Writes RFK Jr. in "American Values/Lessons I Learned From My Family."
While I idolized my dad, I just couldn’t go along with him on that one. What about all that planning and practicing for the apocalypse at Our Lady of Victory? What was the point of all those drills?...
I felt like I did my best work amid calamity; I tended to prosper in chaos. I knew I could thrive in the woods. I would eat birds’ eggs, snakes, frogs’ legs, freshwater mussels, crayfish, mudpuppies—exactly the circumstance in which I seemed to flourish.
That last question is a punchline set up by a discussion a few pages back of the preparations at his school, Our Lady of Victory, where, in the event of nuclear war, the students would relocate to "the basement, where we would feast by candlelight on the dehydrated food and canned fruit cocktail then stored in elephantine canisters against the cellar walls."I was ready to fight off mutants and do my part in recreating civilization after the apocalypse. Were we truly going to waste all that canned fruit cocktail?
Are you old enough to have a memory of living through the Cuban Missile Crisis? RFK Jr. was 8 years old at the time, so the passage above is told from the point of view of a little boy. He imagined a life of adventure, like something in the sci-fi movies he'd seen.
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"Are you old enough to have a memory of living through the Cuban Missile Crisis?"
I was 7 and have no memory of it whatsoever, which has always kind of surprised me. My parents may have shielded me from it. We did have a "fallout shelter" of sorts in the basement, but it was kind of an abstract thing. And there was discussion of Truax Field (4 miles from our house) being a potential nuclear target. In retrospect, I suppose those topics may have come up due to what the adults knew was happening vis a vis the Cuban Missile Crisis.
My brother and I in summer of '58--ages 11 and 9--decided that we needed a fallout shelter and proceeded to start digging one in the crawl space under the house. We dug a trench about 4 foot deep and 12 feet long before my dad came down and realizing the risk of cave-in forbade any further digging. But it did give him the idea that he could add a basement to the house, and he hired a contractor to do it in '59.
"He imagined a life of adventure, like something in the sci-fi movies he'd seen."
Little boys still imagine this when they think of nuclear wastelands. They even made a video game out of it. It's called S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
Not that old, but I did go to high school on an air force base that was a first strike target in the event of a nuclear war with the USSR. (It was an A-10 base in the UK) We had regular air raid drills including full MOPP gear for the military personnel. The original Red Dawn came out the year after I graduated, but we did think about that type of thing.
To be more honest the CND protestors outside the gate were a bigger problem.
Living in Florida during the crisis the first thing that happened was Navy Lt Daddy disappeared for a few weeks to go fly planes somewhere. Even then I knew that living so close to Mayport Naval Station home base of the Mediterranean 6th Fleet meant we were all goners regardless of how sturdy my Catholic grade school desk was that I dove beneath to the command of a nun's whistle. I'd seen TV film of nukes going off. But other than that it was a lot of area hub-bub and bomb shelter talk that never really interrupted my 7 year old life. I'll call it a push.
The future always belongs to those who show up.
"During that phone call from the White House, my father told us that if there was a nuclear war, none of us would want to be alive anyhow..... I, for one, intended to be among the survivors. Nuclear holocaust, I reasoned, could hardly be worse than school."
There were no treaties. There was no START or SALT stockpile/delivery system agreements back then. An exchange would have been total, and I don't just mean nuclear. It would've included the "CB" as well as the "RN", for those that know.
Knowing what we know now about Soviet nuclear force structure and stockpile from 1962, an exchange would've immediately gone counter-value, not counter-force...the Soviets didn't have the warheads or the accuracy for counter-force strikes. Those strikes on urban centers in the US and Europe would've been followed up by "salting" attacks with chemical and biological weapons, of which the Soviets had the advantage in '62.
It would've been hell on earth. Senior was right, you would not have wanted to be alive, and the dead or dying you would get to see would be dying or have died in the worst imaginable ways possible. What land appeared untouched by nuclear strikes would've been instantaneously poisonous to the touch, and your only relief would've been underground for years at a time.
(p.s. If you want to thank someone for avoiding a nuclear holocaust in 1962, don't thank a Kennedy. Thank Vasili Arkhipov.)
Supposedly, JFK refused to go to the bunker the generals had ready for him. He said "either we solve this, or I die," or something like that. Probably another reason they killed him. The thing is too, that his father had seen war, which teaches you that there are worse things than instant death.
