A typically cheery thought

[cmdr_zoom]

To die alone is widely regarded as a very bad, sad thing; some go so far as to say that we all die alone, in some sense.

Ironic, then, that for a good ten years or so, my great fear was that my death would be accompanied/shared by most of the Northern Hemisphere.

Comments

[gwyd.livejournal.com]

I have a friend who's something like 15 years younger than us who got all stressed out about environmental collapse. i pointed out that nearly everyone they meet older than them grew up expecting sudden death with little or no warning, the flash, the mushroom cloud, the shockwave. That in a majority of the world people expect death from war or disease at a young age and that tat can easily take whole villages, everyone they know personally within weeks or months. That it was like that through a large portion of the last 1500 years in the western World. The expectation for a long life is a relatively new thing and the expectation of the world not suddenly ending is a luxury, really.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

These days, that small portion of my headspace is mostly occupied by stuff like asteroid impacts and gamma-ray bursters. Ecology and climate change is more of a process; it doesn't have that same quality of "today, quite unexpectedly and inconveniently, the world ended."

[gwyd.livejournal.com]

My friend was all panicky in a way that was genuinely baffling me and the baby boomers.

[sptrashcan.livejournal.com]

We will all go together when we go. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frAEmhqdLFs)

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

All suffused with an incandescent glow.

[gwyd.livejournal.com]

Universal bereavement, an inspiring achievement!

[caluche.livejournal.com]

Looking back on it though, the fears were probably more or less unfounded and driven more by hollywood than real danger. Not that there wasn't a danger, but if you're going to live in the US during the cold war, one of the best places to survive would be a small town on the west coast. Eugene itself wouldn't be any kind of target, and there was no major target to the west of Eugene. More or less, safe from both immediate blast damage and fallout.

Of course, there would be the problem of starving to death a bit later on.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

My understanding was that Eugene itself was a low-priority target, what with the rail yard and population center. My previous home, Roseburg, might well have made it through untouched.

That said, in the event of a full-scale Global Thermonuclear War, I would almost prefer to perish in the initial exchange rather than live through the aftermath. I'm a civilized man, and when civilization goes, so do I.

You're right that the fear was played up, though if it kept us away from the brink, I'd say that's a good thing in the long run. I think that for me, a big part of it was the perception outlined above: that there was a very small but non-zero chance that it could happen at any time, either because of an outright glitch or misinterpretation (like the one narrowly averted by Colonel Petrov) or some escalation of Cold War saber-rattling. A sword of Damocles hanging over my head, over which I had no control at all.

[caluche.livejournal.com]

The population center was unimportant as far as a countervalue bargaining piece and there is value to keeping the population alive, particularly from the soviet viewpoint. The soviets fully expected a war to be fought after the nuclear exchange, and to inhibit the US ability to fight as much as possible it's better that there is a damaged infrastructure and food production capability yet a large population that needs to be fed.

The rail yard is probably important enough that it's on some soviet target encyclopedia somewhere, but it'd (probably) going to be such a low priority target that it'd have to be a long running and not accidental war.

It could still happen at any time, at least in that there's a very, very small chance of an accidental launch by one of the nuclear powers triggering another and so on, or you could be on an airplane that gets flown into a building, or any number of things.

The thing about surviving a global thermonuclear war is that the 'global' part isn't entirely accurate. Much of the southern hemisphere would probably survive more or less untouched. It's still by no means be a pleasant thing to live through, but I'm not totally sure that we'd really even be facing the end of technological civilization.

Certainly though the flavor of the concern is different than climate change.