Go | New | Find | Notify | Tools | Reply | |
Not really from Vienna |
I was 5. I remember my parents and grandparents having "a serious discussion" and learning to "duck and cover" in school that next year. The bomb drills morphed into "tornado" drills a couple years after that. I remember seeing fallout shelter signs here and there through the late 1960s.This message has been edited. Last edited by: arfmel, | |||
|
Member |
I was probably riding my bicycle around the neighborhood at the time. _________________________________________________________________________ “A man’s treatment of a dog is no indication of the man’s nature, but his treatment of a cat is. It is the crucial test. None but the humane treat a cat well.” -- Mark Twain, 1902 | |||
|
Corgis Rock |
I was 13, in 8th grade. Recall my parents sitting me down in from of the TV to listen to Kennedy. What went on after that is pretty much a blank. “ The work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation is slow, laborious and dull. | |||
|
| Member |
In boot camp Lackland AFB. Wondered what all the concern was about. Talk about ground zero. | |||
|
Amateur Astronomer |
I was in grade school. Remember the 'duck and cover' drills. Little did we know if there had been a launch, 'duck and cover' wouldn't do much good. It came out years later that the Soviet missiles were so inaccurate they opted for bigger (megaton) warheads to make sure. NSA Archive I worked at Laughlin AFB for 8 years, where Col. Rudolph Anderson was based when he was shot down over Cuba in his U-2 Alcohol Tobacco Firearms Who brought the chips and dip? Jim | |||
|
| Free men do not ask permission to bear arms  |
Germany, SP5, Signal Corps. Kinda exciting. A gun in the hand is worth more than ten policemen on the phone. The American Revolution was carried out by a group of gun toting religious zealots. | |||
|
| Member |
I was 7 and remember the drills and etc. Friend's parents built an underground bomb shelter in their front yard. Had a hand cranked ventilation system. It was a cool place to play! Hell of "fort" it was poured reinforced concrete, bet it's still there. Funny, I don't ever remember it being stocked. Our church had a room in the basement that was stocked with tin containers of food and water marked with a 20 year lifespan IIRC They looked like maybe 5 gallon bucket in size but were square. The supplies sat in there for decades before they cleared them all out. Also remember the radiation shelter signs in the church hallways and on the front of the building. Collecting dust. | |||
|
| Freethinker |
Sheltering or things like “duck and cover” obviously depend on a number of variables, and in the case of nuclear weapons, the distance from GZ. Contrary to what seems to be a strangely common belief, even the largest weapons won’t destroy everything on the planet, or even within a single state (most of them, anyway); their effects—blast, thermal, radiation—diminish as one gets farther away from them. At great enough distances when the primary immediate danger is from collapsing buildings or debris being thrown through the air at high velocity, sheltering might make the difference between living and dying. The same principle is involved with weather conditions like tornados and hurricanes. If the tornado touches down on one’s home, being in the basement probably won’t help much. If it touches down a block away, having a sturdy wall and lots of earth between me and it could help keep me alive. I was a junior in high school during the crisis, but still don’t recall that it made a huge impression on me at the time. I believe that the news readers and most other adults were less likely to indulge themselves in frenzied expressions of panic in those days and therefore that sense of calmness trickled down to the children. Then again I do recall one of my classmates’ opining that the stockyards at the Twin Cities (where I was living) would be a prime A-Bomb target. I believe I expressed some skepticism that we might be at the top of any targeting list, but fortunately we never found out. ► 6.4/93.6 | |||
|
Member |
I did not. My dad was on the USS Yosemite doing the blockade thing. Said it was scary as hell with subs running under and nuke procedures for weapons. Used to visit the old hawk missile batteries on north key largo and parts of south miami. “Forigive your enemy, but remember the bastard’s name.” -Scottish proverb | |||
|
| Too old to run, too mean to quit! |
What was your unit? I was in commo in 3AD during that Cuban missile fiasco. AIR, we spent nearly 2 weeks out in the boonies monitoring various commo nets and wondering if we were going to have to fight. Elk There has never been an occasion where a people gave up their weapons in the interest of peace that didn't end in their massacre. (Louis L'Amour) "To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical. " -Thomas Jefferson "America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great." Alexis de Tocqueville FBHO!!! The Idaho Elk Hunter | |||
