How many of you remember the Cold War?

36 comments

1. Upvote if you don’t here for comparison

2. I was born during the end of it but didn’t form memories until the 1990s.

3. I not only remember it, my college major was directly related to it. So I’ve studied it extensively

4. Yes. I can remember being on Cape Cod in the summers with the fighter jets from Otis AFB screaming over the beach.

5. To say OP’s question in another way: How old are you?

6. Wouldn’t this be comparable to the late 80s / early 90s when there was actually a coup d’etat in the USSR?

7. In 1967, I was a precocious 7 year old riding in my parents’ car when I saw Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin’s motorcade on the way to meet LBJ in Glassboro, NJ.

8. This sub leans older than most on Reddit, so more than you’d think. I personally do.

9. I remember it and I was in the navy in the early nineties

10. I remember nuclear bomb drills in school.

11. Early memory was Bush 1 announcing the fall of the Soviet’s

12. I remember seeing it on the news, but because I just turned 40 this year I was too young to know or care what it meant.

13. I have no memories of it and I didn’t even know it happened until I was in my teens. I was born in the mid eighties. I would have been six when it ended.

14. I’m a former military brat born in 1953. It was a significant issue for the first half of my life. We lived in DC and my dad worked at the Pentagon.

15. Very much so.

16. Maybe I’m too young. I knew the Soviet Union existed, but I never considered the fact that where we lived (West Germany) due to my dad being in the army probably would have been the frontlines.

17. I do. There were bomb drills in my elementary school and they would make us hide under our little desks. Like that was going to do anything, ha!

18. I remember the final years of it. I was around middle school when the USSR fell, so I remember those years well, but I wasn’t old enough to understand all the nuance. The deja vu moment for me this morning has been people worrying about who will be guarding the nukes if the government falls. I distinctly remember when the USSR fell and we went from “Phew! The Soviets can’t bomb us now!” immediately followed by “Oh shit! But no one is guarding the nukes anymore!”

19. From the 1950s on.

    And my dad was a “cold warrior” who was career Air Force. He started right after the Korean War and flew RB-29 spy planes out of Japan. He e was shot down by the Russians, killing one of his crew.

    He later ended up in SAC in B-52s as a nuclear deterrent to the Soviets, running out of the house countless times to launch to go bomb the Soviets, none of us, including him, knowing if it was a drill or not. He ended fighting in Vietnam and retired in the mid 70s.

    During the Cuban Missile Crisis we were stationed in Mississippi in range of the missiles in Cuba. He was so sure we were going to war he sent mom and us kids to my grandparents on “vacation” to the place he thought would be survivable in case of nuclear war—the Oregon coast. My parents were so strong I had no idea they thought what they did. I thought we were on vacation and dad had to work.

    Looking back it was a weird way to grow up. Air raid sirens going on base, every man there running for their airplanes or posts, base being locked down, sometimes having to stay indoors.
    When you transferred to a new base, one of the first questions you asked at school was “What number are we?” That meant what priority nuclear target were we for the Soviets. The military would determine what bases were of #1, #2, etc., importance to the Soviets, and of course that info would circulate.

    That’s a terrible concern for a child to have. Seemed normal at the time.

20. I do but back then it seemed like the USSR could nuke us if they wanted to.

    I think we could intercept their missiles today.

    Granted, I don’t actually know if this is true or not and I’m just basing on “surely the US has the technology to do that today?”

    Still, it seems less likely for a nuclear attack via missile to be successful on our lands today so it’s not as scary as it was when I was a kid.

21. From the time I was five and the Cuban missile crisis to 1989 I remember the cold war. I was a cold war worker, I helped make fissionable products used in making bombs. Looking back, the amount of labor and money that went into that era by all sides was a disgrace to humanity.

22. Oh yeah. I mean, I was pretty young for most of it, but the media definitely made a point of bringing it up on the regular. Movies and tv shows would frequently lean into soviet threats or spies. Nuclear war was always in the background as a threat. And while it wasn’t a common topic, everyone had opinions on what would happen if the missiles were launched.