But Joe Biden thinks that it's worth risking nuclear war over who gets to rule over some ethnic Russians in a border dispute within the confines of the old Soviet Union.
We had "duck and cover" air raid drills monthly at school. Fallout shelter signs weren't uncommon, I remember a couple at Knott's Berry Farm and some people had shelters in their backyards. Nobody (at least, none of the kids I knew) freaked out over it.
Makes me wonder what all the fuss is over the potential for the planet to be a couple of degrees warmer in 100 years.
I don't remember air raid drills or anything like that. My dad took some civil defense training and brought home a transistor radio--the first one I ever saw. I turned six in 1962. I never imagined living among mutants.
Canned fruit cocktail. Is it true this would be served at pretty nice dinners on the Philippines--a place with plenty of tropical fruit--because it was what Americsns would like?
I was born after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Became aware, and terrified, of the threat of nuclear war around the beginning of 1983. Which I didn't realize until much more recently was a rich year for close calls.
I had dismissed as disaster porn the claims of my classmates that we were tenth on the Soviets' target list. (Oh, so they publish their list? Where can I read that? We're ahead of all these military bases, all those missile silos? Our humble little city, just because GE has a defense plant here?) I figured the closest targets were a state capital, dozens of miles one way, and the Air Force base dozens of miles the other.
Like RFK Jr, I intended to be one of the survivors. Only much later did I understand: The Russians didn't need to publish their list. FEMA (I know, I know) had former nuclear targeting people on our side who they asked, Hey, what would you hit if you were going to throw 500 warheads at us? How about 2,000?
And now I realize we didn't have to be tenth. I still wouldn't have had the chance to put my survival plan to the test, unless they simply missed or we got a dud. The fireball of my nightmares wasn't going to be 40 miles away, but just under 2.
Did you read Alas, Babylon at that time? It seemed there would be a difficult aftermath. But then there was On The Beach...
I was of the "duck and cover" generation. I was 19 years old during the Missile Crisis, and I thought the fear of Nuclear Armageddon was overblown. That year I was even in a play set in the aftermath of a nuclear war, but I saw it as fiction. I do confess that one of my room mates told me that the Soviets had targeted Central Square in Cambridge, MA for a nuclear strike, because that would knock out both Harvard and MIT. I had one bad night about that.
Hell yeah! and the adults' downplaying was bullshit. I was scared because there wasn't a father around and we had no shelter.
But my parent said, if the bomb drops it'll happen so fast you won't know what hit you etc which I knew was totally wrong if the bombs fall 40 miles away like at Long Beach naval shipyard or Edwards AFB.
Fallout, anyone? Radiation sickness? My parent was good with small children but no match for a 13 year old.
LOL!
I live less than 1.5 miles from a primary target. Unless I have 30+ minutes warning, I am dead in the first blast if the missiles fly, and probably dead within a week even with the warning.
If by some chance I do survive the first weeks, I intend to gather up the survivors and march to the remains of D.C. to wait for the politicians to emerge from their bunkers like roaches so that they can be executed in the most painful ways possible.
When I was stationed in Germany in the late 1970s, I had a conversation with some civilians old enough to have lived through WWII. They told me that if WWIII broke out, they hoped the first bomb would land right on them. Some British people told me the same thing. To people who lived through mass bombings of population centers, war was not an abstract idea. They didn’t want to go through it again.
Are you old enough to have a memory of living through the Cuban Missile Crisis?
I was a junior in high school, living in a quarry town in Illinois. I expected that the missiles couldn’t reach us, and that even if they could hit Chicago — and they probably couldn’t — they wouldn’t disturb us. My dad had seven siblings all living on farms, so I figured, probably naively, we’d drive to one of those farms and survive by learning how to do farm work.
Speaking of nuclear war, whoever has his hand up Joe Biden's ass has ordered three thousand members of the reserves called to active duty "to augment the active Armed Forces of the United States for the effective conduct of Operation Atlantic Resolve in and around the United States European Command’s area of responsibility."
Over there! Over there!
In mid-October 1962 my father was dying in the hospital. He had been there for over a month, I'm told, but my sense of time (and reality) was that of a nine-year old and my memories are not that clear.
I do recall seeing the maps on the front pages of the papers, showing distances from Cuban missile bases to cities in the US, but even then, and later, I didn't consider Nuclear War likely.
Now I'm not so sure.
I was in college when Neville Shute's "On The Beach" came out. I nearly dropped out of college. It was so frightening. Now, I know some of his facts were wrong, Indonesia has lots of oil, for example, but I still can't read it.
