In Arizona, Tucson shouldered the most dangerous part of the nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. Some seventeen Titan II intercontinental ballistic missiles ringed the Old Pueblo from 1963 to 1982 in blast-hardened silos (one still exists as a museum near Sahuarita). The silos wouldn't have been enough to protect the ICBMs from the many incoming nuclear warheads targeted by the USSR, especially as the Soviets gained parity with the United States in missiles and warheads. So facing a launch warning, a president would have had minutes to get the Titan IIs, which carried the largest U.S. warheads, airborne. Tucson would have been engulfed in a firestorm of hydrogen bombs. The motto of the Strategic Air Command, on display at the gates of bases such as Davis-Monthan, was "Peace is Our Profession."
Still, Phoenix was an important target during much of the Cold War. In addition to two Air Force bases used primarily for fighter-jet training (Luke and Williams), the city had a relatively large set of valuable aerospace and technology plants, plus research operations. It was the state capital. And, had "the balloon gone up" in such a way that city-for-city targeting happened, Phoenix was a major population center. It was highly vulnerable. As one of my mother's water engineer friends said, "Bomb the dams and it's all over." The evacuation plans drawn up by Civil Defense for American cities in the 1950s wouldn't have worked: Where would you send half a million souls in an isolated place largely surrounded by desert?
Even in a limited nuclear exchange, Phoenix would have been vulnerable to fallout. It was badly lacking in fallout shelter space (I remember seeing a report in the early 1970s that, as I recall, claimed space for about 100,000 when the metro area held six or seven times that number). Still, the ubiquitous shelter signs were everywhere downtown: The round older ones in red-white-and-blue with CD (Civil Defense) emblazoned on them, the more spare "Fallout Shelter" black-and-gold rectangles from the '60s. (One of the old ones was on a lamp post near First Watch downtown well into the 2000s; I hope somebody preserves it). These were mostly basements of office buildings, stocked with food and water by the feds, meant to protect against radioactive fallout. I remember one in the utility tunnels under Coronado High School; when I went down there in the '70s, the food, water and geiger counters were all neatly packed, a decade old. Yet these were not blast shelters. Few Phoenix houses had even basements. Few Phoenicians dug their own shelters.
Planning, such as it was, was rudimentary. A bunker cut into a butte on the military reservation in Papago Park served as the city and county emergency center in the event of attack (it's still there). Sirens were placed around the city, bright yellow, tested every Saturday at noon. A long wailing meant tune into the radio — first CONELRAD, then the Emergency Broadcast System — while a rapid rise and fall of the siren meant "take cover immediately." The EBS was regularly tested with a long, high-pitched tone on every radio station. In the bomber era, the 1950s, Luke and Williams were assets, protectors, especially when America had such a huge advantage. Once ICBMs became operational, they were just targets. And the reaction time had shrunk from hours to about 30 minutes, 15 or less if the missile were launched at a low trajectory from a Soviet "boomer" submerged off the West Coast. Phoenix was not large enough to have Nike anti-aircraft missile batteries such as those that stood sentinel over New York, Cincinnati, Seattle or San Francisco. And once ICBMs established the balance of terror, the Nikes were obsolete.
We made plans, of course. In an emergency, my grandmother and I would go downtown and join my mother in the basement of her office in the Heard Building. But in reality, about the best one could do, as the authentic-looking Civil Defense poster hanging in the ambulance station advised, was "kiss your ass goodbye."
A Titan II missile, the most powerful U.S. ICBM, in its silo near Tucson.
I'm sure most children who grew up in the 1960s had nuclear-free childhoods, innocence unmarred by constant thoughts of fiery annihilation. I was not one of them. The drills at Kenilworth School, where we were led away from the glass-windowed classrooms into the interior auditorium — face the wall, cover your head — filled me with primal fear. I remember watching President Kennedy's speech during the Cuban Missile Crisis on the black-and-white, rabbit-eared television. Even when that confrontation was snuffed, the weekly siren testing froze my blood. Doomsday dreams haunted my sleep; I heard the lines "thine alabaster cities gleam" and imagined Phoenix being vaporized by flash, blast, shockwave, fire, elements that could overpower even the everpresent sun overhead. I always assumed these complex missile systems would really work and that the Soviets would be perfect marksmen, using the Valley Center tower as the aiming point for several megatons of hellfire.
