OCTOBER 21, 2021 – Once upon a time I was in third grade—at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 16 – 28, 1962). On the day before Kennedy and Khrushchev stepped back from the ledge, I kept my fingers crossed from the 8:00 a.m. radio news until the sun went down.
During that intense time, the Crisis was all anyone could talk about. We knew what to do if the Russians launched an attack during school hours: follow the yellow and black fallout shelter signs to the school basement. Word on the playground was that it’d take 15 minutes for the ballistic missiles to travel from Cuba to the Twin Cities. I worried. By the time the air-raid sirens went off, would enough time remain to get to the basement?
Our house was a better place to be for a nuclear attack—or so my dad said. In designing our house which had been built the year before, Dad had included a “bomb shelter” under the garage. All six sides were built of reinforced concrete, and the entire space was a full step down from the rest of the basement. What troubled me were the windows—the sizable one on the back side of the room, where the ground sloped away from the house, and a smaller, higher window on an adjoining wall. Dad explained that to prevent “fallout,” he’d block the windows with plywood panels. I wasn’t so sure. Worse, he’d never got around to making the panels.
Of course, the attack never occurred, and luckily our “bomb shelter” at home and our “designated safe space” at school weren’t put to the test. Yet, the episode left a lasting impression.
The next year, inside the National Guard Exhibition at the Minnesota State Fair, fair-goers could watch a mock response to a mock nuclear attack. It was chilling. The show opened with a film featuring a sunny, summer day in Minnesota, with scenes of the capitol, pedestrians in downtown Minneapolis, and kids playing baseball in a park. Suddenly, the wail of an air-raid siren split the air. The pleasant, familiar scenes on the screen vanished, and Soviet missiles roared through space. Next, three guardsmen rushed onto the stage and took their seats at consoles that anticipated Star Trek battle stations. This action was accompanied by movie snippets depicting the relay of commands from White House to the battle stations, then missile silos opening as a stern voice announced, “This is not a drill! This is not a drill!”
In the next scene, our missiles launch launched and soon knocked out the incoming rockets. The demonstration ended with a return to the opening scene of the capitol, pedestrians on the street, and kids playing ball.
Of course, other crises were afoot in those days, as they are in any era, but the threat of wiping ourselves out by a minutes-long thermo-nuclear war occupied front and center stage.
October perspective.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
