@Precis No, I don't recover "duck and cover" drills from third grade in 1963, because they didn't have third grade or "duck and cover" here in the UK, and I wasn't born until 1964.
@MishaVanMollusq The UK is half the size of Oregon. By the end of the Cold War there were an estimated 2000-5000 H-bombs pointed at us. I never lived more than 5km from a strategic target until 1989.
I was a 15 minute bike ride from Sandia Labs. My high school honors science class got tours of their nuclear bomb-making facilities, presumably to recruit us to work there. Didn’t do my mental state any good.
@cstross The first few years of my life. I'm old enough to remember the horror of all the adults talking about how we were all going to die, the weekly air-raid siren drills, and news about scary Russians and scary Americans wanting to drop the bomb. I vividly remember being terrified all the time.
But I'm young enough that I spent my teenage years in the hyper-optimistic 90's, which I suppose were a brief cultural over-correction to the horrors of the cold war.
@datarama I was 25 when the Berlin Wall came down, so it blighted my youth (and I think I have residual PTSD from it to this day). On the other hand, I can relate to how the young un's feel about climate change.
@cstross I've largely come to think that the defining difference between early millennials and being born on the arse-end of Generation X (like myself) is whether or not you got to experience enough of the last chapter of the Cold War to get your head at least slightly fucked up by it.
(Inasmuch as those generational cohorts make sense outside a very specific North American context at all.)
@datarama I was leading edge GenX. Indeed, my elder siblings are unambiguousl trailing edge boomers: I beat the "official" GenX start date of 1965 by about ten weeks. (Generations are kind of smeary, so I go with cultural identity over calendrical procrusteanism.)
@cstross yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. I'm leading edge GenX while Husband is a final decade Boomer. A visit to Berlin when the sons - born mid-90s - were around 8 and 10 was ... quite something. So let us tell you about this Wall, and Checkpoint Charlie...
@cstross@JulietEMcKenna I'm old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis… What I did not know at the time, nor did any Americans, was that a) there were already some atomic bombs in Cuba, ready to launch, and b) a Soviet submarine that US destroyers were harassing had nuclear-armed torpedoes and a crew that was overstressed by being too long in a sub that was in tropical waters but was designed for cold water.
@SteveBellovin@cstross@JulietEMcKenna Serhii Plokhy's Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis is interesting on that incident though I wonder how accurate all the interpretations of people's memories are.
Apparently, there were 4 diesel-powered Soviet submarines in the area, armed with many conventional torpedoes and one nuclear torpedo (10 kt) each. The one carrying the group commander was the one forced to the surface and harassed. What's frightening is how close it seems to have come to launching its nuclear torpedo at a US destroyer.
A US aircraft dropped flares on the submarine for photographic purposes but the Soviets thought it was an attack, pointed its torpedo tubes at the destroyer and prepared to dive. It was only an apology via the signal light on the destroyer, seen as the Soviets were delayed clearing their bridge, that stopped them from actually launching.
@cstross@datarama Similar here; I (b 1978) am definitely very early millennial; my sister (b1981) is Gen X, despite us being "officially" on opposite sides of that generation divide.
Mostly it's because I was a very early bulletin-boards-and-modems kid, while she wasn't
And I've realized that we lived through a very rare time of the horror of the cold war disappearing, and everything getting not just better but more stable and predictable and boring as I grew older.
And now it's all "may you live in interesting times" times a thousand all of a sudden.
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