By ART CHANCE
The hydrogen bomb and I were born in the same year, 1949. I grew up surrounded by major military bases including a strategic air command base– the guys with the nukes — about 75 miles away. Today, the U.S. military has a few hundred active duty aircraft at any given time, but in the 1950s and 1960s, it had several thousand.
A major military exercise produced an aluminum overcast. Our fields and lawns were littered with strips of aluminum foil; the WWII term was “window,” that they dropped to confuse radar. Let me assure you that a B-52, an 8-engine, intercontinental range nuclear bomber with a 180-foot wingspan is a very impressive sight and sound at 500 feet over your head when you’re a young boy.
There was a mid-air collision involving a B-47, a smaller 6 engine cousin of the B-52, a few miles off Tybee Island, Georgia, on Feb. 5, 1958. The B-47 was damaged but still aloft, so it dropped a 7,600-pound Mark 15 nuclear bomb load offshore to lighten its load; the bomb has never been found, or at least nobody has admitted finding it.
To a 10-year-old boy who loved trucks, trains, boats, and planes it was an almost idyllic existence. For a boy who hadn’t yet really discovered sex, it didn’t get much better than a B-58 Hustler, 4-jet, delta wing supersonic bomber flying over at the better part of a thousand miles per hour with a wall-shaking sonic boom in its wake.
But there was a price; every couple of weeks you heard the piercing scream of the air raid sirens and got to dive under your desk at school and wait for the blinding flash of the nuclear bomb. Major buildings all had that yellow and black sign that designated a “Fallout Shelter.” People who were wealthy enough built and supplied personal bomb/fallout shelters. The rest of us took the traditional Southern “God will make it right” attitude and went about our lives, but for most who still lived very close to the land, food and survival supplies were just what you put in for winter every year.
In October of 1962, I had just turned 13; I was grown, and I knew everything there was to know, and just wanted to be on my way to ruling the world. In the election of 1960, John F. Kennedy had made politics into a popular television show. NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report and CBS’ World News Tonight with Walter Cronkite dominated American dinner tables and opinions. Only if you lived in a major urban area did you have the choice of one or the other; most of America had one TV channel in those days, and a good bit of the country still had no television service.
Longtime Alaskans recall that the first live TV broadcast ever in Alaska was the moon landing in 1969 and it took the entire resources of the Congressional delegation and the US Department of Defense to bring it to Alaska. If it is any comfort, I was going to college in Southeast Georgia about 100 miles from a good sized city; I watched the moon landing on a small black and white TV with rabbit ears and a very snowy picture. Nobody had 200 HD channels in those days. When I came to Alaska in 1974, the evening news was at 7 am the next day — if the plane from Seattle got in with the reels.
I lived in the Huntley-Brinkley World; we didn’t have one of those rotators that could turn your TV antenna toward a different city. I climbed up on the house to turn it to the CBS station to watch The Beatles on Ed Sullivan a few years later. If you were a kid in those days, your information was the evening news, whatever there might be on “educational TV” at school, and whatever you got from your parents at the dinner table.
Most families took the paper, both the daily from a nearby big town and the local weekly, and they read it cover to cover and the covers too, especially the local paper. Everybody understood what the political bent of a particular paper was. In Georgia, the Atlanta Constitution was the paper the Yankees loved; liberal, by Southern standards, and was New Deal supporting. The Constitution won Pulitzers. The Atlanta Journal was the business-oriented paper, but not business enough to be seriously considered a Republican paper. The Augusta Chronicle was old-time Southern, as was the Macon Telegraph. The Savannah Morning News was the one and only Republican paper in Georgia in those days. You made a political declaration by the newspaper box on your mailbox, just as you once did here in Anchorage.
Radio was still somewhat important but not so much as it had been a decade before. Radio had become more of an entertainment medium than an information medium, but if you had the radio on in the car, you got their minute or two of what passed for news. We had a lot less information in those days, but in my view it was better if not always objective information.
