My mother didn’t need to hear anything more. As soon as he left, she bundled my sister and me into our white Chevy station wagon and drove to the base commissary. I was not quite five years old, my sister not quite three. At the commissary, my mother filled two grocery carts with food, candles, matches, batteries, and propane for the camp stove.

My father flew fighter-interceptors, meaning that if Soviet bombers carrying nuclear weapons were headed toward the United States, it was his job to intercept and destroy them because a nuclear blast at altitude would cause less damage than a ground hit. I was still young enough to form a mental picture of him as Superman, flying fast into space to smash bombs with his fist, reeling back from explosions but then shaking himself upright and flying safely home. I was too young to ask what a nuclear blast would do to him and his plane, but even when I was old enough to ask I didn’t.

The Cuban Missile Crisis now seems like ancient history, but Cold War hostilities shaped my life and the lives of many others who grew up pricking with a constant sense of threat, which stern codes of silence demanded we never speak of. That silence was deepened in families like mine: An Air Force film for children taught us to be wary of questions, even from friendly teachers, when small bits of home life could, for a spy, add up to classified information. Such a code of silence now, in an age when everyone shares every feeling on Facebook, seems as surreal as a 9-megaton bomb. Such wariness seems absurd in an era when former missile sites have been converted into picnic spots.

The author’s father near the cockpit of his F4. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he flew an F102. Courtesy of Karen Bjorneby.

That autumn day in 1962, my mother pulled our station wagon, brimming with provisions, into the carport. Our neighbor was outside, in red lipstick and black stretch pants, smoking a cigarette and watching her two sons play around a tree. She came to help with the groceries, and when my mother asked if her husband, too, had gotten a call, she laughed. She wasn’t worried, she said; it was all just posturing. And if not, she shrugged, we’d all be dead anyway. So she wasn’t preparing for anything except Halloween.

My mother packed our countertops with Saltines and Spam, cookies and peanut butter, canned soup and canned vegetables. In the basement, she made up sleeping bag-beds and filled Coleman jugs and spare canteens with water. That night, the president appeared on television and matter-of-factly explained that the Soviet Union was installing nuclear missiles on Cuba, and that this crisis might lead to war.

We settled in to wait. For two weeks, my mother kept my sister and me close, doing her best to cheer us. She spoke to no one, because she couldn’t risk answering anyone’s questions; she couldn’t let on that my father was involved in the crisis or tell anyone where he was.

My parents had been married for eight years by then. That they came together is an American story in itself. My father was a boy from Ketchikan, Alaska, where his grandfather had been the sheriff, and my mother was a girl whose parents had traveled back and forth from Tampa to Detroit looking for work, and who’d won a scholarship to college in Texas. She met my father in Big Spring, at an Elks Club party where she taught him to dance to the song, “Put Your Little Foot.” He was tanned and tall—nearly too tall for cramped cockpits—with extraordinary peripheral vision and the controlled aggression and high tolerance for pain and fear the Air Force then selected for in their pilots. And he was a jokester, a man who subscribed to both Mad Magazine and Scientific American.

My mother was a willowy redhead, her flirtatious charm covering an iron resolve borne of a Depression-era childhood etched by poverty and hunger. When my father was gone, she kept the car in repair, the taxes paid, and the furnace going. Whenever she could, she helped other wives cope. And she was a crack shot—never would she choose preparing for Halloween over striving to survive.

That same day, inside a few military hangars at a small-town airport in the plains of Nebraska, my father was helping rack nuclear missiles onto fighter jets, his included. Then he flew to Homestead AFB, thirty miles south of Miami. As he entered Florida airspace, he said later, the view on his radar screen was like nothing he’d ever seen before. The entire state seemed to vibrate; so many planes were flying in, it looked like a beehive, swarming with nuclear-armed aircraft, all prepared to obliterate Cuba.

What was strange to me then was the sudden silence on the base. All my life, we’d lived less than a quarter mile from the flight line, so that my father could get to a plane in fifteen minutes. I’d grown up with the sound of engines in my ears, with the crack and thunder of a fighter breaking Mach I overhead. Each night I fell asleep to jet-whine, like a lullaby. But now, all was quiet. I slept badly. I was too young to understand the crisis, but I wasn’t too young to know that if the planes weren’t flying, something was wrong.

Not one of those nuclear-armed aircraft ever took off toward Cuba to unleash Armageddon. President Kennedy negotiated an end to hostilities by agreeing to remove American missiles from Turkey in return for the Soviet Union removing their missiles from Cuba.

