Mutually Assured Destruction (11/9)

When we look back in history, we find certain things intriguing, odd, rational, or the like based on our knowledge of the event. I find it funny that we look back on people during the 1950s and 1960s who built fallout shelters and prepared for nuclear war as hysterical. If people today go crazy preparing for simple snowstorms by raiding supermarkets, why does it seem ridiculous that people in the past prepared for nuclear war? Viewing the very damaging effects of nuclear weapons, doesn’t doing anything to protect yourself make sense? I think the idea of fallout shelters and preparing for the worst was good. In fact, the basement of my church at home is a fallout shelter. The yellow and black radioactive signs are still posted above the doorways even though the outward threat and fear of a nuclear war has dissipated a bit since the Cold War. People at the time, however, thought otherwise. Public opinion was that all hope was lost if a nuclear war started. There was no surviving the severely injurious damage done to both yourself and your surrounding. In essence, why even bother? People who did make fallout shelters seemed to be weird.

Reading about how people thought their neighbors were essentially nutcases if they tried to protect themselves reminded me of a movie called Blast from the Past with Alicia Silverstone and Brendan Fraser that I watched years ago (a few pieces of information were read and paraphrased from www.imdb.com to refresh my memory). Brendan Fraser is the son of a nuclear physicist, played by Christopher Walken, during the Cold War period. After a scare on television from the Cuban Missile Crisis and increasing tensions between the United States and Soviet Union, the family runs into the fully stocked fallout shelter and is stuck there for 35 years. Fraser’s character Adam emerges and falls in love with Alicia Silverstone, a beautiful girl who helps him survive in the modern world. Even after the family rejoins the modern world and the two main characters are married, the father believes that the Soviet Union has taken a political move to fake their own collapse to put their enemies into a lull while they rebuild their forces. Functioning off of this fear, he starts constructing a new fallout shelter “just in case.”

While this story is obviously fantastical and funny, but it reminded me greatly of what we have been reading and talking about. Hysteria during the Cold War period and reliance on technology caused the scientist father in the movie to create a state-of-the-art fallout shelter and run there at the first sign of warning. I believe that this is an understandable behavior for the time it was set. During the 1960s and even today our military world functions through a Mutually-Assured Destruction policy. Countries try to get their nuclear arsenal as developed as possible so there will be no threat of attack. The reason for this is that if someone strikes first, that country can have a return strike with the same or much greater force. Thus, this fear keeps countries and political leaders from engaging in a nuclear war. I liken this nuclear game to chicken, where two cars drive as fast as they can at each other, hoping the other car will swerve first. Normally this game that can surely lead to death does not because both parties “chicken out” before they collide. This is much like the nuclear policy where many countries threaten and seem to almost go to war, but no one actually strikes. If this is the situation of today’s world, after many peace treaties and nuclear proliferation bands, imagine what it was like in America decades ago. Living in such an unsure world during the 1960s where technology was new, leaders were strong, and suspicions were high, anything could happen.