Even if you were a kid, you couldn’t escape world events. The movie “October Skies” was very real and we all went out at night to see Sputnik tracking across the sky. It was as good an education as federal money provided to Southern schools. The first telecommunications satellite went up that summer, Telstar, which brought the first live transatlantic television and other modern telecommunications.
In retrospect, it might seem a tense period, but in reality, it had been a tense period for our whole life, and we were accustomed to it. And then it got tense. The news started to bubble up that the Soviets were placing nuclear missiles in Cuba. It was still unsettled in those days just what Fidel Castro was; some said a Cuban patriot, some said a Soviet puppet. Soviet missiles 90 miles from the U.S. settled that question. The Soviets/Cubans shot down a U.S. U-2 reconnaissance plane trying to take a peek, which only increased the tension, and this wasn’t long after the Soviet shoot-down of a U-2 over the Soviet Union, so nerves were raw.
The truth was as rare then as now, and nobody knew that the US had nuclear missiles in Turkey as close to Moscow as the Soviet missiles in Cuba were to Washington. The U.S. demanded the removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba and the Soviets said “Nyet.”
The interstate highways weren’t yet finished in The South in 1962, so the way to Florida was the two lane blacktop of the old federal highways. My home town has the singular distinction of being the first place that two transcontinental federal highways intersected. US 80 from San Diego to Savannah and US 1 from somewhere in Maine to Key west cross at the Courthouse Square in my old home town, though the courthouse isn’t there anymore and there isn’t much traffic. In 1962 there was still a lot of traffic and soon came a lot more.
In October of 1962, my world turned olive drab green. The roads were clogged with military convoys headed for Florida. Soon our intersections were supervised by MPs and we were limited to only certain hours on the major roads. Endless miles of convoys of troop transports and transports for tanks and other military vehicles. The rickety old Georgia and Florida Railroad, built to haul Florida watermelons to Yankee markets, carried never before seen traffic as it hauled tanks and heavy vehicles south to Florida. The skies were filled with aircraft.
I don’t know that I was afraid; I was a young teen and immortal. But my parents were afraid. They heard from their grandparents first-hand memories and recollections of Sherman’s troops in the yard; they knew something about war. And then calmer minds intervened. The Soviets agreed to remove their missiles, maybe, from Cuba. The U.S. agreed to remove its missiles from Turkey so long as it didn’t have to admit that it had them, and the Soviets went along.
The hydrogen bomb and I have had a good run; we’re still here after 70-odd years. For a few years there, I thought we were done with this. Nikita Khrushchev was a rational actor, as was John F. Kennedy. I’ve long said that we are all alive because the Russians loved their children. In my 72 year,s this is the first time that I’ve heard a Russian leader threaten nuclear war out right, and I’ll confess to being afraid.
Art Chance is a retired Director of Labor Relations for the State of Alaska, formerly of Juneau and now living in Anchorage. He is the author of the book, “Red on Blue, Establishing a Republican Governance,” available at Amazon.
Most excellent!
‘http://www.321gold.com/editorials/moriarty/moriarty030122.html
Bob Moriarty
Archives
Mar 1, 2022
Excerpt:
While Putin has been made out to be the villain in the latest stupidity on the part of Nato and the US, if Russia is a swamp, Ukraine is a cesspool of corruption and bribes and operates as a sock puppet for the Big Guy who is happy as long as he gets his 10% cut.
Putin demanded two things. One was the US/Nato honor the written agreement they made thirty years ago. Putin doesn’t want nuclear weapons on his neighbor’s front porch. JFK wanted the same thing in 1962 and that certainly seems reasonable to me. And two, he wanted Ukraine to honor their written agreement that they would talk with the breakaway republics directly in accordance with the Minsk II agreement they signed in 2016.
If the US/Nato and Ukraine didn’t honor what they agreed to in writing and Ukraine continued to shell Donbass, he would attack Ukraine.
Since you raise the issue of written agreements: In 1994 Ukraine and Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum, agreeing to destroy the nuclear arsenal it had “inherited” from the Soviet Union in exchange for a guarantee by Russia and the western powers that they would “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.”
As one a half generation behind you, Art, allow me to present what those my age believed within the same time frame of certain nuclear death experienced.
I vividly remember that grainy encapsulation of the moon landing of July 20, 1969, within Alaska’s first live broadcast, not that I cared at the time, as that was the day of my 6th birthday celebration, and was brought in (under duress, I thought at the time) to witness, amongst a gathering of friends and family, watching what I remember as a 13-inch black and white TV screen, though it could have been as much as a 15-inch screen, the most monumental moment of humanity at that time, though at said time, I did not understand it as such, nor did any of my fellow like-aged party guests, but the adults certainly did at that time, as I, and my like-aged party guests came to appreciate fully within our coming years.
We were half a generation behind you, Art, so perhaps we understood less the finality of life your ilk did, as we also went through the drills of run, duck, and cover as you and yours did, but without the understanding fully of what said drills actually meant, as I do not remember being afraid, per se, but being somehow ignorantly prepared, which of course, as you were aware at that time, we were not, but ignorance is bliss, is it not?
Fast forward nearly 53 years unto this time, this place, this situation…and yet I am still unafraid just as I was all those years ago…not because the circumstance does not warrant said fear, but because said circumstance is simply out of my control as it was those many years ago, and understanding more fully that should such a calamity truly occur, I, you, and the rest of use shall most likely be dead before I / we can even worry, or think about it, considering that Anchorage is most likely a tier one target due unto JBER and its proximity and threat to Russia, as well as the pipeline and Eielson Air Force Base, so I am sure that we are a prime target as unto such an attack.
That said, I fear also for all those around this Globe that shall also suffer the ramifications of said decision to attack and respond within such a fashion, which as we all learned, is termed Mutually Assured Destruction…the question, of course, is which, if any, entity finds that situation acceptable?
My ‘fear’, as it were, regarding that happenstance, is not of my own existence, but the existence of my nieces, nephew, grandnieces, and their possible futures.
Right there at ready.gov/nuclear-explosion, they show you how to survive:
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“When you have reached a safe place, try to maintain a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who are not part of your household. If possible, wear a mask if you’re sheltering with people who are not a part of your household. Children under two years old, people who have trouble breathing, and those who are unable to remove masks on their own should not wear them.”
Would six feet under comply with the recommendations?
This is what happens when silly unserious people are in power. Drag Queen story time, pronoun obsession, mask hysteria, and a military more obsessed with understanding “white rage” than being able to kill a foreign enemy.
Kids in Ukraine have safe spaces not to die. Kids in the west have safe spaces because Dr Suess might hurt their feelings.
Putin moved because he knows we can’t and won’t stop him. Ukraine is putting up a valiant fight (so did Poland in 39) but can’t win without intervention from the west. The west won’t intervene, it would disrupt the sale of products to Russian oligarchs.
There’s no need to be scared. Russia won’t use nukes because Putin and China know we’re not serious about stopping them.
But at least the homeless will have government paid crack pipes.
Enjoyed this read as I recalled the same memories as Art. The wealthy built bomb shelters during the sixties.
Not only the wealthy; I remember a poor farmer about 10 miles from our farm who constructed one in the side of a hill. He dug and built it himself and stocked it with canned goods and c rations. People thought he was nuts, but he was genuinely concerned with his family’s safety.
Art, your article brings back lots of memories. There were so many aircraft (B-52s) in Florida that GIs said Florida may sink. I believe Robert Kennedy, attorney general, counseled the president to basically go to war. I remember the US Navy blockade of Russian ships transporting the missiles. And I do know that the Jupiter missiles in Turkey were not really effective and we were probably going to remove them anyway. Any mistake could have led to nuclear war. And the Commander of Strategic Air Command was for that! Today, we know that the “Gulf of Tonkin” fake incident led to our great involvement in Vietnam. The “Weapons of mass destruction” led to the Iraq war. Hopefully, we will not have a like “incident” to get us involved in Ukraine.
