Anyone here alive in the 195o's?

Oh, right - I turned fifteen that same month.

smoky fought in Korea during the 50's.

he was not impressed with the place...

When you are dodging human waves, it's hard to appreciate ambiance.

A hydrogen bomb IS an atomic bomb.
It comes from nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms, the way that the sun burns.
The atomic bombs that we used on the Japs in 1945 were from nuclear fission,
splitting atoms of uranium (the first bomb) or splitting atoms of plutonium (second bomb).




The Korean War, the Vietnamese War, the communist revolutions in China, Cuba & other places
were part of the "Cold War" which was the 3rd World War.
The commies were trying to conquer the world and to enslave it
under the political and economic ideas of Karl Marx.
That was the most thorough-going totalitarianism of anything that the world has ever known.




Schools ofen have very large windows facing outdoors. If a bomb detonated such that
the school was on the fringe, the edge of that bomb's power of destruction,
those windows woud become many 1,OOOs of fragments of flying glass.
It was a good idea to get under our desks
to avoid the trajectories of those glass fragments.



I believed that because of the cowardice, faint heartedness and disloyalty of the liberals,
we were going lose the Cold War. It was the 3rd World War.

For years and decades, I believed that because of liberal weakness
and disloyalty, the commies woud win, and eventually,
communist battle tanks woud come rolling down my street,
such that I 'd have to take a gun and kill my mother
and then be killed myself while trying to kill as many communist troops as possible,
always remembering that, when running out of ammunition,
the last round had to be for ME.

Death was much, much better than communist slavery.

The second happiest day in my life was Christmas Day of 1991,
when the USSC went out of business and ended. Freedom won. Slavery lost.





David

I believe that Dave enjoys "embellishing" his personal history.

"Personal history" ???????? HOW?

What did I say about anything in my "history" ????

Please explain?





David

ERRATUM:

I said:
"The second happiest day in my life was Christmas Day of 1991,
when the USSC went out of business and ended. . . ."

The USSC (US Supreme Court) did not go out of business.

I shoud have said:
The second happiest day in my life was Christmas Day of 1991,
when the USSR went out of business and ended.





David

In school in the 50s, we had these "air raid" drills, where we'd crawl under our desks and "duck and cover"--which meant we'd curl up in a little ball and cover our heads with our hands. By about 1956, i was asking myself what earthly good that would do if anyone dropped the atom bomb on us. I also asked myself why anyone with a brain cell would be dropping an atom bomb on the totally insignificant little town i lived in.

From time to time we were told that our generation was being warped by "living in the shadow of the bomb." I'd say, though, that the ones who were freaked out were the grown ups. When you grow up with something, it becomes a commonplace, something you don't think about much. I don't recall being worried about the bomb--after all, it they dropped one on us, we were toast, game over.

I also recall how so many grownups were all worked up over "the reds," the commies who, apparently, not unlike the monsters of childhood, lurked under children's beds.

But mostly i remember inhabiting a world which seemed to be the best of all possible worlds and a world which would never change because it didn't need to change. A few years later, though, i was to revise that opinion.

I attended more than one school, in California, in the fifties. None of them made us do the duck and cover stuff. I moved to Texas in Jan of 57. Until the Sputnik scare, nobody there mentioned the Soviets much at all.

We would have to "duck and say a rosary" Sr ATtila (the Nun) would always do a rosary check before we got our chocky milk break in the morning.
If they were so worried about us getting cut up from the bomb blast, why the hell did they put in those big walls'o windows?.

OH YEAH, I remember that me and several other boys (this was second grade) would have to pull the shades down. Sr Attila didnt want us to be frightened by the flash That was something we found strange.
You aparently saw through the idiocy at an early age. I, on the other hand was scared shitless and the only thing that kept me from years of therapy was because our next door neighbor was a psychiatrist and My Dad always said he was nuttier than a Snickers.

I would dream about atomic bomb blasts and hydrogen bomb blasts, always in school .
SR Attila assured us that, should we all die from the blast we would get a free pass into heaven without any Purgatory time. I was afraid of heaven cause lightning came from heaven. SO there I was, 6 years old and really fucked up . I was afraid of lightning, clowns, Thad Zstchynsky,Polio, the hydrogen bomb,mosquitoes carryiing Equine Meningitis and the ghost of Johnie Hannahoe. I had a very full plate of things to be afraid of.
There on top of it, I was enrolled in a school wherein the nuns were pushing this crap that dying for "The Faith" was a really big deal. Its amazing that I never delved into being a cereal killer

I think if you were a cereal killer, you would be post toasties...

My grandfather taught me how to read in the summer before i turned four. After that, i would go to the depot (he was a station master and telegrapher) and we would look at books and he would explain them to me. We had this picture book of American history which was pure bullshit. He didn't tell me it was pure bullshit, but he explained things so that i eventually figured that out for myself. One of the things we discussed was why battles were fought at a particular place and time. So, for example, the battle of Bunker Hill (which was fought on Breed's Hill, but that's not to the point) was fought because the Americans had built a little fort overnight on Breed's Hill, and if they put artillery in there, the Brits would have to get out, because they could shoot at the Royal Navy, but the navy couldn't shoot back because they couldn't elevate their guns that far. So, i eventually understood that these things have a concrete reason. Gettysburg was a meeting engagement--the two armies got to, roughly, the same place at the same time. Nevertheless, Gettysburg was important because it was the hub of roads from the west, the southwest, the south, the southeast, the east and the north.

