Two people come to mind when I recall my teenage anxieties about being blown to kingdom come in a nuclear war. One is an ancient American farmer; the other is my chemistry teacher, Mr Fenwick.
I was in the upper sixth and we were both in the school production of Cabaret. I was hopeless as the leading man; Mr Fenwick was brilliant as the MC, a role for which he wore tights. Honestly, the 80s – what were we like? I digress. After rehearsals I’d give him a lift to Stourbridge Junction train station, and we’d have a pint in the pub across the road. One time we somehow got on to his childhood memories of the Cuban missile crisis. “I remember thinking, ‘Fucking hell, we’re all going to die,’” he said with feeling. This was the first and only time in my school years I heard a teacher use the F-word. He conveyed brilliantly the visceral fear he’d felt more than 20 years earlier; for a fleeting moment he was back there and he’d taken me with him.
For all the horror I felt at that close shave humanity had had, even then it seemed like something rather quaint, a calamity my parents’ generation had narrowly dodged. Good sense had prevailed, and would surely do so again if we ever again found ourselves so close to the abyss.
This was February 1985. I was already on the third Soviet leader of my teenage years: Brezhnev had died just over two years earlier, to be followed, briefly, by Andropov, who was succeeded, even more briefly, by Chernenko. All three of them, in their severe, grey way, had chilled me to the bone. My main preoccupations doubtless concerned all the standard adolescent agonies, but beneath it all the threat of Armageddon was always in the background, humming and clicking away like a Geiger counter. Even as Mr Fenwick and I chatted over our pints of Banks’s bitter, I was dimly aware that there was probably a Soviet missile aimed at us. Perhaps it had “Stourbridge” or “the Black Country” scrawled on it in Cyrillic script. And yet I don’t think I ever truly believed it would happen.
I must have been a subscriber to the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, because I somehow found reassurance in the very madness of it all. I recall an item on television news about a large-scale rehearsal for a nuclear attack somewhere, I think in the American midwest. I’m hazy on the details but I remember very clearly a vox pop with an old boy, a resident of a town in the area. He looked like someone out of a Steinbeck novel, and spoke in the kind of accent someone might speak in if they were mocking a country boy drawl. Asked if the simulation exercise had caused him to worry any more about the prospect of a nuclear winter, he chewed thoughtfully on whatever he was chewing, and then said something like: “The way I see it, there isn’t one critter in this whole darned world crazy enough to start something like this.” Yes, I thought: I think that’s right. I hoped that was right. I still hope he was right.
My daughters, only one of whom is a still a teenager, have both confessed to some alarm over Ukraine, and where this is all going to end. I’ve said two things to them, neither particularly helpful. The first has been along the lines of: “Ha, you should have tried being a teenager when I was a teenager. We had this the whole time. Imagine that.” Then, catching myself on, I’ve tried to reassure them with a cobble-together of various bits of geopolitical wisdom I’ve picked up from some of the wise owls I’ve spoken to on the radio. Naturally, I’ve edited out the alarming stuff I’ve heard from those wise owls I know and trust – such as the former US presidential adviser on Russia Fiona Hill, and the journalist Misha Glenny – who aren’t entirely sure that Putin won’t press one of his nuclear buttons.
I suppose one advantage, if you can call it that, our teenagers have is that they already have experience of dealing with not one but two existential threats to humanity. That’s certainly what the pandemic felt like in its darkest days, and the climate emergency is deepening all the time. I didn’t have any such concerns. All I had to worry about was nuclear war; I didn’t know I was born.
As my chemistry teacher and I drained our pints in the Labour in Vain pub next to the train station, Chernenko wasn’t long for this world. The following month he was replaced by Gorbachev, who looked less grey and forbidding than any of his predecessors. He certainly didn’t look like the kind of guy who would press the button. One thing led to another and, before the 80s were out, the Berlin wall had come down, the iron curtain had lifted and the danger seemed to have passed for ever.
Bar perhaps the chubby North Korean with the flappy trousers, no contender for the title of nuclear-armed crazy critter for the ages presented himself. I assumed we were out of the woods; I never thought I’d be as scared as Mr Fenwick had been over Cuba. How wrong I was. I wonder if he’s as scared now as he was back then. If he wants to meet up in the Labour in Vain to share his feelings, I’ll buy the first round.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
