A civil defense educational video on school preparedness for nuclear war in the 1950s.

BY BOB SMITH

I attended grammar school in Northern New Jersey during the early 1960s when the Cold War was in full bloom, with Nikita Khrushchev pounding his shoe on the desk at the United Nations and threatening to bury us all.

Teachers and schoolchildren, today, live in fear of random attacks by madmen with automatic weapons. Today’s threat is intensely personal – the shooter, often acting alone, stalks the halls and brutally murders innocents, one by one, at close range. The threat in the 1950s and 1960s was entirely anonymous – intercontinental ballistic missiles bearing nuclear warheads would launch from an ocean away and descend from the sky, killing millions.

Some elementary schools now have armed guards or run lockdown drills, in which the lights are turned off, classrooms are locked, and students hunker down in the dark, hoping the door doesn’t open. We were afraid, just as schoolchildren today may be, as we, too, prepared for the unthinkable.

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