re: For people born before 1992, how close was your hometown to a direct Soviet ICBM strike?

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I remember looking up from under my desk during a bomb drill at a photo of Ronald Reagan that somebody had just put on the wall.

Circa 1984.


As someone who has no vivid memory of the Cold War, bomb drills were still a thing as a late as 1984? I know they were a thing in the 50s and 60s. But they were still doing it in the 80s?

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Speaking of which, I know "Duck and Cover" gets a lot of laughs because of the seeming futility of the effort, but it probably still helps to duck and cover if you're 10 miles or more from the epicenter of the detonation. At that range, you probably wouldn't have fried in the blast, and ducking and covering probably would have kept you from being impaled from flying glass.

What the heck would a 2,000 warhead attack even look like?

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Even if we got the jump on the Soviets with a fully undetected first strike, I'm sure the locals would not appreciate over 2000 of our own ICBMS taking off simultaneously.

Even from a distance of 100 miles from the silos, the noise would be infuriating.

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Their infuriation would be short lived because about a half hour later, there would be an even more infuriating noise.

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To quote my seventh grade teacher, “Son, we are thirty miles from Barksdale Air Force Base. If there’s ever a nuclear war, this is going to be a smoking hole in the ground,”

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Yes, this. Never any nuclear drills growing up in the 70s. We barely had fire drills.