Surprise Story

I was so surprised when....

But I think I need to back up and give you some history or you will not understand why I was so surprised. The past is another country. One of the main reasons to visit that country is to understand that the world we are so used to today is not the only way thing can be. Things that were once mountains which dominated the landscape are later so completely diminished that it is hard to find any trace of their existence. Usually these changes are like the erosion of our physical landscape; it proceeds continuously but so slowly that one never actually notices it. But sometimes there is an inflection point that is so sharp and complete that there is a absolute break between what came before and what comes afterward.

I was born in 1946. People who were born before 1945 experienced a world that those of us born after have never experienced and will never know. In August of 1945 two atom bombs were used. Prior to that, the world already had many ills: war, plague, flood and famine, but, no matter how bad it got, the world itself and the human race could always recover and carry on. After '46 we could never be sure.

I remember a time, I think it was in the second grade so I would have been about 7 years old in Bedford New Hampshire a typical New England town with a pretty white Presbyterian church on a hill flanked by maple trees that turned brilliant scarlet in fall just like you see in all the calendar pictures. Our classroom was in the basement of an old firehall because at that time every school was filled to overflowing. My memories of those days include that special smell a peanut butter and jelly sandwich gets by sitting in a metal lunch box all morning. I also remember our regular civil defense drill were we all crawled under our desks and covered our heads so we wouldn't get cut by the flying glass if they bombed Boston.

It was a little after that, I was maybe 8 or 9, I was a fan of some early science fiction shows on TV. My family was pretty well off so we had a good set and the antenna on the roof had an electric motor so one could rotate it to get the best signal. It was just 3 networks and all black and white of course but I loved it. My favorite was show called "Space Patrol" because it had a ship called the Terra 5 that was really elegant looking (at least in my eyes). I watched faithfully but I don't remember much about most of the stories but one that did stick in my memory where they landed on a planet where they found a single survivor after the rest of the planet had been blown out of existence by a cataclysmic war.

About the time I was 12 the family moved to Oregon and then a little later, to eastern Oregon. I wonder how many of you know anything about Strontium 90? Well, this was a time of intense competition between the US and Russia and they both carried out extensive nuclear weapons testing. Since bombs in use are detonated in the air, most of the early tests were done there too. Many of the US tests were done in Nevada which is not that far from Oregon, especially eastern Oregon. The reason I mentioned Strontium90 earlier is that it is a component of radioactive fallout and Strontium is chemically similar to Calcium and when we eat things containing Calcium (or Calcium-like substances) it goes into out bones. It is known that eastern Oregon along with most of the American west got a good dose of fallout from US testing along with the dose that everyone got globally. Fortunately, atmospheric testing ended in 1963.

At this time in my life, I was building lots of plastic models. I built cars and planes but ballistic missiles too: the Minuteman, the Atlas, the Pershing etc. The thing about ballistic missiles: one couldn't stop one once it was on its way. Not with 20th century technology and probably not even today. And a missile from Russia could land in America 30 minutes after launch, and vice versa. So the people who were running things at the time (who loved acronyms) came up with MAD. Mutual assured destruction. The minute they thought an attack was under way, they would launch their whole arsenal in response.

And that's the way things stood through my adolescence, college years and adulthood. By the early '80s,I had a family and a daughter I was living in Hamden Connecticut, a typical American suburb just north of New Haven. At the time I was also a regular reader of Scientific American magazine. If you have seen an issue of Scientific American from the last 20 years, the Scientific American of that day was a very different publication. It was both thicker, usually running around 100 pages and denser with most articles being highly technical and full of charts and equations. I recall one issue in particular where they presented the nuclear arsenals of the world (basically the US Russia plus England and France). Just as an exercise I added up the total megatonnage divided by the surface area of the earth. I don't recall today whether I used total surface area or just land area but it really doesn't matter. I do recall that the number I got was a little less that 1 kilogram of TNT equivalent per square meter. Converting it into more common terms, say 5 pounds of dynamite for every square yard of the planet earth. So that would mean the square yard you are sitting on and the one in front of you and the one behind, the one to the left, the one to the right and the four more in the corners just to be safe. In New Haven, I was about 40 miles from Groton Connecticut where the nuclear subs were built. Avco-Lycoming where they made helicopters was 40 miles the other direction and Pratt-Whitney maker of jet engines was about 40 miles north. So there was no point in trying to run anywhere. So we mostly just accepted that that's the way it is. You couldn't really ignore it because it was all perfectly real. But you couldn't think about it too much either because that could drive you completely crazy.

And we all lived like that from the time I was a little kid until my 40s. And that's why I was so surprised when the Soviet Union collapsed and spasm war got called off and we didn't all blow ourselves up.