Drop The Big One And See What Happens
I don’t remember ever being actually worried about a nuclear war.
This may be a sign that I was simply a very unaware, optimistic child, of course. But I really don’t remember any of the Cold War, Oh-My-God-We’re-About-To-Die paranoia from the 1980s that I often read about as if I wasn’t alive during that time; I remember seeing parts of things like Threads and thinking “Oh, that’s doesn’t look too much like fun,” but it never really seemed… real, I guess? Or real enough to be an actual possibility.
It’s not that I was entirely unaware of the idea that there was the possibility that America and Russia could go to war, and that if they did, we were right in the middle and that that was not necessarily a place anyone would want to be. I simply didn’t think that it would ever happen, for whatever reason; I had this idea that just the idea of war was bad enough, or scary enough, that it made real war unnecessary. That makes me sound much smarter than I actually was, more aware and cynical than the me I was then, so I’ll throw that into relief by admitting that I also had this feeling that war was something that modern society had moved past, after past conflicts (Ha! If only).
Because of this latter mistaken idealism, I remember the sharp taste of disillusionment when the first Iraq War started, a kind of hollow “this will never end” take that had me worried that mandatory military service would get reinstated just in time to get me, and that I’d end up out of place in a warzone a teenage pacifist waiting to get killed by someone with less moral qualms. But even that me, the one quietly convinced that war would never end and we would always be in conflict with someone, was never worried about the idea of some giant atomic apocalypse. It was the smaller, longer death that concerned me, then. Nuclear war was still the stuff of movies and ill-considered fantasy.
One day, someone’s going to drop the big one, and I’m going to be thinking “Aw, really? That’s so Terminator cliche” just before being blown to atoms.
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My Mum had a “What To Expect” brochure in the spare room, and I made the mistake of reading it.
To this day – To. This. DAY. – I can’t hear but the faintest skirl of the Air Raid Siren without my heart leaping into my throat.
Every time I stayed in the spare room, I could feel that book daring me to read it. Looming out of the shelf full of Jesus books on the shelf above the bed. Daring me to work out just how unutterably fucked I would be if the bomb hit our town.
And then I saw “Threads.”
Thanks a lot, Cold War!
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