Stories from the Cold War

First grade started as the world was about to end. A siren went off at the school, and hundreds of us kids were led down to the basement. We were stunned to find ourselves in a vast concrete cavern lined with barrels of water and big boxes of crackers. This fallout shelter would keep us alive if Pittsburgh were destroyed.

At the time, we didn't understand why. Much later, we learned about radiation, isotopes and fallout. We learned about people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki whose shadows were burnt into walls by A-bomb blasts. We also heard about the Soviet threat felt during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

That was all history, though. We didn't want to attack the Soviets. But did they know that? And were they crazy enough to attack western Europe and then us? From the rhetoric, you could never be sure. Presidents Carter and Reagan talked about limiting nuclear weapons while they continued to build new ones.

Details we couldn't imagine

The newspapers ran full-page stories about this. Big maps showed where Soviet and American missiles were deployed and which military bases — and cities — were targets. The papers said the Soviets had 250 warheads pointed at my city, which they could reach in minutes. Divided Germany was on the front line, but all of us in NATO were in harm's way.

Movies filled in the details we couldn't imagine. In War Games, a teenage hacker almost started a global thermonuclear war, thinking he was playing a video game. Testament and The Day After showed the after-effects. On screen, the Soviets invaded Colorado (in Red Dawn), attacked Alaska (in World War III) and occupied the United States (in Amerika).

Just before giving a speech in 1984, Ronald Reagan gave the technicians a sound check. "My fellow Americans," he said, "I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." This "joke" put the Soviet army on alert.

Many of us thought the attack could come at any minute.

News from the teletype

I followed the news closely, because I read it on the air at a college radio station. A lot of the stories were about insults traded by American and Soviet diplomats.

The teletype machine spat out news more or less continuously, so it had a little bell to announce something important — usually the day's top story. A disaster, like a plane crash, would make the bell ring three times. Four times was even rarer, I was told, and five would mean World War III.

I was alone at the station one day when I heard: "Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!" I ran over and read the news letter by letter as it was being typed out. Yuri Andropov, the belligerent Soviet leader, had died after only 15 months in office. For days, no one knew who was in charge or what exactly was going on over there.

A year later, the same thing happened with Andropov's replacement, Konstantin Chernenko. Again, five bells. When the dust settled, it was Mikhail Gorbachev who took over this time. We were lucky.

We'd expected more nuclear threats. Instead, we got glasnost. We'd expected the East Germans to drive their tanks through the Fulda Gap. Instead, they drove their Trabis to West Berlin and bought bananas.

Twenty years later, one of those citizens stood before the US Congress this week as the chancellor of a reunited Germany (video). She earned unending applause as a reminder of the peaceful end to a war that, thankfully, never happened.