The author’s mother in the mid-1960s. Courtesy of Karen Bjorneby.

The crisis ended, my father came home, and we all feasted on moon pies. Our house was an abundance of loving gratitude and relieved laughter. But throughout the days of waiting, my mother had worried over one big question: If nuclear war broke out, yet the base remained standing, would she share her food with our unprepared neighbor and her two sons? Or would she apologize, then close and lock our door?

It’s hard to imagine, now, the omnipresent dread shadowing those years before the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed treaties limiting missile development and deployment. If I tell you that when I was 11, I was required to take a six-week long class called “Civil Defense,” intended to teach us how to survive a nuclear strike, you might think that gruesome or even cruel. But my classmates and I, then stationed at Homestead, Florida, listened to our fathers’ planes taking off and landing every day around the clock. And that Civil Defense class gave me private answers to my some of my impossible-to-ask questions.

Our teacher handed out a one-inch thick workbook, full of maps and math problems. I studied the expected damage and fatality at various distances from the blast site. Some people would die in the fireball or the shock wave, some later from burns or catastrophic radiation exposure. Everyone within thirty miles would die or be seriously injured.

I learned about radiation poisoning: vomiting at the lowest level of exposure; bleeding from the mouth, skin, and kidneys at the next level; delirium, coma, then death. I learned how to triage who might survive and who definitely wouldn’t. My own exposure to fallout would depend on distance and wind conditions. Using the workbook’s math problems, I calculated how soon I’d have to find a shelter before exposure killed me, and then how long I’d have to stay there as radiation levels declined. It looked, to me, hopeless. Even if I survived a direct strike, normal winds could spread enough radioactive fallout fast enough that people hundreds of miles away could die after only an hour’s exposure. Our neighbor in Kansas City, I realized, had been right.

More than 50 years after the Missile Crisis, I cannot sleep without the sound of engines nearby. I keep a turbo fan right beside my pillow, and if I’m away from home an app on my phone plays engine noise for me. If I wake in the night, and all is silent, the thought still flares through my mind: Something is wrong.

The post A Half Century Later, the Cuban Missile Crisis Haunts My Dreams appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

00:00 Soviet ICBMs launch, possibly from Kozelsk or Tatishchevo.

The threats the Soviets posed to America and its vision of global order were at one level ideological, at another imperial, and at another existential. The first two threats were answered quickly. Our answer to communism was democratic capitalism and our answer to Moscow’s expansionism was containment.

00:01 U.S. satellites detect the Soviet missiles.

By the late 1940s, with the circulation of George Kennan’s Long Telegram (and subsequent “X” article), the articulation of NSC-68, and the formation of NATO, the lasting shape of a response to the Soviet imperial threat had taken shape.

There was to be no such tidy, rational response to the unprecedented existential danger posed by nuclear weapons, however. It was not simply a matter of vulnerability, but also a matter of deep uncertainty.

00:04 After confirming the satellite data, NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, notifies the designated White House “crisis coordinator” that an attack is underway. That person must then find and inform the president and convene an emergency meeting of top military and civilian advisers.

The Cold War was more than an ideological conflict, it was a psychological conflict as well: A quest for a global anxiolytic.

It’s hard, to this day, to grasp both the immediacy and durability of the nuclear threat. The Soviet development of nuclear weapons meant that for decades people in the United States lived with the knowledge that only 30 minutes stood between us and nuclear annihilation. That was obviously terrifying; it still is. But what made it even more terrifying was that there was no clear way to prevent or cope with this all-consuming threat.

For one, we never really knew what the Soviets had, or when they had it. The American intelligence community woefully and repeatedly misjudged Soviet capabilities. To start, they underestimated how long it would take the USSR to develop an atomic device, leaving Washington scrambling when they it detected their first nuclear test in 1949.

00:09 Military officers brief the president on preplanned emergency launch options, which are detailed in a black binder inside the so-called “nuclear football,” carried by a presidential aide at all times to minimize response delays.

The pattern continued in subsequent decades with unfounded fears of a “bomber gap” and then a “missile gap,” misreadings that highlighted more of an intelligence gap. Our knowledge of the Soviet nuclear program was inadequate throughout the Cold War, and only added to the climate of uncertainty.

