Like many children living in the late 1960s and early 1970s, my worst recurring nightmare was nuclear war.
As schools and cities made disaster plans and built preparedness shelters, my young mind resolved that it wasn’t a matter of if, but when.
The problem is, preparedness didn’t seem to matter, since most of us had learned about the horrific effects from the United States’ nuclear bomb deployment in Japan during World War II. If that was a first-generation example of nuclear destruction, I didn’t want to see the next generation’s potential.
But as the Cold War subsided, apparently the real-time nuclear threat subsided, as well.
“You can’t imagine what it’s like,” I once told my children, “going to bed at night and fearing the world as you know it may end at any minute.”