As a Christopher Nolan fan, I am hoping to see Oppenheimer this weekend, and I can’t help noticing all the think pieces about “the bomb” and when it all meant then and what it all means now. I get it. Our culture produces so much writing about movies and television that even Succession received front-page updates on the websites of The New York Times and The Washington Post. “Barbenheimer” is a word.
As a child of the 80’s (I was 10 years old in 1980), here is my visceral, lived experience outside of a neat think piece:
I was terrified every day and night of nuclear war.
In 1983, when I was 13, our entire school was assigned, as homework, to watch the televised film The Day After. I didn’t sleep that night and had recurring nightmares for a good period afterwards.
Our school had bomb shelters marked with ominous black and yellow symbols, which was really just the basement. For us kids, the future was dim lightbulbs and piping.
Sting’s solo track “Russians,” released when I was 15, was hugely popular with kids my age. While not an upbeat song, it was the first popular work for people my age that gestured toward some kind of communiction or hope.
Weekly tests of emergency sirens (still a thing, every Wednesday) made me jump out of my skin during the first few seconds.
Films like Red Dawn, released when I was 14, did not help at all. Of course, it seems stupid and dated now, but in the moment, in the theater, it was terrifying rather than inspiring.
The Terminator, also released when I was 14, reinforced nuclear dread, but proved far ahead of its time by attaching the nuclear strikes to “the machines” or artificial intelligence. The film also proved horribly prescient in having a creature/machine time travel back from a nuclear future to commit massive gun violence in the past. This was 15 years before Columbine.
My K-12 schooling in history repeatedly presented our dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as “saving a million lives.” This was mantra: the ground war would have been too long and too costly.
Again, I spent nearly the entirety of my youth terrified of the world’s end by nuclear war.
And now the Russians are the enemy again, having invaded Ukraine (full disclosure: I am of Ukrainian heritage), and talks of nuclear bombs (and cluster bombs and “dirty” bombs) again prove topical. But there’s a significant difference between this moment and the time of my youth (and the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was the great scare of my parents’ generation). At the same time we were making and releasing films like The Day After, not to mention engaging in an actual nuclear arms race, there were non-public climate-change predictions being written by companies like Exxon and, 35 years ago in 1988, the scientist James Hansen testified to Congress, saying that we were speeding toward a “new climate frontier.” All I can remember of that time is, and I’m not trying to be funny, “the ozone layer has a problem, so don’t use aerosol cans.”
Maybe I was afraid of the wrong thing all along.