Fear of nuclear annihilation scarred children growing up in the Cold War, studies later showed

“What do you want to be if you grow up?”

“I remember going to bed one night when I was 11, seriously afraid I would not be alive in the morning,” remembers writer David Ropeik. The date was unmistakable. It was the Cuban Missile Crisis, in October 1962.

Fear of total human annihilation is a tough feeling to live with every day. For children growing up in the Cold War, mutually assured nuclear destruction literally haunted their dreams. Many of them wrote letters to the president, begging Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and their successors not to push the button. Others just prayed the bomb would kill them instantly, preferring swift death to years of sickness and grief.

At the turn of the 20th century, people loved radiation. They were using radium to paint watch faces, and injected it in toothpaste for a mesmerizing glow. The technology was seen as a harbinger of a bright American future, a sustainable source of energy, and a miraculous ingredient for scientific and medical breakthroughs.

Then the United States bombed Japan. On August 6, 1945, the world watched 80,000 people perish in Hiroshima, followed by another 70,000 victims three days later in Nagasaki. Bodies within the immediate blast zone disintegrated into black dust. The bomb’s thermonuclear wave peeled back human flesh and toppled buildings; the flash alone caused severe burns. A deadly firestorm erupted. Those just outside the immediate blast were hit with such extreme radiation that their vital functions failed within days.

“The fear of irrational death…has burst out of the subconscious and into the conscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehensions,” wrote Norman Cousins in a Saturday Review editorial, days later. The Western world’s hopeful fascination with nuclear power perished.

That didn’t stop the government from building a hydrogen bomb 450 times more powerful than the one dropped on Nagasaki. The weapon’s first thermonuclear test was completed in 1952.

When the Department of Defense wasn’t urging citizens to build fallout shelters, it was sharing instructional films featuring friendly animals. The official 1951 Duck and Cover film, featuring Bert the Turtle, was intended to teach schoolchildren how to protect themselves from a nuclear blast.

“They’d show you these films of buildings exploding at test sites,” Danny Lee Ladely told the Lincoln Journal Star in 2006. “It was pretty scary. There was no way (hiding under a desk) was going to save you. We kids said, ‘You can bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.’”

For David Ropeik and many others, the Cuban Missile Crisis was that moment, the point of no return, a feeling of teetering on death. One of the biggest cultural oversights at the time, however, was the notion that children couldn’t grasp the seriousness of the world stage. On the contrary, many of them grasped it all too well.

President Kennedy had the proof in his mailbox. One child wrote in 1961, “I am 9 years old. I don’t like the plans you are planning. I am too young to die.” Another 11-year-old boy asked, “What will be left of this wonderful world in ten years if someone presses the button?” According to Awaiting Armageddon: How Americans Faced the Cuban Missile Crisis (2003), teachers reported a change in their students’ artwork, specially an uptick in mushroom clouds. Beside a drawing of an explosion, one six-year-old girl presented self-portrait of her own death. In one Atlanta elementary school, a fifth grade girl passed a note to a boy. “Are you scared?” it read. “No,” he replied. “I am,” she wrote.

At home, children anxiously settled into their new fear-based realities. When searchlights panned her street, one girl hid under the bed for fear of a missile attack. In reality, a new supermarket had opened nearby. Another family heard an explosion. While the parents checked the furnace, their 12-year-old son walked to the window, peered out, and smiled. “No mushroom cloud,” he said, before returning to his homework. “I remember many times hearing noises that would make me say, ‘Could that be…”?” remembered a film executive who was a high school senior during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Older children, or those who aged into teenagers during the Cold War, tended to have a more resigned outlook. A Florida sophomore told The Miami Herald she hoped “that if a bomb comes, I’m not around to see what happens afterward.” Another threatened that if he learned the bomb was coming, he would run and stand outside rather than duck and cover.