Not only did we not know what the Soviets had, we also didn’t know what their intentions were. Many Americans thought that it was entirely possible that Soviet leaders would launch an attack out of the blue one day. U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who headed Strategic Command, even came up with a bizarre metaphor to describe this uncertainty, suggesting that a “gnome in the basement” (presumably Khrushchev) might someday see the light, judge that “the correlation of forces is right,” and decide to launch an attack. The U.S. met this uncertainty by building more weapons, which perversely led the Soviets to do the same. The arms race would then start over again.

00:17 The briefing concludes, leaving the president about two minutes to decide how to respond. If there is any delay, U.S. ICBMs will be destroyed in their silos by incoming Soviet warheads before they can be launched for a retaliatory attack.

Americans were also particularly worried about a nuclear surprise because we had been on the receiving end of conventional surprises. Pearl Harbor was still fresh in the national memory after World War II, and the attack had spurred the creation of the CIA. But the agency failed to predict North Korea’s 1950 invasion of the South, and we were caught flat-footed yet again.

00:19 The president selects one of the pre-planned options and communicates it to the Pentagon, which authenticates his identity and formats launch orders.

This new intelligence failure led to the establishment of the Office of National Estimates—an office charged with compiling the best intelligence evaluations and using them to predict the future. But ONE failed repeatedly as well—most notably with a Sept. 1962 estimate that Khrushchev was highly unlikely to put nuclear missiles in Cuba because it would not be rational to do so.

Uncertainty also marked planning for nuclear war: no one knew exactly what to do with the nukes we had. At first, the Air Force treated them as simply more powerful versions of conventional bombs, developing the anesthetically named “Single Integrated Operational Plan-62,” which allowed for a preemptive strike of over 3,000 nuclear weapons if the Soviets made an aggressive move.

00:24 The launch orders are transmitted to American ICBM crews via encoded Emergency Action Messages.

But the truth was that the military had no idea what it was doing. As Alain Enthoven, a former RAND strategist at the Pentagon, once retorted to an officer who found his civilian meddling intolerable, “General, I have fought just as many nuclear wars as you have.”

The prospect of nuclear war came at the same time that the military began using operations research and systems analysis to develop conventional war strategy. With these tools at hand, nuclear war at first seemed like just another problem to be solved with the careful application of scenarios and algorithms.

00:27 Having authenticated the EAMs, U.S. Air Force missileers begin the launch sequence.

But there was no scenario under which nuclear war could be considered winnable, and attempts to secure certainty with more weapons eventually morphed into attempts to secure certainty through arms control. Both Russians and Americans seemed to recognize that the existential danger of nuclear weapons was a problem as great, if not greater, than those posed by ideology or imperial expansionism.

00:29 U.S. ICBMs launch.

The fundamental purpose of arms control wasn’t a reduction of numbers, per se, but the establishment of transparency, predictability, and stability—i.e., the antitheses of uncertainty.

Of course, the notion that the weapons and not the Soviets were the problem was seen as dovish silliness by some hawks, the intellectual adjunct to the gut instincts of the …

00:30 Soviet warheads begin to detonate over the United States, destroying Washington, D.C. and killing millions.

The post I Tried Writing This in the Time It Would Take a Russian Missile to Hit Washington—I Didn’t Finish appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My mouth was numbed with spice from pulverized chiles. So many outdoor comals, toasting so many tortillas, extracting the caramel from so many thinly sliced onions, lined the streets of the small towns, and I felt compelled to pull the car to the side of the road, stop, and eat from each one. I’m here, I told myself, to eat all the chile sauce I can. I’d spent most of the season on the road, conducting research across America for a book that begins each chapter with a foodstuff typical of a state, and digresses from there. But what I was concerned with at the moment was winter—particularly, how even among all of this sun-cooked cacti, the holiday season was bound to a dominant narrative, one that depended on images of snow, rosy cheeks, exhalations condensing like ghosts in the air before us.

Winter is coming to an end now, but I still can’t help thinking about how in America—in song and story, TV commercial and dream—the season is white. And when the Earth itself doesn’t manufacture snow, we do it ourselves, with machines named Snow Gun, American Output, Atomic Chill. When I arrived in Tularosa’s town square, I saw one such snow machine spewing its cold manufactured flurries into the air. I parked the car along the square’s southern border, watched as a team of smocked volunteers worked with inadequate gloves to mound the snow into piles from which children, for a few coins, could pack snowballs for the throwing.

