Nuclear Shadow Again
(Image courtesy of Gabriela Bertolini at FreeDigitalPhotos.net)
On Friday a friend called to talk about the invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s threats to use its nuclear arsenal. My friend is much younger than me. She moved here from an eastern European country over a decade ago in her early twenties, which takes far more nerve than I had at that age. She’s very intelligent, very driven, very sensible, very good.
Until her call I hadn’t fully realized how the past week and a half or so can feel to those who are young enough not to remember the Cold War. People in her birth country have far more experience that most Americans within living memory of getting through dreadful things, but those were her grandparents and great grandparents, not her. Those of us whose lives span most or all of the Cold War now have friends, colleagues and younger generations in our own families for whom this is new. The possibility of nuclear war terrified my friend.
She wanted to know what I’m doing about it as a way of helping her decide what she should do. Maybe there are people around you who want to have a similar conversation. Friends, colleagues, nieces and nephews…
Location and Supplies
She asked whether my wife and I plan to move to the USA, my birth country, to get farther away from the war in Ukraine. My wife and I have not considered doing that. No place in the world is safe from the missiles. We are about as safe as we can be if we stay where we are.
My friend and I talked about maps. I listed places in the UK that would be the most likely targets. Our distance from the closest of them puts my wife and I outside the blast zone. Prevailing winds tend to put us upwind. Then my friend and I discussed likely targets closest to her. She should be outside the blast zone too. And so on.
She asked about supplies. We’re really all in practice for that aspect, aren’t we? It’s basically like preparing for Brexit, preparing for pandemic lockdowns, or preparing for hurricane season.
Living in the Shadow
Of course, if Russia and the USA ever launch their full nuclear arsenals, we’re all toast. But Biden is in the White House, as steady a hand as we could ever have at that helm. He plans ahead for contingencies. He will have thought about the many things Putin could do and what would be an appropriate response. He won’t be grasping for a response at the last minute. He won’t go farther than he must.
But Putin is rattling his nuclear arsenal, so asking how to cope with that shadow is a legitimate question. I can only answer with what we did “back in the day.”
I grew up in what was then the world’s biggest petroleum and petrochemical refining center, very much in the heart of the Cold War. Adults said we must surely be on the target list. Even in childhood, I thought it would be silly to spend a costly nuclear warhead on us. All an enemy needed to send was one suicidal maniac with a match. But classmates and I all played along with what adults told us. We practiced using a Geiger counter. Our families kept a stash of emergency supplies in the safest part of the house (which got used when a hurricane struck, so the supplies were useful). We curled up under our desks at school during duck and cover drills. When we grew too big to fit there, we filed out into the hallway for drills and stood facing the hallway walls, with elbows touching the walls and fingers interlocked behind our heads.
We knew all of that theatre was futile.
I told my friend about all of that.
Really, what ordinary people did then and what ordinary people do now about the nuclear shadow is simple. We can stock up a bit, just in case. At the least, it’s comforting to do something that feels useful. At the best, it comes in handy when there’s a flood or storm or some other commonplace disruption. We can look at the map and think about whether we might want to visit friends upwind if the nuclear powers start to look too crazy.
But mostly we simply keep on living. We don’t obsess over the shadow and let it paralyze us. Some of us make noise, telling Powers That Be to stop this nuclear insanity and dismantle the arsenals. Whether we’re making that noise or not, for the most part we shove the worry into the back corners of our minds as best we can. We carry on with what we care about and who we care about, day after day. Let that crowd out the shadow. It may not sound like much, but the alternative is to become catatonic with paralyzing fear and miss out on the life and the good in front of us right now.
That’s where our long conversation wrapped up, with my friend feeling more steady.
We remembered the world got through the Cold War, even though sometimes a madman had access to a big red button.
I was a young junior high teacher during the Cuban missile crisis. We took the students out in the hall for drills to prepare for the real possibility that we would be attacked. I thought at the time that it was better to have the drills than not have them in case the missile’s guidance system was not quite accurate, but since we lived in a primary target all of us were almost certain to die if we were attacked. As I look back these decades later, it seems odd that life went on as normal. We were all apprehensive; we all knew that we were facing either instant death or a horrible, much slower death from radiation poisoning. Yet nobody left town. We all just kept going to work.
Fortunately, President Kennedy was able to communicate with Nikita Khrushchev and the two of them agreed to remove the nuclear threat in ways that allowed Khrushchev to maintain his dignity. Our lives were saved.