Others derived opportunistic humor. Memoirist David Obst wrote in Too Good to Be Forgotten that his fear of dying before losing his virginity inspired a lusty pickup line. He asked girls whether they “wanted to live without ever having made love.”

A common joke during these years was “What do you want to be if you grow up?”

Research on the effects of the nuclear threat on children is chilling. At the end of the 1950s, 60 percent of American children reported having nightmares about nuclear war. Few other comprehensive surveys were conducted at this time, though studies multiplied in the early 1980s. In the 1960s, 44 percent of children in one survey predicted a serious nuclear incident. By 1979, 70 percent of interviewees the same age felt sure of an attack. Researchers noted that the latter survey respondents seemed more resigned than their 1960s counterparts. A 1984 survey of 1,100 Toronto schoolchildren found that many reported feeling helpless and powerless in the face of nuclear war. For them, the issue was rarely discussed in the home.

A policy of silence, whether intentional or not, pervaded many Cold War households. When not directly removed from discussions of looming Soviet threats, children were the victims of their parents’ own denial. “The idea of exterminating ourselves is so chilling that we have decided to deny it to ourselves and to our children and pretend it cannot happen,” wrote Carlos Salguero, assistant professor at the Yale University School of Medicine and Child Study Center, in 1983. He called the phenomenon a “special realm of existential absurdity.”

In 1979, after the rise of the government-sponsored atomic age and space race, the accident at Three Mile Island created a newfound nuclear panic. Even so-called responsible applications of nuclear power were considered highly dangerous. Add to that an escalating nuclear arms race and international weapons buildup, and the 1980s birthed a new generation of Cold War kiddies. Even Mr. Rogers released a five episodes in 1983 as part of a “Conflict” series.

Perhaps the strongest cultural reflection of this fear was the television film The Day After, also released in 1983. The first half of the movie introduces the conflict between NATO forces; the second half depicts the consequences of a Soviet bomb dropped on Kansas City, Missouri. Finally, stripped of symbolism and superheroes, here was a fact-based depiction of what humans could expect in the event of a nuclear attack. And director Nicholas Meyer held little back.

Before the movie even aired, critics aimed to censor its horrors and the media warned that the images might be too graphic for children. Some school teachers even wrote home to parents, begging them not to show their kids a vision of World War III. But the country needed release, and families were finally willing to approach their biggest fears, even if it was just a simulation. Two days before the film aired on ABC, Washington Post critic Tom Shales wrote, “Who should watch it? Everyone should watch it. Who will be able to forget it? No one will be able to forget it.”

An estimated 100 million Americans watched the film when it aired, ranking The Day After the highest-rated TV movie to this day.

President Ronald Reagan watched it, too. In his diary, he wrote that the film was “very effective and left me greatly depressed.” In his memoir, he revealed that The Day After partly inspired his signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty in 1987, an agreement with Mikhail Gorbachev to eliminate all short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles.

More than 30 years later, the impact of the film and its profound moment of communal vulnerability are still felt.

In a 2016 episode of The Americans, various households watch The Day After. After the viewing, 15-year-old Paige, whose parents are secret Soviet spies, approaches her father. “You really think it’s all going to end like that? Everything?” she asks. He explains that’s why he and her mother side with the Soviet cause. “I just hope we’re all together and it’s quick,” Paige concludes. “It’s better if we just get wiped out straight away than get sick or anything.”

The moment isn’t uplifting, but it’s honest. And prevailing research around Cold War child psychology recommends just that. Postwar denial and silence wouldn’t do. It only increases anxiety and worsens impulse control in young people. Families faced with the threat of nuclear violence should foster early and honest communication with their children, and present ways to confront their fear, express it, “transform it, and put it in the service of humanity,” insisted Salguero in 1983.

“It is essential that young people not be left alone with their fears. It is essential that they make contact with others who are willing to hear them and to share their concerns,” wrote Harvard professor Dr. William R. Beardslee in 1986.

And now it might be time to start talking once again.