The line for the snowballs was long and snaking. Up front, a 7-year-old girl forked over her mother’s money and built a pathetic 8-inch snowman with the aid of a rigid burlap mold, under the supervision of a beautiful red-vested volunteer with matching red Santa Claus barrettes. Behind this odd snow station, a skinny teenage boy stood behind a pot-bellied beast of an instrument—a harmonichord, the premature offspring of piano and violin, wide as a park bench—and, with the aid of a hand-crank, elicited a pathetic winter circus tune.

I got out of the car, and crossed the square to be closer to the music. A small girl ran up to me, blew soap bubbles into my face through a blue plastic wand. She wore no shoes. Her mother, younger than I was, touched my arm, said, in barely-accented English, “Don’t be sad.”

But I couldn’t help it. Behind this version of winter, there was that other: nuclear winter. On July 16, 1945, Tularosa had shuddered in the aftermath of the nearby Trinity atomic bomb test. Ash rained over the residents after the blast, and their bodies incubated rare forms of cancer as they picnicked and played soccer and celebrated birthdays on poisoned ground decorated with radioactive green trinitite glass. Some residents collected—and still collect—this glass and set it on their mantelpieces, because, in spite of its toxicity, it is so beautiful.

At the other end of the fake snow-covered square, couples ice-skated in tank tops, tube-sled down squat radioactive hills. I wondered what compels us to sacrifice our bodies to things we deem beautiful. I wondered how many fingers we’ve lost to the frostbite because we couldn’t stop ourselves from touching the snow.

Tularosa’s residents at the time of the bomb test primarily were descendants of Mexican farmers. In the 1840s, following the Mexican-American War, these farmers were bemused to find that they now lived in the United States, even though their houses remained fixed. It was a devotion to Manifest Destiny that allowed America to justify embellishing its borders—a belief that we had a divine right to owning whatever we please. In raining down nuclear ash on their families a century later, our impulse was the same: a pursuit of a fresh national personality, that of global superpower, with the ability to defend the borders it fabricated.

In coldness—even this forced coldness—we can feel this atrocious American ideal anatomically. As we shiver, as our hairs stand on end, as our teeth chatter, the atomic electricity within us compels our flesh to rise into goosebumps, hundreds of little piloerections running from neck’s nape down to chest and shoulders. We gain such a barely noticeable elevation, expanding, imperialistically, that much further into air that once belonged to other molecules. In coldness, we can tell ourselves that we’re celebrating the sort of cockeyed, diverse heritage that only bears the illusion of singularity.

In this conversation between body and weather, past and present, the electricity within us communicates with the electricity without—the streetlamps and telephone wires, the generators and grids, the charges and currents and fields and magnetism, the neons and the fluorescents, the gases both noble and peasant, the potential and static, the kinetic and flowing. The nuclear weapons. The snow machines. We’re as dizzy as in a dream, our bodies blossoming as they quake.

In this way, and in this weather, we can time travel—sense the energies of the past and future, our bodies, as our ideals and empires, expanding, even as they implode.

This is who we are, I thought, as I picked chile skins from my teeth with my tongue, as the flakes of fake snow whirled above, drawing lassoes or nooses or mushroom clouds onto the sky. We appropriate. We make of things what they’re not in order to gel with a dominant narrative. Because the borders have been redrawn, because we are a superpower both militaristically and commercially, winter, here, must be cold, in order to fit in.

And now there I was, once again bound to appropriation, however different the scale, trying—as so many have before me—to claim brief ownership of this place, via chiles, definitions of winter, and a chapter in a book. Even as I felt terrible about this, I didn’t know how to avoid it; how to avoid asserting some sort of malign dominance in my compulsion to girdle all of these elements into a delusional thesis. So, like most of us, I ate chiles, and watched the fake snow gyrate, and took my notes, and made no difference. I am American, after all, wedging my quiet violence up into the crevices of apathy. My writing did none of these people any good. I was a peeping tom, both entitled to peep yet somehow still unworthy, fogging up the glass of history, other people’s milieus. I spat chile skins to the cobblestone and licked my lips. I watched.

To her mother’s snapping camera, the 7-year-old girl with the snowman beamed as the barretted employee supplied her with small pieces of cork and a reusable string of carrot to stick into her creation’s face. Machine-pumped flakes waltzed around her head, collecting in her black hair. She knew, as I knew—if only via goosebumps, and some inexplicable and unpleasant smell—the testing of the limits of human invention isn’t quite over, nor is our compulsion to name the ultimately destructive after the holy. Slaughter renamed destiny. A bomb called Trinity.

Though this world was melting quickly, and the girl was already being ushered out to allow for the next child, her face, as if trapped in a mold of its own, would endure its smile.

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