Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction

[Monte Davis]

Thanks for the link, Dave. The P-relevance stretchesd from the last dt 
of Gravity's Rainbow to "a heavenwide blast of light..." As a 1950s 
child and 1960s teenager, rocketry and SF fan, I swam in the cultural 
currents Brians traces: "duck and cover" exercises in primary school, 
"On the Beaach" and "Alas, Babylon" aand all that.

I remember vividly a day during the Cuban missile crisis of October 
1962. My school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan had only a small 
gym, so we'd often troop over to Central Park for afternoon athletics. 
It was overcast but bright, with the sun a brighter patch. As we were 
walking past the Museum of Natural History on 77th St., with its big 
Vormance-ish meteorite outside, I had a flash (quite literally) of the 
whole sky going intolerably white.

I had enough precocious missile-tech knowledge even then to realize that 
the whole "crisis" would soon be moot. There was no long-term strategic 
shift at stake: Khrushchev had put medium-range missiles in Cuba to fill 
a brief gap before long-range missiles in the USSR were ready to fill 
the same role, so from our POV the "safety" we were attaining by forcing 
him to back down would (and did) last 2-3 years at most. In that 
12-year-old moment I was really, really pissed off at the "grown-ups" 
(on both sides) for ratcheting up so much fear and tension over such a 
transient side bet.

Haven't gotten over it, really.