When I was in fourth grade circa 1958, my teacher was an intense woman who was obsessed with nuclear war. Our class project was a fallout shelter model, and a lot of our discussion centered on planning for that eventuality. Our school had air raid drills rather than fire drills. When the sirens went off, we all walked single-file downstairs to the basement, lined up covering our heads with our arms and faced the walls. No silly ‘duck and cover’ for us big kids.
I talked to my parents about getting a fallout shelter. We had a small yard that barely held a swingset and a wading pool, small details about where to put it didn’t occur to me.
All I knew was my teacher and the media said we needed it. My Dad felt the pressure to provide us that protection, and studied design and inventory suggestions. Mother insisted there was no way she would ever enter such a place – this terrified me.
Public conversation centered on how to behave if you had a shelter and your neighbors didn’t. Should you get a gun to keep them away? The horror of thinking about it got worse when I saw a Jerry Lewis movie in which he was in a test shelter and somehow eating irradiated peanut butter. It all became a blur to me.
By the time I was 13 and heard Bob Dylan sing Let Me Die In My Footsteps I forgave my mother for what she had said. Then came the sixties and as Dick says `other priorities.’
I had a beautiful childhood in a nice community with a loving family, but looking back, it was contaminated by fear inflicted by society. My home was in upstate New York. Now I find myself wondering if little george had a similar experience at Sam Houston elementary, and whether Shotgun Cheney was ever nine years old and uncertain of the future.
Once this stuff was a terribly important reality, but now I don’t know what young people think about nuclear weapons. I can guess what they learned about it in school. I remember a Boolady’s diary about watching the test blasts in Nevada (sorry- forgot who) and wish we could have a conversation about our nuclear situation, which seems to be unmentionable.
Interesting links: Britain’s Reliable Replacement Warhead
Nuclear Policy Research Institute
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization
Atomic Archive