And now we have a regime of idiots gambling with nuclear war.
I was six at the time and what I remember was being with my parents at the beach when a flock of Navy jets flew right past us just above the waves. I thought that was cool until I saw my parents faces turn white. They denied it years later but I distinctly remember the look on their faces. The good old days with the weekly air sirens and ducking under the desk.
The duck and cover drills were never trained at my elementary school, where I started in 1965. But wee had regular fire drills, where we exited the classrooms quietly and marched in single files up the hall and out the doors and to the fenced playground, there to be monitored by the nuns until we were deemed trained enough to return indoors where the heat was on in winter.
And THAT training was used for a practical purpose once a year. When Ringling Brothers came to town, they marched their circus wagons and various animals but especially - gloriously - !ELEPHANTS! - from the train station across town, down Independence Boulevard, and into the Charlotte Coliseum. I don't know how the nuns knew the exact timing, but we all got to use our well-honed fire drill tactics to march out to the playground, thinking it was a fire drill. Moments later music from up the street would drag us all to the fence, and the parade would pass. What a thrill that was.
Show me a duck and cover drill that ever provided as much entertainment. And what kids will get out of today's active shooter drills, except expertise at "7 minutes in heaven" at sleepovers, I can only imagine.
Haha love RFKjr wanting to live. I'm a kid and I feel like I just got here and want to live my life!
I will always be grateful I got to do that. Though I might have made better use of it if I had been influenced by so many doomers.
As usual the liberal media would not let a kid forget about the pending END OF THE WORLD.
During that phone call from the White House, my father told us that if there was a nuclear war, none of us would want to be alive anyhow.
Huh? Oh, no, no -- when they go down into the mine, everyone would still be alive! There would be no shocking memories, and the prevailing emotion will be one of nostalgia for those left behind . . combined with a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead!
Some time ago a crazy dream came to me
I dreamt I was walkin’ into World War Three
Are you old enough to have a memory of living through the Cuban Missile Crisis?
I was 6 and remember my parents talking about it while watching the news. I did have post apocalyptic day dreams in the years after that. Things like me and Barbara Eden being the only two people that survived. I think Bob Dylan wrote a song about that - must have read my mind.
"I'm sorry too, Dimitri. I'm as sorry as you are. We're all very sorry here."
Relax. The Brandon Army secretary is recruiting people who have no connection to the military. They way we rid ourselves of a "military caste" that fought our previous wars. Officers are to be recruited by their percentage in the census. Race will trump experience.
And then the really funny thing is that it turns out that a bigger threat to young Bobby Junior's life in the 1950's and 60's -- a much more real and present threat to him than nuclear annihilation -- would have been tetanus, pertussis, polio or measles. All, however, erased from concern for the young Kennedys as a result of childhood vaccinations.
JFK's "father had seen war, which teaches you that there are worse things than instant death". Really? When did he see war? He doesn't seem to have ever worn a uniform or seen combat. He spent World War I as assistant general manager of a shipyard in Massachusetts, building warships thousands of miles from the action. Joe Kennedy's only brush with war was when he was ambassador to Britain for the first two months of the London Blitz, before FDR sacked him for defeatism. Did he experience German bombing? Apparently not. As Wikipedia puts it:
"Kennedy and his family retreated to the countryside during the bombings of London by German aircraft in World War II. In so doing, he damaged his reputation with the British. This move prompted Randolph Churchill to say, 'I thought my daffodils were yellow until I met Joe Kennedy'."
Around 1962, my parents bought a house (in Center Square Green, Blue Bell,PA) on a small "hill", complete with a bomb shelter. It was the coolest thing. My dad forbade us to go down into it. I snuck down anyway and he had a couple of glass milk bottle filled with water and an army cot. It was damp and musky, and there might have been a can of Sterno and some wooden matches.
I was wary of nuclear war during the timeframe of "The Day After", but perhaps I get into the fantasy of being inside the fiction and because I had a very young daughter -- separated by a few miles due to a divorce. I wanted to protect her and didn't really care about myself.
MarcusB. THEOLDMAN
Dad was XO of an ammunition ship based in Norfolk, which emptied of ships. We were almost 2, 4, and 6. I sure hope we didn't misbehave.
I was helping model Soviet strikes on the US in the mid 80s, using a 300 baud DARPAnet link to the super!computer at Los Alamos. Northern Maine was the only place in the lower 48 that was unlikely to have deadly (to some people) fallout from a full volley, based on our data base of winds. But we didn't worry about them hitting Canada.
