What I Really Learned from All Those 1980s Nuclear Strike Drills
Preparing for a post-apocalyptic wasteland that never came
Note: This story originally appeared on Medium on January 30th, 2023. It was the first story I submitted to . It represents the start of a wonderful working relationship and friendship!
When I was in elementary school, we used to pretend that the Russians were shooting nuclear missiles at us. It was actually the Soviet Union then, but we still called them “the Russians.”
Climbing under my desk scared me the first few times. It was always gross under there. Kids put gum or boogers underneath the desk and you had to sit and stare at it until the teacher decided “fun pretend nuclear oblivion” time was over.
When I got a little older, the fear started to be replaced with annoyance. I got taller. Getting down on my hands and knees hurt too much. I knew the whole thing was stupid. All we did was watch movies about thermonuclear war. We all knew we’d be vaporized in the event of an attack.
“Mrs. Leviathan,” I said. “If a Russian nuclear missile is headed right for our school, what good is it going to do me to sit under this desk?”
One of my friends started laughing.
“Walter, shut up and do what you’re told.”
“What happened to, ‘There’s no such thing as a bad question’?”
“I said… get under the desk.”
“No, if I’m going to die, I want to die standing proud, saluting my flag, like a patriotic American! What would George Washington say about US citizens huddling in terror on their hands and knees? He’d find it shameful I bet! You’re asking us to dishonor the Founding Fathers and I refuse!” I’d already learned that you could get away with a lot of insubordination if you talked like this.
Mrs. Leviathan rubbed her eyes and took a sip from the special mug she kept in her bottom drawer. “Listen, kid… would you just get under the desk? Go down there and have playtime or something. Here’s a Hot Wheels car I confiscated.”
Then she threw the car at me.
“Hey! This is mine, I’ve been looking for this.” I said. Incidentally, it was a black Pontiac TransAm like the one in Smokey and the Bandit.
So, I met her halfway. I sat at the desk and started playing with the car.
Mrs. Leviathan looked at me and looked around the room. The other kids were all being quiet and were under their desks. She took another swig and let it pass. The next time we had a drill, everybody just sat at their desks.
Inevitably, propaganda begins to contradict itself. If you’re going to constantly fearmonger about the devastation of a nuclear winter, you can’t expect kids to believe they can huddle beneath the protection of a flimsy desk.
All we ever did back then was watch movies set in the aftermath of a nuclear war.
Armageddon was a big deal. There would be weeks and weeks of warnings leading up to the broadcast of films like The Day After. A stern guy would come on the screen during Saturday morning cartoons and urgently tell the parents not to let their kids watch this film.
Back then we were too innocent to wonder why they were playing these announcements during child programming. We didn’t realize they were commercials. They just interrupted our cartoons which were also commercials for the toys we were supposed to buy (I still have my original Optimus Prime by the way).
“Mom, can I stay up and watch The Day After?”
“No!”
“But I need to be prepared in the event of a Soviet attack!”
“I. Said. NO!”
Every single movie took place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. I remember watching Damnation Alley. I didn’t really care about the apocalypse, I thought it was cool to watch Jan Michael Vincent drive his motorcycle through a desert full of gigantic scorpions and gigantic cockroaches.
I learned that after the nuclear war, our main problem would be fighting off gigantic insects using primitive weapons.
I learned to think that the apocalypse would turn America into a dustier version of Middle Earth. It would be like Steel Dawn, Mad Max, or Blood of Heroes (which features a post-apocalyptic precursor to Quidditch if you can believe that). I thought these movies made the aftermath of a nuclear war look gritty and cool. Secretly, I was starting to look forward to it.
“Go to bed, Walter!”
“But mom… I want to see the end of Damnation Alley!”
It was easy to make movies back in the ’80s. You didn’t need an expensive set. You just drove out to the desert and had a voiceover explaining about “the day the missiles came.” You didn’t even need to show the war. These days that’s as boring as watching Bruce Wayne’s parents get murdered.
“Yawn… seen it!”
But just once I wish they’d have shown a bunch of kids huddling under desks who got totally obliterated so every child of the ’80s who had to endure a nuclear strike drill could go “Ha!” Like, come on America, at least spare kids the indignity of having to huddle on the floor.
But all those nuclear attack drills served their purpose. We came to fear Russia. We knew we had an enemy. We knew the United States was there to protect us from harm.
“Hallelujah! God bless the USA! I’m so happy and patriotic and proud though I don’t know why.”
When I had kids, I felt a certain amount of relief that they would never know the terror of an imminent nuclear attack. They wouldn’t have to watch movie after movie after movie featuring a mushroom cloud.
“Uh-oh, we know what that means.”
“Yeah, giant scorpions.”
But imagine my surprise when my kids came home from school and said, “We had an active shooter drill today.”
“Oh yeah, what did that entail?”
“Mrs. Leviathan (no relation), made us huddle under the desks.”
“Dammit.”
You see, modern America in all its wisdom thinks it’s better to make it easier for active shooters to murder as many children as possible. They help the killers by drilling kids to sit motionlessly in a room while quietly waiting to die.
Because, you know you can’t open the windows and flee. Just sit there and wait for the police not to arrive.
In fact, this is worse than the nuclear drills because nuclear wars only happened in the voiceovers of cool post-apocalyptic movies.
In modern America, kids are getting murdered at school all the time. One probably got murdered as you read that sentence. America doesn’t care.
Some things have changed since I was growing up, but not that.
We don’t turn on the television anymore, instead, we turn on the internet. There aren’t terrifying videos of mushroom clouds which are followed by crowds of half-melted zombies lurching around. Instead, every day we get to see a new video of policemen murdering somebody who was pulled over for a broken tail light.
These videos aren’t fantasy, these videos are real.
It makes me realize that we’ve been trained to be scared of the wrong things.
Growing up, I was conditioned to be afraid of the Russian military. Imagine my surprise when I found out Russia only has an 84 billion dollar military budget. The US military budget is around 800 billion.
Here’s something even more surprising, the US police budget is about 120 billion.
Our police officers are better funded than the Russian military? Really? Why?
Even with all that money, we can’t protect our children. They have to spend their days at school huddling under a gross desk with gum and boogers wiped on the bottom, waiting quietly to be shot.
They taught us to huddle under desks too.
Really, we were learning to stick our heads in the sand.
From what I see, everybody learned this lesson really well.
“I'd rather Be Writing” exists because of your generous support. If you have the means please consider upgrading to a paid sponsorship. I have payment tiers starting at as little as twenty dollars a year. I'm so happy you're here, and I'm looking forward to sharing more thoughts with you tomorrow.
My CoSchedule referral link
Here’s my referral link to my preferred headline analyzer tool. If you sign up through this, it’s another way to support this newsletter (thank you).
You took me back with those drills and the descriptions of those shows with the mushroom clouds. I hadn't thought about them for a long time. We know what WE were thinking, but what must the teachers have been thinking? They had to have known the desks wldn't help us.
I guess we were the lucky ones, compared to having to do active shooter drills - when the danger was likely to be perpetrated by someone right here on U.S. soil, and close up and personal.
The enemy within.
Be well!
Christy 🇺🇲❤️🕊
This took me back! I lived in Houston during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and we were drilled every day at school for about a month at that time. But instead of getting under our desks, we were sent out into the hall where we scrunched down next to the wall and got into something like “child’s pose,” with our hands locked over the back of our heads. I think most of us suspected that if there was really an attack that affected the school, we were not going to walk away. I also remember hearing Nikita Khrushchev on TV, saying that the USSR would destroy us from within. I couldn’t figure out what that meant. Guess we all know now.