I remember the Cuban Missle Crisis very well. I was 2 months shy of my 12th birthday at the time. I was living in San Francisco and attending a private Catholic school. We spent days having multiple "drop drills" during the entire period of the crisis and shortly thereafter. There were rumors about that San Francisco was potential prime target due to the presence of nearby US Navy facilities and a number of missle emplacements around the Bay Area. Being in a Catholic school, we were encouraged to pray by the nuns and the priests. I was quite interested in science at the time and had seen quite a few documentaries and read a few books about the effects of an atomic blast. I was not fully convinced prayer was going to be effective deterrent to being blasted into molecules by a Russkie bomb and neither was running into the school hallway, crouching down, and covering my head with my hands. From the photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki I had seen, there weren't a lot of intact hallways at ground zero.
Going home in the evening was no further reassuance. The few television channels available at the time were constantly showing grave faced members of the government making even graver statements, experts and scientists exhibiting various aerial photos of missles either in Cuba or on the way to Cuba, and public announcements of what to do in case of an attack (other than kiss one's posterior goodbye). It was a rather frightening yet also interesting experience. I have often felt the Crisis was where what would become the anti-war movement in the late 60s had its real birth.
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