Growing up during the Cold War
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The other day I was thinking about how things have changed during my lifetime. One of the things I mused about was the Cold War with the USSR. From a very early time, maybe as early as 1949, when I started school, it was obvious to me that Soviet Russia was an enemy.
I remember a headline when I was 8 or 9 about the Russians exploding a hydrogen bomb, and that people were upset about it. I remember also some films demonstrating what to do in the event of a nuclear attack; essentially, the advice was to get under your desk. Even as a small boy, however, I didn’t think that would do much good if an atom bomb was dropped nearby. During his campaign for the presidency, John Kennedy asserted that the Eisenhower administration had neglected our defense needs, saying that the Soviets had a whole bunch of missiles with hydrogen warheads they could unleash on the United States. Turned out that was an exaggeration, but it sure worried people.
But it wasn’t until the early 1960s, when I was attending the University of Wyoming, that the dangers of the Cold War really hit home. I would frequently have to travel to Cheyenne. I mention that because there were silos, for Atlas missiles, I believe, located near the freeway between Laramie and Cheyenne. I’m not sure why, but even before the Cuban missile crisis, I was aware of these silos and missiles.
In October 1962, photographs were taken by an American U-2 spy plane showing the clandestine installation of missile launch facilities in Cuba. The United States immediately imposed a military blockade on Cuba and declared that it would not allow nuclear weapons into Cuba. Whereupon a tense standoff ensued, in which the whole world watched Soviet vessels, presumably with nuclear missiles, slowly sail toward Cuba. The attention of the country was riveted on Cuba, and I remember watching President Kennedy address the crisis and it scared the heck out of me. But what really got to me was what I saw when driving to Cheyenne one day in that October.
A missile silo about a half mile south of the freeway had suddenly shown activity. The missile in that silo was part of the nuclear deterrent force of the United States and I’m sure carried a big hydrogen bomb, many times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb. And what I saw that October was one of the most chilling sights of my life. The missile had been pulled up out of the silo and was issuing steam, or some such effluent, showing that it was being readied for launch. And toward the top of the silo a big red light I’d never seen before was ominously blinking.
That image has haunted me through the years, frequently popping into my mind. What I’d seen made me realize how close we came to a nuclear Armageddon in 1962, one that would have wiped out tens of millions of people both in the United States and in Russia. Fortunately, a compromise was finally reached (I think in good part to the calm resolve of John Kennedy), and a monster disaster was avoided. In preparation for this column I read a Wikipedia article about the Cuban missile crisis and it stated that this crisis was the closest the Cold War ever came to a full-scale nuclear war.
The people who wrote that article had the advantage of knowing about things that the public did not know in October, 1962, such as a confrontation with a Soviet nuclear submarine that almost started firing between the two sides. But that horrible blinking red light I saw back then had already told me that the situation was much worse than we had known.
After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States and the USSR installed a “hot line,” and in later years further diminished the friction between the two countries by a series of agreements. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, most Americans felt we were finally past the fear of a nuclear holocaust.
Recently, though, Vladimir Putin has taken Russia on a more aggressive path, and for people of my generation, remembering the bad old days of nuclear threats, this is a troubling development.
John Davis was raised in Worland, graduating from W. H. S. in 1961. John began practicing law here in 1973 and is mostly retired.
