Incoming ICBMs would look very different (something like bright meteors).

Edit: I know, through the eyes of an 8 year old. My city was a target of the U.S. nuclear missiles, so the I had the same fear. Saw nuclear exposions all the time in my dreams.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WagAKBuc_o

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7X89a531CY

Hey old friend,

Do you think, that having been through Cold-war era conditioning and propaganda, that you're sort of sensitized to the "modern Russia tropes"? I ask because, well Russia seems like a shithole. A sort of noncompete on the global scale outside their natural resource stockpiles, but the US demagogues seem to like to point fingers there and I see it as more or less a propaganda tool. I suspect it's aimed at the generations that experienced the cold war, but I'm inducing hard.

I think a lot of people miss the Cold War. There was this far away, monolythic, scary enemy, that can be reliably used to justify any amount of military expenses. And to a certain point it was, of course, since up until 1953 they were expecting a "world revolution".

The situation changed ever so slightly after 1985, culminating in dissolution of USSR. Good riddance!

And now the same forces - or new incarnation of the same forces - are working again to create that image of an absolute enemy - on both sides. It's just so easy.

Thanks, but I don't really think that's the point at all.

The parent commenter relates that they were 8 years old and not a missile identification expert at that age; but stressed about by something that actually was a realistic fear.

> 8 years-old

Source?

Thank you.

I was a teenager when Reagan came to power, the idea of a nuclear holocaust was in our faces thanks to stuff like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0OPVi90-lg

Except that was a hypothetical. The effects of climate change are real, and irreversible.

As a child in the Reagan years, this was not a source of stress for myself or any kid I knew.

We were still doing nuclear attack drills in my elementary school during the Reagan years, so yeah.

Same here. To make matters worse, I used to confuse the tornado sirens in our town for air raid / civil defense sirens when I was very young and I remember being quite afraid of them, even when I knew they were routine tests, until I finally understood the difference.

I wonder if one big stressor is better than a thousand small stressors.