23. Grew up under the threat of the Soviet thermonuclear hammer. Duck and cover. Bomb shelters. Khrushchev’s “We will bury you” threat all the way through the Reagan “Evil Empire” brinksmanship that led to the 1983 Able-Archer seconds to WWIII horror. The miracles of 1989 unfolding on TV.

24. I “fought” in it. Ballistic Missile submarine in the 80’s. Played hide and seek with Soviet subs.

25. I’m old enough to remember being taught to get under my desk at school in case of a nuclear attack… aka “duck and cover.” LOL… as if that would protect us!

26. The Day After was our after school special.

27. I was a kid in the 80s and we had “civil defense drills” at school regularly. We would all go into the hallway and face the wall and put our hands on the back of our head. I guess this was the best personal defense tactic they could think of. I guess it wasn’t necessarily for nukes maybe just for your run of the mill bombs. By the time I got to jr high/high school these were phased out. Interesting that they never actually explained to us what it was for. We just did it and didn’t ask questions.

    Also when I was a kid it was a common playground thing to call other kids “commies” as an insult. So the knowledge that we had enemies called commies was out there. Did we actually know what that meant? Not really but we heard the older kids and grown ups in our lives use the word so we knew it was bad.

28. In school we had to watch nuclear explosion films, have bomb drills, learn where our local fallout shelter is located and learn how to remove radioactive dust from canned food surfaces. We also learned that water in the toilet reserve tank would be safe to drink.

    I was in 1st grade.

29. Born in the early-70s. I remember the tail end of the Cold War like it were yesterday. In the 50s and 60s there were people that didn’t understand just how awful nuclear war would have been. The notion that you could duck behind a tree or a desk and survive were replaced with the terror of mid-80s movies like the Day After and Threads. As a young boy, I feel as if I were prematurely aged emotionally speaking. I grew up in a constant state of dread/fear thinking only the worst of our future.

    While I’m somewhat okay now, I’m still not convinced that we’ve escaped that fate, but rather kicked the proverbial can further down the road. Yes, the Cold War is technically over, but that’s only a name we gave to the introduction to the potential end of the world.

30. I was born and raised in Poland and my parents left Poland to get away from Russia’s bullshit, along with other things. So I’m a little weary of what’s been going on.

31. Grew up in the 70s and 80s. Remember it well. In 83-84 I was in the Civil Air Patrol and got to spend a week at an Air Force base in Plattsburgh NY. We got to ride on a KC-130 when it did it’s nightly refueling mission. Flew around Me, down the coast to NYC and back up the Hudson. While on mission we got to watch the FB-111 refule while they where on station. Those guys where up there every night waiting for the order to fly over the artic and nuke Russia. Brought the reality of it home really well.

32. Remember it? I helped win it.

33. I remember it well. Soviet Union dissolved when I was in college, and I visited Russia a year after the attempted coup where Boris Yeltsen stood on the tank with a bullhorn.
    Now, i worry more about Russian nukes being sold off/stolen and ending up in the hands of terrorists who have no love for the US. That is more likely than Russia hitting the Big Red Button on us.

34. Yes. I have relatives in Europe who would go visit their East German relatives. They told me everything they took – even clothes they wore – were inventoried upon leaving and departing to be sure they didn’t leave anything if value (like Levis) that could be traded on the black market.

    I now have a work colleague from East Germany (he and his wife). We are within a year of one another, and even though we experienced such different educationally (he was sent to Russia and China; received an incredible education), we have many common experiences – music (classic rock of the 70s and 80s) being one.

    I do find it interesting that his children went back to Germany for university, and one lives there full time now.

35. Remember it? Hell, I sat nuclear alert as a B-52 crewmember in the waning days of it.

36. I remember the fall of the Berlin Wall. I can understand why Fukuyama called it the end of history. It felt like that at the time.

    Then 9/11 happened.