While the threat of nuclear war has waned a bit since we were diving under desks, we did get a demonstration that skill is still necessary from the Chelyabinsk bolide 8 years ago. A 20 m rock blazed across the sky over eastern Russia one day. It exploded in an airburst around 30 km above the ground. The airburst was good for about half a megaton of force. Nearly 1,500 people were sufficiently hurt to need medical attention. Some 7,200 buildings were damaged by the shockwave, mostly with windows blown out (which also caused most of the injuries).
Duck and cover is always a good idea when you see a bright flash. Looking out the window, not so much. Cheers –
Let me clarify something about my parent’s memories as I’ve had a few emails about that paragraph. I’m not a Westerner; most of the West was settled either by people who moved West after the Civil War or who immigrated to America in the mid to late 19th Century to settle the Homestead and railroad lands available.
My heritage is another America. My ancestors on the surname side came to America in 1640. On the maternal side they’ve been here at least that long but the records are scarce since they weren’t as well educated and literate. I’m the first member of my lineal family that has ever made a mortgage payment on his home. I grew up on land claimed by my family in the 1795 Creek Cession Land Lottery. My sister still owns a little piece of it; I sold the last of mine a few years ago because I no longer have any interest in it.
I grew up in the extended families of an earlier America. My grandmother lived out her days with us; we knew what she knew. I knew my great grandmother and sat with her at the dinner table. I sat at my gg/grandmother’s knee and heard her stories of Sherman’s troops in the yard and house when she was an eight year old girl and had just learned a few weeks before that her father had been killed in action at “The Crater” near Petersburg, Virginia.
My family history doesn’t start when Grandaddy stepped off a wagon in Oregon or stepped off a ship in Alaska. I go back a lot farther than that.
The conclusion was brought about by two men who developed a friendship. Attacking your friend is impossible. Nikita under estimated kennedy for a youth. His books, his mothers faith and his fathers upbringing, and experinces around different people like mlk jr, his personal setbacks well prepared the young president to face nikita. Its a good thing there was more to kennedy than being a silver spooned baby.
Don’t be fooled by Marxist Trump propaganda, Obama and his “fundamental transformation” of America would have evolved to the same point as Putin’s war in Ukraine if Obama would have been in office as long as Putin. Once a Marxist usually always a Marxist.
Art: Thank you for this personal story and the follow up info about your family. Such personal experiences passed on to current and future generations should be headed as to where we’ve been, and what might be avoided. Unfortunately, we often don’t listen to those older than us (I didn’t want to call you and elder, as I’m of your generation too) and as such, those younger often don’t learn from history, and repeat the same or similar mistakes made before us. Let’s hope the younger folks will read/listen to your story and that of others passed on to them as “been there, consider our history before acting.” Hopefully, the world can get past the insanity people inflict on others.
Another Art C.
Art, for perspective, and to show the young-uns what you are talking about, please explain what devastation a thermonuclear blast from a hydrogen bomb will do to a city the size of Anchorage.
The bomb that was detonated over Hiroshima, Japan was a 20-25 kiloton device. In today’s world that would be so small as to be considered a tactical weapon. It completely leveled the central city and killed 60-80,000 people almost immediately with the blast and burns. Another 100K or so died in the aftermath from radiation poisoning and side effects.
Russia or China would attack with multiple devices to seek to destroy TSAIA, the Port and rail yard, Elmendorf and Ft. Richardson. A 25-50 megaton device targeted on each of those points would cause most everything and everyone between Eagle River and Potter to cease to exist. There are enough variations in topography to shelter some areas from blast and flash damage, but much would depend on the altitude at which the device was detonated.
Goodbye, A-town.
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So I guess Sarah Palin could still see Russia from Wasilla?
This article reminds me of my days in grade school during the 70’s. There were posters in all classrooms on what to do during an emergency. With the exception of fire, most simply stated to “crawl under your desk.” Yes, in the event of nuclear attack crawl under your desk. I watched war movies with my dad and uncles so I never found much wisdom in this.
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