Going Nuclear

By US gov - US gov, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2130620

Living in Montana in the 60’s came with a certain resignation. There was a gallows humor everyone had about the Cold War. The joke was that we didn’t need to worry about a nuclear war with the Soviet Union because it would be over for us in a flash. The state was sparsely populated with people, but had a lot of rattlesnakes, antelope, and missile silos. We accepted the fact that the Russians knew this and would target us first. I used to stare dreamily out the car window as my dad drove us periodically to either Great Falls (where there was an Air Force base) or Helena (the state capital) and watch the antelope herds grazing on the plains and wonder how many missiles they were walking across. It wasn’t as though anyone I knew was traumatized about living with so many deadly weapons beneath the idyllic surface. They just all knew they existed. They went on about their lives: skiing, hiking, canoeing, hunting, fishing – all the things that draw people there to this day. Yet, it was never far from our minds either, particularly in my house because the threat of nuclear war was literally how my father made his living.

My father was on the Montana State University faculty, although I’ve always suspected they were funded by the federal government, and he and several other men traveled around the state teaching “civil defense.” What that means is his job was to teach all of us to survive a nuclear blast. They met with town councils and came into classrooms, including mine, with straight faces and tried to sell to their audiences that an atomic bomb was something we could get through. As far as I know, all American children of a certain age went through drills practicing ducking under their desks and filing into “shelters,” but it was big business in Montana.

Yet, at some point I figured out that what my dad did was really nothing more than giving people false hope to keep us all calm. The fallout shelter in my middle school was the cafeteria, which was in the windowless basement, but I don’t recall that there were blast doors that could be used to seal it off: there was just a staircase with double doors that were not airtight. I think it was right about then that I caught a clue that none of these fallout shelters around town would really keep us safe from radioactive fallout. I had already had some doubts that ducking under a school desk would do much to shelter us from the kind of blast I’d seen in documentaries about Hiroshima. Sometime in 1971 someone in charge figured it out too and cut the entire Civil Defense program at MSU down to two men. My father was not among the two retained.

I never asked my dad if he knew his job was based on a falsehood, although I always wanted to. He was too raw at being let go in the early years to dare ask, and then later, well, by the time I felt I had the kind of relationship with him to be able to ask, he contracted cancer and was rapidly gone. All the very many questions I had for him, including that one, would go with him. But I suspect he knew. He’d seen war up close. He knew what even conventional bombs could do. He was highly intelligent. I can’t imagine he harbored any illusions about our chances in a nuclear war. I believe he came to the same conclusions I did, and like Sting would write some many years later. We had to hope that the Russians loved their children too.

What does all this have to do with modern American politics? For one thing, Russia is not the only nuclear power America has to worry about now. Donald Trump has told us and the world that his goal with the war in Iran is to ensure that they never obtain a nuclear weapon, despite abandoning the agreement that at least temporarily was preventing them from developing one. He had said much the same of North Korea back in 2017, yet today they are estimated to have between 50 to 120 (depending upon whose intelligence sources you listen to) nuclear warheads and working to build more. China, with an eye to protecting itself, has aligned more closely with North Korea, leaving American allies in the region wondering if they will need to develop their own nuclear programs. The world seems more of an atomic powder keg than it ever has. One must ask if we have the seasoned statesmen in the current administration capable of navigating these perilous waters, or do we just have to rely on North Korea loving their children too? When we determine who we support in the next presidential race, it’s not just bringing down gas prices and making sure we don’t lose social security, it’s looking for someone adept enough to handle international relations and taking the temperature down on nuclear proliferation and threats. That’s a tall ask, but one our children insist we make because it won’t work to hide under desks.