Old anxieties came flooding back last week as the Russian president launched a massive military invasion of Ukraine, while warning potential foes who intervened of “consequences greater than any you have ever faced in history.'
Growing up in Las Vegas in the 1980s, Glynn Walker always knew he could die in a nuclear attack.
As the years passed, Walker stopped worrying about nuclear bombs as other threats emerged: terrorism, the war in Iraq, climate change. But the old anxieties came flooding back last week as Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a massive military invasion of Ukraine, while warning potential foes who intervened of “consequences greater than any you have ever faced in history,” and putting his nuclear forces on high alert.
Experts say that Putin has little to gain from starting a nuclear war, but his recent rhetoric has stirred up long-buried fears in generations of Americans who grew up believing nuclear annihilation was not just possible, but practically inevitable. “There was a lot of research that showed the youth at that time experienced deep fear and anxiety that adults could no longer protect them from adult things,” said Spencer Weart, a science historian and author of “The Rise of Nuclear Fear.” “People who joined the counterculture in the ‘60s will tell you it was ‘duck and cover’ and hiding from ‘the bomb’ that convinced them we had to change the system.
As a child in New York City in the 1960s, Victor Narro remembers feeling comforted whenever he saw a sign indicating a fallout shelter — three yellow triangles in a black circle. “As a kid I held that image as a sacred image of safety,” he said. “That was the indoctrination.” For Kim Lachance Shadrow, 46, a freelance journalist in Long Beach, the week’s events brought back memories of a particularly frightening music video from the 1980s, Genesis’ “Land of Confusion.”
Actor Peter Sellers on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”
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