The Rise of Nuclear Fear - how we learned to fear the bomb

I remember going to bed one night when I was 11, seriously afraid I would not be alive in the morning. It was October, 1962, and the frightening cold war between the U.S. and Soviet Union, constantly in the news but mostly abstract to me as a kid, had becoming terrifyingly real. I had watched a stern President Kennedy on TV revealing that Soviet missiles were being installed in Cuba and ordering a blockade of Soviet ships. There were pictures of the missile sites, and video of confrontations at sea. The world really was on the brink of nuclear war. I was viscerally afraid, and I wasn t alone.