|
| Too old to run, too mean to quit! |
Yeah, I remember well plotting the various effects from a nuke if dropped on Frankfurt. Downwind drift of fallout, etc got especially interesting when one considered just how far downwind that crap could drift and be deadly to folks who had survived the blast with no injuries. I still have the plotting and estimation calculators around here somewhere. Elk There has never been an occasion where a people gave up their weapons in the interest of peace that didn't end in their massacre. (Louis L'Amour) "To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical. " -Thomas Jefferson "America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great." Alexis de Tocqueville FBHO!!! The Idaho Elk Hunter | |||
|
| Member |
Yep, we didnt have a fallout shelter, and lived about five miles from a SAC base. I was old enough to know what was going on, and our family spent a nerve wracking two weeks or so. | |||
|
| Peace through superior firepower  |
I was one year old. Lived through it, don't remember it. I had my bahbah and my banky and I made potty, I think. All in all, a not unpleasant experience. | |||
|
| Freethinker |
Yes, I still have two copies of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (DoD and AEC publication), but as the original was published in 1962, I’m not sure if I had it before the crisis. ► 6.4/93.6 | |||
|
| Member |
Remember it well. My old man was too cheap to build a fallout shelter. I figured I would die but my buddies would be okay, just living under the driveway for a couple of years. The movie, " On the Beach " which premiered in 1959 featured the aftermath of a nuclear war with the survivors waiting to die in Australia when the nuclear fallout reached them. It scared the hell out of me. Living in Chicago at the time I figured we would be one of the prime targets. I knew that Duck and Cover was not gonna work with a direct hit from a nuclear warhead. | |||
|
Member |
I was 15 and we were at Ft. Carson, Colorado. My dad was an infantry major assigned to the G3 shop of the 5th Infantry Division and heavily involved in planning for the division to deploy. One comment I remember was that the best maps they could come up with quickly were from "National Geographic". I'm glad it was resolved with out the dI vision being deployed. "Cedat Fortuna Peritis" | |||
|
member |
[raising hand] I was 16 at the time, and remember it well [/raising hand] drills in school were the norm during those times. | |||
|
| Member |
I was 13, living on a farm 90 miles from SAC headquarters at Offutt air base in Omaha. I was reading lots of "on the beach" type novels about nuclear war back then. I assumed Offutt would be a prime target and I knew that 90 miles was not far enough from a nuclear bomb. We only got one tv station with 30 minutes of news at 6 pm. We did get a daily paper, which came in the morning. I believe we stayed home from school a couple of days. I remember being scared and waiting for the newspaper to come to see what had happened overnight. Strange to think back to that time when we only got info twice a day! | |||
|
Step by step walk the thousand mile road |
I am close friends with the son of the NPIC guy who found the missiles in the first place. He also briefed the EXCOM every day during the crisis. As a result I spent many hours listening to a true insider's perspective. It's positively horrifying just how close we came to turing evolution over to the cockroaches. My favorite anecdote was him telling his wife that she was to pack the car and if he ever called to suggest she visit her sister in rural Missouri, she was to grab the kids and leave, in that instant, in a hurry. The unspoken piece is that this would likely be the last time this side of heaven they'd speak. He knew the location of every pay phone between the White House and his house and always had change to make a call. There is a tremendously long list of men to whom we owe the very survival of the species. Oleg Penkovsky. Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov. John Scali. Dino Brugioni. Arthur Lundahl. A long list of others. Almost no one knows what we owe these men. Nice is overrated "It's every freedom-loving individual's duty to lie to the government." Airsoftguy, June 29, 2018 | |||
|
always with a hat or sunscreen |
The recent how old we are thread should serve to indicate that, like me, there's a good number of old farts frequenting this forum. As such, yeah we lived through that shit! I was 15. Certifiable member of the gun toting, septuagenarian, bucket list workin', crazed retiree, bald is beautiful club! USN (RET), COTEP #192 | |||
|
| Powered by Social Strata | Page 1 2 3 4 5 |
 | Please Wait. Your request is being processed... |
|
© SIGforum 2024