Have been thinking a lot since listening to Blueprint to Armegeddon about what will be the next transition and what will usher in the next huge change in our global understanding of things. My hope is that it is not a huge leap backwards like after Rome fell. But it led me to thinking about nuclear threat. I can remember just a couple of times as a 1st or 2nd grader doing the duck and cover drills in schools. It is bone chilling to think how close we came several times to nuclear arms being used en masse.

I have a couple questions for discussion...
What are your cold war memories?
What do you see as the next global transition like happened from 19th century to 20th century?

So many memories...

1980 Miracle on Ice
Ducking under desks or moving into the hallways And sitting Injun style with heads down for "other type emergencies" in the late 1970s
Reykjavik Summit
Olympic boycott when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan
Brezhnev, Chernenko, and Andropov all dying in a span of about five minutes
Lech Walesa in the news every damn day

More than anything...
News reports showing Russian babushkas shopping in stores with empty shelves (that made me sad)

And finally...
That cheesy made for TV movie called WWIII with Rock Hudson as President and Brian Keith as the Soviet Premier

Cuban Missile Crisis - dad said it looked like we might have to move to somewhere south of San Antonio - which was supposed to be one of the safest places to be during an all-out nuclear exchange.

BQ78 said:

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Cuban Missile Crisis - real scare that within days a nuclear exchange could occur.

26 Sep 1983- on alert and decoded a "real" message that said taxi with a nuke loaded B-52 and prepare to launch. May have been closer to nuclear war that day than any day in October 1962.

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Tell us more details?

BQ78 said:

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Cuban Missile Crisis - real scare that within days a nuclear exchange could occur.

26 Sep 1983- on alert and decoded a "real" message that said taxi with a nuke loaded B-52 and prepare to launch. May have been closer to nuclear war that day than any day in October 1962.

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Thank goodness Petrov kept a cool head and didn't launch based on the Soviet early warning false alarms on that day in 83.

Dayum! Thanks for sharing!

This is one of my favorite Cold War stories. From Air and Space magazine 1993 from their series of stories remembering the Cold War.:

https://www.airspacemag.com/airspacemag/open-gate-180963869/

Memories of the useless duck-and-cover, even into the 70s.

Being a Texan, I don't think at age 13 I fully understood hockey, but I damn sure understood what it meant with the US beating the Russians in hockey in the Olympics in 1980.

In the early 80s, I watched a show on HBO about Nostradomus which talked about his "predictions" of Napolean, Hitler, and a man in a [color, blue or red, I don't recall] turban launching nuclear missiles at America. That last was predicted to occur in the mid-1990s. Memories of that show remained with me throughout my years at A&M in the late 80s and into the 90s, but by the time 1997 rolled around, I had forgotten it until a conversation at lunch with co-workers brought up the subject of Nostradomus, and I remembered that show, and I laughed at his so-called prediction.

The TV movie "The Day After" scared the crap out of me. Coupled with the Soviet Union being known as the bad guy in many movies of the time, notably 007 movies, and the real-world invasion of Afghanistan, and with knowledge of the Cuban Missile Crisis (pre-dates me), I recall a feeling of inevitability of what would be a cataclysmic war. I didn't really let the fear of that run my life, as there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. Still, it was in the back of my mind at times.

The shoot-down of KAL 007 in 1983 was a big topic of conversation in my government class that year.

This was discussed on the Forum 16, but Bill Whittle is doing an excellent podcast on the Cold War. It's called The Cold War: What We Saw".
This part of our history always fascinated me and I'm glad I got to experience some of it growing up in the late 70's and 80's.
There is one episode about nuclear subs and the US attempt to retrieve a lost Soviet sub (K-129, maybe?) and how the Hughes Glomar Explorer was this elaborate CIA project that used Hughes as a front to recover the sub.
I also thought the episode on Vietnam was interesting. I had been aware that Vietnam was a terribly mismanaged war, but never took the understand the background.
The small factoids and information that he presents leaves me with a feeling of Paul Harvey's "The Rest of the Story" stories.

Growing up in Fort Worth in the '70s and I remember the B52's leaving Carswell every day on their trips, knowing that we lived close to a SAC base that probably meant that we were going to be a priority target to the Russians (Bell Helicopter, General Dynamics)

Air Force 54-56 !2thAF HQ Ramstein, Germany - Some idiot got the bright idea to creosote all sidewalks

so if we were attacked our base would be hard to spot from the air .

HQ was a 4 story building in a forest - real hard to spot.

Bad thing was we had to walk on those sidewalks getting that sticky creosote on our shoes

- hard to get off.

On leave in Berlin we went to East Berlin before the Wall went up and visited the Soviet

Memorial - huge impressive statues - one Soviet officer and his wife there.

One month later a US Lt. was grabbed there and held for 6 months for some reason - then let go.

My escape story from the cold war !

This is such a good podcast. Have a couple people at the office listening to it.

All of the above would be on my list of what I remember. I would add teachers being called up in the reserves and gone for months during the Cuban crisis. First person in town killed in Vietnam Nam. Everyone's favorite teacher called up and a year later also killed in Nam. A good friend just a few years older joined and killed on a special mission in Laos I think.
Crazy times when I think back.

At the time, were people not constantly talking about how pointless the duck and cover practice was? It seems like even an 8-year old could see that this had no chance of protecting you.

If you're at ground zero, sure, nothing is going to save you.

If you're a couple of miles away, you have a few seconds between the flash and the arrival of the heat/blast wave. Getting under your desk and hukering down will help protect you against the glass that will momentarily be flying in from the blown out windows.

People survived as close as 300 meters to ground zero in Hiroshima.

It was never a stupid idea, unless you believe it's better to die instantly than have a slim chance of survival.

Drills where we got under the desk. I was a kid of course, but I questioned just how much protection a desk inside a building would provide!

Cuban missile crisis.

All the concern over Russia, including Sputnik and the space race.

Apache said:

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When Red Dawn came out in '84, all my elementary friends & I wanted to be exactly like the Wolverines. Except we would win because we were Texans and thus awesome.

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When i watch that movie now i cant help but see atf logos on the bad guys.

I almost got run over by a leopard tank as a kid in west germany. It was awesome.

Treetop jets and company size maneuvers were common. Late 70's.

CanyonAg77 said:

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If you're at ground zero, sure, nothing is going to save you.

If you're a couple of miles away, you have a few seconds between the flash and the arrival of the heat/blast wave. Getting under your desk and hukering down will help protect you against the glass that will momentarily be flying in from the blown out windows.

People survived as close as 300 meters to ground zero in Hiroshima.

It was never a stupid idea, unless you believe it's better to die instantly than have a slim chance of survival.

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Being the Hiroshima bomb was detonated about 600 meters above ground, no one was 300 meters away.