I remember when the monthly air-raid drills — first Wednesday of the month, 1:00PM — stopped, not because the Cold War had gotten any colder, but because the mi

I remember when the monthly air-raid drills — first Wednesday of the month, 1:00PM — stopped, not because the Cold War had gotten any colder, but because the missile threat made the "I've got plenty of time to get to the shelter" bomber scenario almost laughable. I also remember the panic I felt, several years later, when the damned local siren went off (on the wrong day and at the wrong time of the day) because someone was digging where they shouldn't have been digging. I served in the Cold War military, and I'll admit to having an involuntary physiological reaction to hearing Slavic accents to this day. I mean, we knew that the apparent "sanity" of our leadership was really just a delicate spiderweb of constraints based on the desire to remain electable; we sort of hoped that there were similar little wire baskets holding the champagne-corks in place on the other side as well, even if they worked differently. And yes, we always suspected that somebody on the other side would go rogue, and had no reason to believe that the people on the other side didn't see us the same way. We feared an accidental launch, but we also feared that some idiot, somewhere, would decide that they could actually get away with a first strike. To me, this stuff is all "just the other day"; I really can't tell you how happy I am to hear that there's a whole generation or two of people who can't really understand a goddamned word I'm saying when I talk about the old days.