So, late in1956, i was contemplating the idiocy of the the duck and cover bullshit, because, of course, we saw film of atomic bomb tests on the teevee all the time. It was pretty clear that we'd be toast if anyone ever dropped one of those suckers on us, so the duck and cover was meaningless. But then, i asked myself why anyone would bother dropping a bomb on our little town. It had absolutely no significance. The following year, he gave me Wells' The Outline of History to read, and i was hooked.

Farmer, u have insulted my veracity
without explaining the reason, giving no specifics.

I requested that u explain this with no results.





David

My parents never discussed politics in my presence, if at all. But my mother did love to listen to Truman's speeches. "They (the radio) cut him off again, for cussing," she told me more than once. I was, essentially, clueless most of the time.

Schools had huge windows, facing outdoors.
Distant bombs coud propel many fragments of flying glass across classrooms.
Ducking woud help to avoid the trajectory of flying particulate glass.
In the event of direct hits, ducking was obviated.

Commie lovers were welcome to stand and look out the window to admire the communist bombs.





David

Travelling to Berlin from any place in Western Europe was a difficult thing.
It was really bad for the West Germans as they were the great animies of the East Germans and the sowiet Union behind them.
If I wanted to go to Berlin(the western part) during the cold war I first had to get a visa and permission to go through East Germany. Coming from Scandinavia via boat getting off in Sassnitz boarding a train in which soldiers with machinguns were walking back and forth. Passport control made you shake all over. One person to control the passport, two to control the passport controller.
You should not talk to anyone in the train who was not a Scandinavian. If you said something bad about the East part it might be reported to someone. If the German talked to you it might be reported.
Crossing the border to any East country was horror.

The link here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uprising_of_1953_in_East_Germany

was one of the things in the 50. which made people believe in a third world war, but was part of the cold war.

Here is another one
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956

Life was a bit different than just to cover your head. Especially in the communistic countries. These people suffered and we in western were afraid of the communists, but not the way you Americans were and are.
Germany was nothing but ruins 1945 and was rebuildt during the 50

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtschaftswunder

Your teacher might have shown you a documentary on the Cuban Missile crisis.
It was touch and go whether you would be here today asking your question.

So I'd be sitting in class trying to pay attention, and all of a sudden the teacher would yell, "Take cover." The students had to crawl under our desks with our heads faced away from the window. I didn't think much of this from a Cold War perspective. I just liked the change of pace.

The Cold War seems to have been a war of fear. Once the US was not the only country with the bomb, we got noivous. It was also a war of mistrust. Maybe paranoia. It wasn't a real war in the fighting sense.

The 1950s were a decade of complete mass paranoia. What OmSigDAVID keeps referring to as World War 3 in his own quaint way never happened because -- thank goodness!! -- neither our leaders nor the Communist dictators were crazy enough to actually use a nuclear weapon on each other. Having seen what even a relatively primitive weapon could do to Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WW 2, we weren't about to use one of those again except in the most dire emergency.

You ask about what kind of war is it where no actual fighting takesplace, Gracie. Well, the 'cold war' is really a metaphorical expression for what actually went on from the 1950s into the 1980s until the Soviet Union (aka the USSR) just fell apart in 1991. It was not a 'war' in the usual sense of the word. There were several actual shooting wars that went on during this time -- Korea, Vietnam, the Communist revolution in Cuba which brought Fidel Castro to power. But the expression 'cold war' just refers to the fact that we -- i.e. the USA, the United Kingdom, NATO and the rest of the Western world were lined up against the Soviet Union (Russia), China and all their so-called satellite puppets in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Russia and Chine in particular were our sworn enemies and we made no bones about that. We didn't trust them and they didn't trust us. We spied on each other shamelessly.

But, as I said, the main thing I remember about the 1950s (I was in school then) was the pervasive paranoia. As others on this thread have already mentioned, we were seeing Communist plots everywhere and people thought that a nuclear bomb could be dropped on us any minute. Some of this feeling of paranoia was perhaps justified. (At the time I thought maybe it was.) But looking back on it with older eyes I can see that a lot of what we thought and believed was utter hogwash.

PS -- I'm glad you like history. I could talk about it for hours and hours.

Yeah, like it was "just paranoia" that Leon Trotsky feared Bolshevik stalkers chasing him with an ax,
and we were all just paranoid about the nazis being aggressive, right ??

It was NOT "paranoia" that the Reds were trying to conquer and enslave the entire world.
We all saw what happened each time thay took over a country.
We had good reason to know that the commies were doing their best to take over.
Communism was always a system of world government; thay never denied that.




So, according to U, wars do not exist unless nuclear weapons r used.





David