the oil industry with all the refineries was a strategic target. We were issued dog tags at our elementary school to wear everyday with our name and religion on them, told they would be shoved between our front teeth or between our toes to identify our corpses.
We learned how to get under our desks in hopes it would protect us. One of the drills had planes flown overhead to make it more realistic, I guess.
The worst thing was that we were divided up according to how fast we would be able to get home when the bombs struck. It was assumed it would be an atomic bomb and we wre told what the bombs in Japan did, and that we would probably die when it hit.
I was in the group that was told I would have to stay and presumbly die without seeing my folks or home again. I don't think I was the only one who grew up with this.
I remember all the way through the Carter years when that was long over, that the weekly air raid sirens still went off every weekend and could be heard for miles. There were many places that were designated with the radiation sign as fallout shelters. Some people built fall out bunkers in their back yard.
I don't know if that was Kennedy's doing, if it was Cold War thinking, or the feeling that WW2 was alive and well. We grew up in the remains of that war, a job I had in the seventies still used that army green for trucks, and anti-aircraft bunkers were still on the beaches.
I look back and never imagined it was staged, it was a real danger to me. Sparring with Castro did not end there, nor with Russia. At the time, I just considered the adults who were going to get us all killed to be insane, but there was nothing could be done.
Most people I knew who really got involved with politics in the sixties had the same feelings about WMD and MAD. It was insane, just like so much that as happened since, and the world is sick of it.
= new reply since forum marked as read