion of people scrambling to safety. Chaos. Pandemonium.
Nothing. Only silence. What was going on? If there was no nuclear war, why had that siren gone off?
I later discovered that the city had installed the siren on top of the local fire station to summon volunteer firefighters they couldn't reach by phone. Learning this, I became embarrassed by my previous crying jag--the joke was on me--ha, ha. But no one ever explained how was I supposed to tell the difference between an alarm calling for volunteers and one announcing world destruction.
This visceral fear of nuclear war remains with me. The scariest scene of The Day After occurred during a serene afternoon when the ground started to tremble. In the near distance, smoke erupted from blast doors popping open, then ICBMs emerged atop pillars of fire and smoke to begin their journey to obliterate cities on the the side of the planet. And similar missiles were on the way here. Within a half hour, tens of millions were going to die.
What activated this memory were the recent videos of Israel and Iran volleying missiles back and forth. Smoky arcs from rockets tearing upward across a blue sky. More ominously, swarms of warheads streaking through night clouds like meteors. Missiles launched from the middle of neighborhoods. Other missiles impacting into those same neighborhoods. And as this was happening--against the background shriek of sirens and boom, boom, boom--people were outside, on balconies, bridges, during weddings, cocktail parties, chatting, arms up with cell phones, recording the mayhem like it was a fireworks show. The saving grace to this bizarre spectacle was that the missiles carried high-explosive payloads and not nuclear weapons. This time.
