Nuclear memories: Russia, war and childhood fears rekindled

Those of us of a certain age remember the threat.

The 1960s were a time of domestic turmoil, yes. But they came, too, with a darker, existential menace: atomic bombs, ICBMs, thermonuclear war, annihilation. The buzzwords of destruction, with the Soviet Union seen as the architect of it all.

Nuclear war was the shadow in our lives. Now, it feels, those shadows are back.

The war in Ukraine, especially Russian President Vladimir Putin’s references to Moscow's nuclear arsenal — and global discussions about nuclear weapons — have awakened memories that I thought were buried. And each day that Russia's conventional war effort seems stalled, the more vivid my recollections become.

Families could buy bomb shelters and students dutifully practiced “duck and cover” — hiding under school desks as if that could save us. Two 1964 movies, “Fail Safe" and “Dr. Strangelove,” had similar plots — a mistaken U.S. order to bomb the USSR — but only the latter was played for laughs. “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” in 1970 gave us the bleak aftermath of an atomic bomb.

The voiceover said it all: "In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe lies a medium-size star. And one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead.”

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Some of us in those years — “nuclear brats” with military family members who trained to intercept Russian bombers and who flew nuclear payloads — lived with the possibilities of nukes every day. We hoped that what was possible didn't become probable.

My dad's Air Force squadron, the 87th, flew the McDonnell F101B Voodoo out of Clinton County Air Force Base in Wilmington, Ohio. The alert fighters carried two Genies. They were unguided air-to-air rockets. Nuclear ones.

The squadron’s job...