I am very close to Cheyenne Mt, so I take comfort in the fact that I do not have to worry about surviving in the blasted wasteland post-apocolypse
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It’s worth remembering that while the bombings are often recalled in memory as a strictly American affair, the detonations were passed off by the UK.
Britain’s blessing was required by the secret Quebec Agreement between the two countries that outlined terms for the coordinated development of nuclear weapons.
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If only he’d been a head of state who could have had Russia’s nukes destroyed 
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Welp, that’s fucking terrifying…
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I spent quite a lot of time in 1985/86 being trained for just that.
Both the ‘being nuked’ and the ‘nuking stuff’ bit. (With artillery shells and their range there are scenarios where you end up sort of nuking yourself anyway, at least as far as the fallout is concerned.)
The practical upshot of all this was that when Chernobyl happened, all the detecting gear came out of storage and anybody who knew how to use a Geiger counter was scurrying around with one. Which is why I know for a fact that I caught very little to none of that.
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What a hard life people lived in the 1980s. The possibility of a nuclear war was on the table all the time. Doomsday Clock, action movies, Star Wars Project and several documentaries about Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed to raise aware and at the same time, prepare people for the worst.
Living far away from the theater of War made us carefree. But every now and then an expert would appear like a prophet and warn that even unimportant allies could receive an atomic warhead to the head or feel the effects of the dreaded nuclear winter.
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“Would you rather be shot with a .22 or a .45?”
“How about not being shot at all? That would be nice.”
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I don’t really “like” this at all, rather I find it utterly terrifying and yet also entirely believable.
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Ukraine informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) today that Russia was planning to take full and permanent control of the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) under the management of the state firm Rosatom, Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said. This was later denied by the Russian Federation.
Update 19 – IAEA Director General Statement on Situation in Ukraine
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I’ve been thinking about this, on and off, over the last couple of days. I can only speak for myself, but I don’t remember feeling like that. Not in a despondent ‘it’s all doom and gloom and we’re all gonna die tomorrow’ way, anyway. Nuclear war was a non-theroretical possibility1) - but that was something my generation was born into and grew up with. In that sense it was normal. My mindset, like a lot of other people’s, was more along the lines of ‘either it’s not going to happen at all - or it will be over in 30 minutes, tops’. Maybe this had something to with actually knowing people behind the Iron Curtain as well. Just ordinary people, trying to get on with their lives. In a twisted way, conventional2) war kind of seemed more awkward (if that is the right word). I mean, if this had happened in 1986, I might have ended up shooting at guys I was related to3) or had met.
1) It has been since 1949 and still is.
2) Which would have stayed ‘conventional’ well into its second or third day. By then the tactical nukes would have come out. I was in manoeuvres training for that.
3) Post-war family reunions would have been so embarrassing.
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