We were the first people to model the blast effect on every county's livestock, using a FEMA data base of pig, chicken, turkey, and cow populations.
I was 12yo and in middle school. I remember the announcement came over the school intercom...the Russian ships had turned back. My good friend Arnaldo Santana (deceased, former movie actor (Scarface), was in the back of the class and let out "Thank God!". I suddenly realized how scared the population was, even 12 year olds.
"Even then I knew that living so close to Mayport Naval Station home base of the Mediterranean 6th Fleet meant we were all goners regardless of how sturdy my Catholic grade school desk was that I dove beneath to the command of a nun's whistle."
I lived within 3 or 4 miles of Mayport Naval Station from 1963 to 1981, (except for a few years away in Gainesville for college).
"While I idolized my dad, I just couldn’t go along with him on that one. What about all that planning and practicing for the apocalypse at Our Lady of Victory? What was the point of all those drills?..."
It was intended to ameliorate the fears of the public, and to give them the illusion they could personally take effective steps to avoid annihilation.
I was 10 in October of 1962. I remember listening to the news on a table radio we kept on a high shelf in our kitchen and thinking that war was imminent.
Re: Robert Cook:
It was intended to ameliorate the fears of the public, and to give them the illusion they could personally take effective steps to avoid annihilation.
I was in Seoul during the evacuation alert false alarm triggered by the North Korean launch this May. Wasn't listening closely so I didn't know why it was debris risk (as opposed to nuke risk). But we didn't do anything anyhow, just went on with our day -- really, what could we do?
I was 12 then and an altar boy. One of my religious duties was serving mass at the local "bad girls home". There were no boys at the "bad girls home" of course so they had to recruit servers from the local parish.
At twelve, I was just figuring out the concept of "bad girls" so things were starting to go right for me.
But I remember the Missile Crisis vividly. I'm with RFK Jr. I thought the whole thing was a big adventure.
The USSR did not have the ability to destroy the USA in 1962. That came later. The missiles from Cuba would probably have destroyed NYC and DC, but they didn't have any ICBMs that could fire before they got bombed by our B-47 bombers (of which we had thousands.)
The USSR would have been annihilated.
There's a reason krushchev blinked. Also, this is why in the next few yeats the Soviets built thousands of missiles.
Big Mike.
We lived in Des Plaines(google it)at the time and my dad was a civil defense warden or whatever they were called. I remember that he brought home a bunch of pamphlets on fallout shelters. Due to our proximity to Orchard Airport(O'Hare) he and my mom decided it would be a waste of effort to build a fallout shelter.
I was in the the fifth grade in San Antonio during the Cuban missile crisis. I remember feeling really frighten down to the pit of my stomach. We really did the ‘get under the desk and kiss your ass goodbye’ thing.
Pretty much every kid was either a current military dependent, or their parent was a veteran. SA being a huge military town, we knew we would be hit in the first salvo if the ballon went up.
@ NotWhoIUsedtoBe, who said...
Kruscheve didn't "blink". JFK agreed to remove the Jupiter IRBMS we had installed in Italy and Turkey against the USSR, in return for the Soviets taking back the IRBMs they were installing in Cuba.
That fact was conveniently ignored by Kennedy hagiographers.
In 1962 we had a few Titan I operational ICBMs, but so did the Russians,with about ten R-7A's deployed. The latter had much larger payloads than the Titans.
Both ICBM types were designed to be launched within 15 to 30 minutes. Subsonic B-47's would have been hours away from the R-7A sites. If Russian ICBMS were in the air and targeted at our Titan sites, the latter would be glowing rubble in their silos before they could be launched.
We could not "destroy" each others countries then , but in theory could incinerate major cities. Close enough.
"I was in Seoul during the evacuation alert false alarm triggered by the North Korean launch this May. Wasn't listening closely so I didn't know why it was debris risk (as opposed to nuke risk). But we didn't do anything anyhow, just went on with our day -- really, what could we do?"
Nothing. If an armada of nuclear missles have launched and are on their way, those in the targeted areas can really do nothing to avoid whatever will happen.
Well, at least RFK Jr. could perish with his mom and siblings knowing his dad was holed up safely in the White House bomb shelter with a bimbo on each knee.
Whoops. He might rethink using the word "survivor" for a couple of days, based on his own recent nuclear comments.
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