In his new book Notes from the Apocalypse, for example, Mark O’Connell recalls with near-nostalgia how the Cold War nuclear crisis “adhered to certain established narrative conventions,” replete with “near misses” and “global panic”: “you had plot: you had drama. Such sentiments - the sedated sense that the Mushroom Cloud has both passed and been surpassed - are dangerously prevalent. In the bigger picture, climate change will be worse.įrom this perspective, not only is nuclear war ‘the Storm that never broke’ (and now, it seems, never will), it’s the Storm that, even had it broken, wouldn’t have been as bad as the climate ‘Superstorm’ to come. And nuclear war now seems maybe not so bad. It’s weird to be going through this pandemic and sheltering here for a different reason. For Mansfield, a kid through those crazy times, the ladder to the shelter was thus a journey back in time:įunny to remember when nuclear war was what we worried about - all those drills, putting our heads under our desks at school. As The New Yorker’s Ian Frazier wrote, the owner of the shelter probably “imagined escaping into it, staying for the recommended two weeks, and reëmerging to find Manhattan nuked and gone.” And 1962 was even worse, with shelters built and stocked amid 170+ explosions and an even closer brush with oblivion in the Cuban Missile Crisis. United Press photo (1955)Ĭity records dated the ‘act’ to 1961, a year of seemingly impending nuclear doom, with 70+ atmospheric tests, the mass-production - and breakneck deployment - of multi-megaton warheads, and a major Superpower showdown over Berlin. Family seated in a Kidde Kokoon, an underground fallout shelter manufactured by Walter Kidde Nuclear Laboratories of Garden City, Long Island.
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