Peace is Our Profession

Titan II missle site
When I was a kid the air raid sirens would be sounded every Saturday at 1:00 PM, a reminder that we could be burned to a nuclear crisp in 15 minutes at any time. The TV would continually interrupt regular programming with an "emergency broadcast" test to prepare us to receive instructions during an all-out nuclear war.

I remember taking the mandatory tour of a local home with a bomb shelter in the backyard and encouraged by school authorities to "discuss" this with my parents. Presumbably the importuning by a pre-teen was meant to put that extra bit of pressure on the parents to have them indulge in a construction project that would remove half a year's salary in order to create a concrete bunker in the backyard. Just so that you could emerge two weeks into Armageddon to see the blackened landscape of a post-nuclear world in which everybody slowly starves because transportation and agriculture would have been completely disrupted. (Only later did this nightmare vision get further "enhanced" with the Nuclear Winter scenario popularized by Carl Sagan.)

I had one problem that bothered me with the bunker-in-the-backyard scheme: there was all this talk about having a gun in the shelter and having to shoot any neighbor that tried to seek refuge you with. All this talk was just too dark for my idealist childish mind.

I remember a few weeks into my 9th grade, I sat in a civics class watching a TV that had been brought in to give us a "lesson" in nuclear brinksmanship as the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded down to the last few minutes before the Russians blinked and total annihilation was avoided.

By the way, the title of this blog entry -- Peace is Our Profession -- is the non-sensical motto of the Strategic Air Command that controlled the nuclear trigger when I was a kid.

Addendum: You too can view relics of the Cold War. Here is a Titan II missile site that you can visit. Maybe it is the same one that I was taken to as a young school kid and shown the console where two keys needed to be turned simultaneously to launch the missile, specifically the Titan II. Keys separated far enough that one man gone mad could not start WWII.

If you miss those edge-of-your-seat, nail-biting times, you can re-live them by watching this classic movie of the 1980s: WarGames where a young hacker inadvertently gains access to SAC computers and starts up a deadly "war game" that will end the world unless the military and the mad scientist who created the system can figure out a way to stop the "intelligent" computer from finishing up strategizing and then executing the ultimate war game.

Wait a second, WarGames is culturally set in the 1980s. It does not have the madness of the 1960s. To really get into the spirit of the 60s, you need to watch Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. First, there is the mandatory speech of "for God and Country":

Then there is the patriotic, American can-do attitude and do-what-it-takes to deliver the nuclear blow finale: