Shelter from the intense heat, and the radiation that is the by-product of a nuclear explosion. . . . Let’s assume bombs fall before you have time to prepare a shelter, or while you wait, in the belief atomic war will never come. We can always hope that man will never use such a weapon, but we should also adopt the Boy Scout slogan: be prepared. . . . It may be safe for you to leave your house after a few hours, or it may be as long as two weeks or more. Two weeks with very little food or water . . . tension . . . unaccustomed closeness. Two weeks with sanitary facilities most likely not operating. No lights. No phone. Just terror.
Fallout shelters were built around the country. New commercial buildings had them. New homes had them, and residents stocked them with water, canned goods, candles, blankets, and tranquilizers. Public buildings had them installed. The possibility of sudden nuclear annihilation at the hands of the Communists became part of everyday life. Many families rehearsed and planned for living for extended periods in dark and rancid basement shelters, and for being separated from one another indefinitely if an attack came when the children were in school.
That the trauma of unending fear and the need for hypervigilance could have psychological or neurological impacts on the developing baby-boom generation didn’t occur to psychologists until the social erosion of the 1960s and 1970s was becoming apparent. Yale psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, founding member of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, conducted a series of interviews in the late 1970s with people who had been children during the Cold War. Writer Michael Carey was his assistant, and reported on it in the January 1981 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
This generation had America’s only formal and extended bomb threat education in its schools, and that education—along with the lessons about the bomb from government, the media and the family—were well-learned. This generation has a collection of memories, images and words that will not disappear, even for those who profess not to be troubled.
Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard psychiatrist John Mack was part of a 1977 task force for the American Psychiatric Association that sought to understand the effects of the sustained nuclear threat on children’s psyches.
We may be seeing that growing up in a world dominated by the threat of imminent nuclear destruction is having an impact on the structure of the personality itself. It is difficult, however, to separate the impact of the threat of nuclear war from other factors in contemporary culture, such as the relentless confrontation of adolescents by the mass media with a deluge of social and political problems which their parents’ generation seems helpless to change.
Analyzing the results of studies in Canada, the United States, Sweden, Finland, and the USSR, together with her clinical experiences with families and young patients, Canadian psychiatrist Joanna Santa Barbara found that nuclear-age youth were “profoundly disillusioned,” and that this affected their capacity to plan for the future. She urged adults to help in young people’s efforts to overcome their sense of betrayal.
Betrayal, cynicism, absurdity, and a profound mistrust of authority were overriding themes not only in the books of such popular writers as Ken Kesey and Kurt Vonnegut, but also in results from studies and commentary on the issue at the time. Jacobs writes on the psychological history and effects of nuclear war:
While children were supposedly being trained to physically survive an atomic attack, Duck and Cover also delivered a subtle message about the relationship of children and their world to the world of their parents. “Older people will help us like they always do. But there might not be any grown-ups around when the bomb explodes,” the narrator somberly reminds them. “Then, you’re on your own.” Duck and Cover was designed to teach children that they could survive a surprise nuclear war even in the absence of adult caretakers, conveying a powerfully mixed assurance. The film leaves no doubt that the threat of attack is always imminent and that the key to the survival of these children is their constant mental state of readiness for nuclear war: “No matter where we live, in the city or the country, we must be ready all the time for the atomic bomb. . . . Yes, we must all get ready now so we know how to save ourselves if the atomic bomb ever explodes near us.” But the film also reveals that the world children take for granted, the safe world of their childhood, could dissolve at any moment. And when that debacle happens, the adults will be gone; the youngsters will be on their own.
We now know that, in some people, the constant amygdala stimulation of such hypervigilance in childhood can produce long-term effects in the brain that lead to post-traumatic stress disorder. The classic fight-or-flight reaction to perceived threat is a reflexive nervous-system response that has obvious survival advantages in evolutionary terms, say psychiatrists Jonathan Sherin and Charles Nemeroff, who have published on the neurological changes underlying PTSD. However, the constant stimulation of the systems that organize the constellation of reflexive survival behaviors following exposure to perceived threat can cause chronic dysregulation of these systems. This, in turn, can effectively rewire brain pathways, causing certain individuals to become “psychologically traumatized” and to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, which can lead to other mental-health issues, impulsivity, and self-medication with drugs, alcohol, sex, or other forms of addiction.
Later studies showed an increased incidence of mental-health problems among the baby-boomer generation that sharply diverged from prior and subsequent generations, and in many ways fit the PTSD profile. Drug and alcohol use ran at rates far higher than any other generation, as did rates of divorce. Baby boomers also experienced a sharp increase in the adolescent suicide rate versus previous or subsequent generations, a problem that, like drug use and divorce, continued to plague the generational cohort into their later years. Suicide rates among baby boomers continue to run as much as 30 percent higher than other age cohorts, and divorce rates in 2010 among those aged fifty and older ran at twice the rate of the prior generation (measured in 1990) while the overall US divorce rate had fallen 20 percent during the same time.
As the largest age demographic, the baby boomers soon began to rule the cultural conversation across the Western world, and particularly in the United States, with what many commentators called an overweening narcissism. During the sixties, when baby boomers were in their teens, they rebelled and self-medicated with sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. In their twenties, as they were getting jobs and finding their identities, they became the me generation. In the 1980s, as they settled down, had families, took up professions, switched to cocaine, and began gentrifying urban neighborhoods their parents had abandoned, they became yuppies: young urban professionals. In the 1990s, as they began investing for retirement, they created the tech bubble. And in the 2000s, as they realized they were mortal, there was a resurgence of big religion in suburban megachurches, and a sharp increase in libertarian, “no new taxes” politics whose goal was to “shrink government until it’s small enough to drown in the bathtub.” Through it all, the generation has largely maintained its mistrust of—and antipathy toward—both government and science. Over the ensuing decades, the baby boomers felt vindicated in this attitude again and again as government officials from the president on down were discredited, and as environmental science began to expose the damage being wrought by the civic, industrial, and agricultural application of pesticides and other chemicals developed during World War II. The world was a mess, thanks to science.
From Duck and Cover to Run Like Hell
We do not have enough data to say that the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation, and the resulting hypervigilence and learned helplessness, are wholly responsible for any of the social or epidemiological characteristics of boomer culture. But historical records suggest it was a significant contributing factor. Whatever the long-range effects, the threat of nuclear war in the 1950s represented terrorism on a new scale. Imagine that ISIS were in charge of a country the size of the Soviet Union and had nuclear weapons trained on the United States; one can get a sense of the era’s fear. Americans knew what these weapons could do, and knew they could be used again. The only option was to plan for an attack on American soil, which was regarded as inevitable. This knowledge changed American culture and its relationship to science in some surprising ways.
For example, it has long been the prevailing opinion that American suburbs developed as a result of the increased use of the car, GI Bill–funded home