I was in middle school the last time I contemplated dying in a nuclear fireball. It was 1983, and I had just seen “The Day After,” a TV movie that depicted a fictional but horrifying U.S.-Soviet war.
The movie showed plenty of graphic destruction when the warheads struck the Midwest, but what shook me the most was the moment before impact, when a crowd at a football game watches Minuteman missiles soar into the blue afternoon sky.
“They’re on their way to Russia,” says a character played by John Lithgow. “They take about 30 minutes to reach their target.”
His companion glances at him.
“So do theirs — right?”
The movie was a Generation X milestone, part of an age when Armageddon was baked into pop culture. Looking back, though, it was a milestone of another kind — a moment when things actually started to change.
President Ronald Reagan, the steely defense hawk who months earlier had referred to the Soviet Union as “the evil empire,” got a sneak peek of the film at Camp David. He reputedly was so moved that he was inspired to slow the arms race.
Four years after the broadcast, the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed a treaty to reduce their arsenals. Four years after that, the Soviet Union was no more. Though the weapons didn’t disappear — Pakistan and North Korea have since joined the nuclear club, with Iran reportedly in hot pursuit — fixating on them came to seem like the quixotic pastime of ex-hippies and radical nuns. Personally, I didn’t give them a thought.
I’m sure thinking about them now.
Vladimir Putin’s gossamer-veiled threats to use some of his 6,000 nukes during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has revived the old menace. Deep down, I still don’t fear the apocalypse — President Joe Biden, for what it’s worth, recently said Americans shouldn’t worry about nuclear war — but if the last two years have taught us anything, it’s that we shouldn’t dismiss the worst-case scenario.
I wasn’t exactly reassured when I sought official advice on what to do if the missiles fly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, citing the World Health Organization, offers nuggets verging on the absurd: “If you are near the blast when it occurs: Turn away and close and cover your eyes to prevent damage to your sight.”
The Illinois Emergency Management Agency doesn’t include military-grade nuclear strikes among its list of potential disasters, though it has produced recommendations about dealing with improvised nuclear devices and dirty bombs. (Long story short: Go inside, get rid of your clothes, take a shower and wait for official instructions.)
A spokesman said the agency no longer keeps an active list of fallout shelters. When WBEZ-FM looked for some in Chicago five years ago, the few they found were beneath South Side firehouses and had been turned into storage areas.
Even if you were to survive the blast, you might soon wish you hadn’t. In their book “Nuclear Choices for the Twenty-First Century,” scientists Richard Wolfson and Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress paint a horrifying picture of the world after nuclear war, with food stores destroyed, social structures shattered, and enough smoke and soot in the air to cause a disastrous temperature plunge.
“Fallout from an all-out war would expose most of the belligerent nations’ surviving populations to radiation levels ranging from harmful to fatal,” they write. “And the effects of nuclear war would extend well beyond the warring nations, possibly including climate change severe enough to threaten much of the planet’s human population.”
The University of Chicago-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has for decades kept a symbolic Doomsday Clock meant to focus public attention on the threat of nuclear war. The closer the big hand gets to midnight, the greater the risk.
At the height of the Cold War, just after the Soviet Union detonated its first thermonuclear bomb, the clock was set at 2 minutes to midnight. That was as close as it got until 2020, when the bulletin’s experts, citing climate change and disinformation as additional concerns, moved it to 100 seconds to midnight.
The panel reconvened recently to ponder whether the big hand should move again after Putin’s nuclear threats, but in the end decided to leave it alone. Rachel Bronson, the group’s president and CEO, said Russia’s moves so far appear to be saber-rattling, though that’s scary enough.
“It’s very worrisome,” she said. “We know in conflict misperception has often led to unintended consequences, but in terms of the rhetoric, which is terrifying, and some of the movement, we haven’t really seen those being aligned, so in part that’s why we didn’t move it.”
I told Bronson I thought younger people weren’t tuned into the threat because they didn’t grow up with visions of annihilation woven into the cultural wallpaper. She had a different take, saying that with climate change, nuclear proliferation and COVID-19, they’ve never been able to take security for granted.
At the moment, it doesn’t look as if it will get any better. Citing government figures, Bronson said the U.S. will spend more than $1 trillion on its nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years. No matter what happens in Ukraine, we seem fated to keep playing the world’s most dangerous game of chicken.
“I mean, shame on us, we’re committing (younger generations) to that,” she said. “They just don’t know it.”
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ABOUT THE WRITER
John Keilman is a general assignment reporter for the Chicago Tribune.
