Childhood Under the Mushroom Cloud

Sometimes I think about what it meant to be a kid during the latter days of the Cold War, and living in the shadow of nuclear annihilation. I grew up in Omaha, not too far from Offutt Air Force Base, then home to Strategic Air Command. Due to SAC’s presence, Offutt was likely near the top of the Soviet Union’s list of American targets, meaning that if WWIII ever broke out, it would be one of the first places attacked by Soviet ICBMs.

Here’s the thing, though: While we were anxious about such an attack, my classmates and I actually took solace in the fact that we’d probably be nuked early on. Better to die quickly in a nuclear blast, we reasoned, than suffer the horrors of war or live on a ruined planet locked in nuclear winter.

There have been, of course, similar situations in history, starting with 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world closer to the brink of WWIII than anything I experienced as a kid. And I hesitate to use the word “traumatic” to describe the above, given that we were still living in America rather than some third-world nation that was actually experiencing war.

Still, our method of coping with the idea of nuclear annihilation almost certainly had some effect on how we saw the world, and perhaps led to those characteristics often associated with Generation X (e.g., pervasive cynicism, skepticism of authority). Speaking personally, perhaps the above also explains my fondness for gallows humor, since few things are more twisted than kids finding comfort in a quick death.