Make Your Own Light
COLD WAR FEARS
Many of us who grew up during the Cold War were emotionally traumatized by the fear of nuclear annihilation. Those of us old enough to remember hiding under our school desks during an air-raid drill remember the feelings of fear. Those of us old enough to understand what was happening in Cuba in late 1962 remember the feelings of fear…
Research on the effects of the nuclear threat on children is chilling. At the end of the 1950s, 60 percent of American children reported having nightmares about nuclear war. Few other comprehensive surveys were conducted at this time, though studies multiplied in the early 1980s. In the 1960s, 44 percent of children in one survey predicted a serious nuclear incident. By 1979, 70 percent of interviewees the same age felt sure of an attack. Researchers noted that the latter survey respondents seemed more resigned than their 1960s counterparts. A 1984 survey of 1,100 Toronto schoolchildren found that many reported feeling helpless and powerless in the face of nuclear war.
I lived in Chicago during the Cold War years of the 50s and 60s. I lived with the worry that the plane flying over my house was sporting the red star of the Soviet Union. Every time I noticed a plane overhead I would look up and try to identify the markings…to assure myself that this one wasn’t the plane that would drop “the bomb” on the city. The fact that I lived on an entrance route to O’Hare Field, at that time the busiest commercial airport in the world, made it just that much CONTINUE READING: Make Your Own Light | Live Long and Prosper