There is one reason for the 1960s generation, virtually all of its attitudes and behaviors: the bomb. From kindergarten through the twelfth grade, every U.S. child born in 1946 or the decade or so after had to hide from the nuclear bomb. None of us knew life without Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In K—3 we hid under our school desks, elbows covering our ears. From grades four or five through graduation, we were lined up three- or four- or five-thick against walls without windows, elbows over our ears. We were supposed to believe that these poses would save us from the bomb the Soviets were going to drop on us sometime after the warning bell rang. In the later grades, our teachers herded us, then stood around and talked. They didn't seem to think that they were going to die, let alone melt, any minute. They seemed more as if they were going to chat until the bell rang and the next class began. Not one teacher could explain the logic of elbows over ears in the face of a nuclear onslaught. Not one teacher could explain why they themselves had not flung their bodies up against a wall or why their ears were bare naked and their elbows calmly down by their sides. More to the point as far as I was concerned, not one teacher could explain why, if these were our last few minutes, we should spend them in such an idiotic way. "I'd rather take a walk," I would say, "if I'm about to die now." My father was called in, a scene he described to me shortly before he died at eighty-five: "I asked them what the hell they expected me to do." The real question was, What was one to do with these grown-ups, these liars, these thieves of time and life—my teachers, not the Soviets? Did they expect us to be so dim and dull? I thought it would be a good idea not to have war anymore. I could feel nuclear winter chilling my bones, even though the expression did not yet exist, and I had a vivid picture of people melting. I've never gotten over it. There was one day when all my schoolmates and I knew that we were going to die. According to historians the Cuban missile crisis lasted thirteen days, but to us it was one day because we knew we were going to die then, that day. I don't know which of the thirteen it was, and I don't know if I'm collapsing several days into one, but I remember nothing before the one day and nothing after. In the back of the school bus all the girls gathered in a semicircle. We talked about the sadness of dying virgins, though some of us weren't. We spoke with deep regret, like old people looking back on our lives; we enumerated all that we had not managed to do, the wishes we had, the dreams that were unfulfilled. No one talked about getting married. Children came up in passing. We 'd feel our own bones melt and in the particle of a second see our own cities drowned in fire. I wasn't afraid to die, but sitting still and waiting for it was not good. I still feel that way. We all, including me, felt a little sorry for ourselves, because everything we had ever known had been touched by nuclear war; it was the shadow on every street, in every house, in every dinnertime conversation, in every current-events reprise; it was always there as threat, and now it was going to happen, that day, then, there, to us. The school bus was bright yellow with black markings on the outside, just the way they are now, but everything was different because we were kids who knew that we were going to be cremated and killed in the same split second. I could see my arm withered, the flesh coming off in paper-thin layers, while my chest was already ash, and there'd be no blood—it would evaporate before we 'd even be dead superheroes. The girls were serious and upset. Even those who didn't like each other talked quietly and respectfully. There was one laugh: a joke about the only girl in the school we were sure was no virgin. She was famous as the school whore, and she was widely envied though shunned on a normal day, since she knew the big secret; but on this day, the last day, she could have been crowned queen, sovereign of the girls. She represented everything we wanted: she knew how to do it and how it felt; she knew a lot of boys; she was really pretty and laughed a lot, even though the other girls would not talk to her. She had beautifully curly brown hair and an hourglass figure, but thin. She was Eve's true descendant, the symbol of what it meant to bite the apple. Tomorrow she would go back to being the local slut, but on the day we were all going to die she was Cinderella an hour before midnight. I wished that I could grow up, but I could not entirely remember why. I waited with my schoolmates to die.

                                                                                                  -compressed from chapters "the bomb" and "cuba"                
                                                                                                   from heartbreak
                                                                                                   by andrea dworkin     - see the reading list.

   

the images after the first are all taken from the above pamphlet, produced just after word war two, except: left.the circle in white, from the "oxford textbook of medicine." right. notice how the army surgeon general agrees that everyone should have more, more, more bombs,and the early acceptance of the idiotic "defense shield." according to the diagram on the left, do you think we have enough?

russian storage sites remain almost totally unguarded and there have been several widely reported thefts of bomb grade radio active material.

  does this sound like fighting "terrorism"?

"terrorism" - the buzz word that replaced "cold war" in its usefulness in controlling the population, mere citizens.

bio-weapons

             
     jusim muhammad, an eight year old victim of chemical attack in halabja. from harpers