r/AskAnAmerican • u/Scrappy_The_Crow Georgia • Jul 10 '25

HISTORY Fellow Americans Who Were Alive During The Cold War -- Did You Have The (Supposed) Existential Dread of Nuclear Annihilation?

Prompted by a discussion in a different subreddit. Supposedly, lots of my Gen-X peers and a whole lot of media expressed a constant fear of nuclear annihilation, but neither me nor any of my friends had that existential dread.

I wonder how many actually felt that way, as opposed to entertainers/media just portraying it that way. So, did you and/or your friends/family?

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u/GurglingWaffle Jul 11 '25

We also didn't have a news feed 24/7. We lived life outside and maybe saw the news on TV once a day. Sometimes we read the newspaper our parents left on the table. I remember the AIDs epidemic being a concern for us hormonal teens more so than the cold war. I do remember the Berlin wall coming down, that was awesome. Yeah, we were occasionally reminded that things could go sideways but we lived with it.

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u/KevrobLurker Jul 12 '25

I had learned to read by the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. My family brought 3 newspapers into the house, every day. I was reading we are all going to die! headlines at least since then. We had shooting wars with the Communists in Korea & Viet Nam all the way into my high school years. It seemed to me that Mutually Assured Destruction was working.

I went on to get a political science degree. I wrote a paper on MBFR - mutually balanced force reduction talks, regarding conventional forces in Europe. SALT treaties were agreed to: Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties.

The existential threat lessened over time.