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(The horrific disaster in Japan has renewed the kind of fears about all things nuclear with which my own generation grew up. This is a recounting of those days).
We grew up in a time when nuclear war with the Soviet Union was considered inevitable. It was just a matter of time. My father told me that stunning fact so often I took it for granted. He believed it so strongly he made preparations for doomsday.
Dad turned our basement into a bomb shelter. Every so often, he would take me down to the basement and show me what he had accomplished. The concrete was so many inches thick — so thick he believed he had actually taken the ultimate step toward protecting his family against the monster bomb. Cans of food and bottled water lined the shelves and Dad assured they were rotated so they never reached the expiration date. He explained in detail what all of us should do when the dreaded warning came.
It is tough for me to remember my thoughts as he went through the laborious details of the Cardella plan to survive a nuclear war. Dad wasn’t crazy. I wanted to believe this man who protected his family from physical harm his entire life had figured out a way to protect us forever against all harm, even a nuclear bomb.
The neat, tidy basement would be where we would stage our last stand. The walls were filled on one side with pictures of all of the modern popes and on the other side with images of our presidents, in line of succession. The picture of JFK had a black border around it. Dad described in frightening detail about how it might be after the bomb dropped, at least in his mind.
We would be safe in our bunker, but other survivors who had not prepared for Armageddon would be seeking food and shelter. We can’t take them in, he would shake his head sadly, or there wouldn’t be enough food and water for us. We might have to keep them out by force. A retired police officer, Dad had a permit for a weapon and he was prepared to use it to protect the shelter from being invaded. This was serious business and we treated it as such. Our biggest problem in surviving, we thought, was our proximity to The Navy Yard. Dad figured the area might be a prime target for the enemy and if they dropped the bomb on that target, the bomb shelter and all of his preparations would be meaningless. We would be vaporized. The only consolation, Dad thought, was death would be instantaneous.
In order to understand our mindset, you have to understand we were less than 20 years removed from when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The devastation of a nuclear bomb was real. Dad had always questioned why Truman dropped that second bomb on Japan. He understood the first one. But why not wait until the horror of Hiroshima sank in and forced the Japanese to realize continuing the war was useless? Why go ahead a few days later and drop the bomb on Nagasaki? And Truman later said he never lost any sleep over the decision. How could that be? We had seen films of the complete devastation wrought by this weapon. It was not difficult to project there would come a tipping point where we would engage the Soviets in a nuclear exchange, even if only by accident. Hollywood was producing films such as “On the Beach,” “Fail Safe,” and “Dr. Strangelove.”
We were shown government-produced propaganda films in school that made it seem like all you had to do to survive a nuclear blast was to close the blinds, go down the basement, munch on crackers and canned food for two weeks and emerge unscathed into a world that was still intact. These same films directed us school kids to hide under our desks should we be in class when the bomb hit. Surviving the bomb was as simple as following your teacher’s directions, not much more complicated than a routine fire drill.
The newsreels always followed up the death and destruction in those two Japanese cities with the fond promise of a future where the atom would be used for peaceful purposes. The future seemed bright, powered by the atom. Our source of energy would be clean, cheap and limitless. The Cold War intruded on that reality. The ’50s became a time of fear. We deluded ourselves into thinking that if the Rosenbergs hadn’t passed our nuclear secrets to the Soviets, they would have never developed the weapon.
Dad never lived to see the end of the Cold War. He died with the bomb shelter still intact. The canned food and bottled water were still on the shelves and the pictures of the popes and the presidents kept up-to-date. I often wonder how he would have handled the end of the threat from the Soviet Union. But if his tinge of paranoia had a purpose, he would have peered into the future and seen not only the promise of the nuclear reactors being built, but the threat as well.
Sometimes, as I watch the chaotic scenes from Japan play out on television, I see Dad with that pensive look on his face, the fear starting all over again, the concern that somehow we had still managed to figure out a way to destroy ourselves, that doomsday was still inching closer. SPR
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