Putin’s nuclear threats are a grim reminder of my past. Here’s hoping I have a future

When I was growing up in the 1960s, nuclear war was a very real concept.

I was not one of the boomers born just after the war — the one that ended with the U.S. dropping two atomic bombs on Japan. They got to watch a cartoon turtle telling them to “Duck and Cover” under their school desks.

For most of the truly perilous moments in Bomblandia, I was in blissful childhood. Thankfully, I was 2 years old during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I have a good friend who spent the famed Thirteen Days on an elk hunting trip in Colorado. He went into the woods the day before it started and came out the day after it was over.

Everyone else was paying close attention. For my part, later watching the Oct. 22, 1962, video of President John F. Kennedy’s almost stricken-looking face delivering the news that his administration would institute a “quarantine” of Cuba was enough to prove it was a close call.

Today Kennedy is lauded for his handling of the crisis, but we know a lot more about the situation now than we did then. Kennedy told Soviet leaders that we would trade our missiles in Turkey for their missiles in Cuba, which were not yet operational.

We are in an entirely different place today. Russia wasn’t actively engaged in taking over a country by military force in 1962. Now they are attacking Ukraine, a sovereign democracy, which raises the stakes quite a bit.

During the Kennedy years, it was assumed and feared that the Soviets would make a play to take over West Berlin, which Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev called a “bone in our throat.”

After 1989, Europe became a very different place. The Berlin Wall came down thanks to decades of pressure from Western democracies. The Soviets’ then-leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who is still out there in his dacha at 91, saw that his country would implode if it kept spending on defense. He was right.

The West won the Cold War, for a while.

In some ways, the NATO alliance, along with the European Union, has never been more unified, and that’s good. Imagine if we had a U.S. president who was manipulated by Vladimir Putin.

You know, like the last one.

Talk of nuclear conflict is in the air again. This, along with the pandemic and threats to American democracy, was not on my turning-60 bingo card.

In a brush-back pitch, Putin recently put his country’s nation’s nuclear arsenal on higher alert. President Joe Biden has not yet taken the bait, and good for us. For the record, I’d note that Putin did exactly the same thing in 2014, when he annexed Crimea. This is what he does.

We don’t have to do that. Oh, wait, we already did: President Trump flatly threatened North Korea with nuclear weapons, just as ridiculously as Putin is threatening us.

I spent many nights as a young child, when my family lived near the nation’s capital, worrying about nuclear attack. I now know that was a waste of time because I wouldn’t have ever known it if a nuclear missile landed in Washington, D.C.

Fine by me.

But I sure as hell wasn’t alone in my peer group in worrying about the bomb. There was even a civil defense station preset on my mom’s 1959 Plymouth.

Comedians joked about it. Tom Lehrer’s “So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III)” contained the lyrics:

Watch Brink-uh-ley and Hunt-uh-ley /

Describing contrapuntally/

The cities we have lost./

No need for you to miss a minute/

Of the agonizing holocaust.

I assume Putin’s war on Ukraine will be conducted with brutal conventional weapons. These weapons are so bad that they don’t need to use nukes.

But I am pretty sure that nuclear war cuts into your oligarchs’ fun and yachts. Now that’s deterrence.

And if I’m wrong, I won’t be around for you to tell me.