Everyone, including grade school children old enough to be aware of it, used to worry about that sort of thing. That latent fear lay across everything and everyone in the US, until around the time the Berlin Wall fell. It was an incredible feeling of the lifting of a mental burden.
I invited my little friends up to the roof to await the end.
The cold war was such fun /s.
https://cochranesfsophomores.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/fos...
Like everyone else, I let my defenses drop after '91 or thereabouts. They are back up these days, I can assure you. Unexpected lowflying aircraft, loud bangs, F16 fighters screaming pairwise out over the Baltic, believe me, I pay attention.
Rational Wiki has a good summaryhttps://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Duck_and_Cover
My freshman physics professor had a story about working for a cold war defense research lab, and not being told what the graph he was working on was about until he absolutely had to know. Eventually, it was revealed that the graph was for % fatalities from flying glass by height of airburst, megatonnage of weapon, and distance from ground zero.
It was at that moment, he decided to find a job elsewhere.
They still have thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at eachother, on hairtrigger alert.
There is zero rational reason for that fear disappearing.
Yes, there is. Political bravado coupled with distrust of politics in general and mainstream information being what it is today it's very hard for citizens to notice geo-political turmoils.
Personnaly I'd blame the fascination for useless plastic gadgets masquerading as star-trek level tech but I can't be certain.