My anxieties were not eased by a family friend who was a reserve rear admiral, pal of Polaris sub boss Hyman Rickover and close to the Atomic Energy Commission. He gladly educated me on all the theories and tools of nuclear holocaust. For hawks on both sides, nuclear war was not only thinkable but winnable. America had the likes of Gen. Curtis LeMay, forerunner of the neocons, and the Soviets had recently sacrificed 30 million dead in World War II. I sent off for Civil Defense material to learn more. By the age of nine, I knew about airbursts vs. groundbursts, counterforce vs. countervalue strikes, missile throw weight, how to turn a dining table into a makeshift fallout shelter, every missile and bomber type on both sides (there had been a "missile gap" in 1960, but it was in our favor). Only by learning everything I could was I able to maintain my own interior balance of terror.
The only time it cracked was when I was 13 and walking down Palm Lane with my first girlfriend. It was twilight and a long, strange arc of icy white appeared above the western horizion. She was curious. I was turned to dread stone. It was, I immediately knew, an ICBM. Or, more precisely, an SLBM lanched by a sub, for the ICBMs would come from the north, over the pole. "We need to go home," I managed, and after getting her to her front door, I ran in a panic. "We've got to get in the car, get out to Shea Boulevard, toward Payson," I told my mother. She calmed me down and we later learned it was indeed an ICBM, but one of ours, a Minuteman headed from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California out over the Pacific Test Range.
Payson called because I had spent a summer there with my grandmother, when it was a tiny speck and the Mogollon Rim was still wild and empty, unprofaned by subdivisions of "cabins." This was 1967, when the Six-Day War broke out between the Arabs and Israelis, with the United States and USSR barely on the sidelines. Every day I expected to see a flash come from the south. But there, in the pines, we would be safe. (Later, the admiral showed me a Soviet study about plans to start a Hamburg-like firestorm using hydrogen bombs on the Southwestern forests). I never doubted that, given the chance, the Russians would, as my grandmother put it, "jump on us." Nevermind that the reality was both sides would have been doused with fallout, whichever "won."
Adulthood mostly rescued me. The banal apocalypses of individuals we faced daily on the ambulance were more important than planning for the Big One (although I kept a nuclear war "go kit" well into my late twenties). I lived in cities that faced much bigger threats, especially San Diego where the Navy kept nukes in bunkers on the Point Loma Peninsula — with the usual pro-forma denials. This was during a moment when we came as close to nuclear war than perhaps any other. In September 1983, with President Reagan building up American defense and the Kremlin occupied by old men who feared an American pre-emptive attack, Soviet air defense satellites and computers picked up what appeared to be a missile launch from the United States. If doctrine had been followed, the Soviets would have retaliated with a massive strike to keep their missiles from being destroyed in their silos. Fortunately, the lieutenant colonel in command that night, Stanislav Petrov, doubted that the Americans would launch just one missile. He knew it was a false alarm and we're all still here. I only knew about this one-tick-to-midnight years later.
Still, whenever I think of the Cold War, I think of Phoenix. Somehow we got through this long, genuine existential threat without taking away civil liberties, strip-searching diapered old ladies or locking down ze homeland. Phoenix went on to set up its own manmade demise. Nukes will probably still be used someday, by Iran, Pakistan, North Korea. But I remain persuaded that American nuclear power did, in fact, keep the peace. Unlike the neo-con vision of today, it was wielded with great restraint, but also steadfast will. One of my high-school friends went on to be a missile officer in a Minuteman launch control facility. I have never asked him whether he really could have turned the key if the command had come. As for me, my downtown Seattle condo faces away from the Trident ballistic submarine base at Bangor, across Puget Sound, a first-strike target for our friends and debt-holders, the Chinese.
Learn more about Phoenix in the 101 archive.
I can't believe it.
I can't believe it.
I can't believe it!
You didn't use the line on your girlfriend, "Well, since we only have 30 minutes to live we might as well.....you know"
Bet you wish you could get a do-over on that one.
( : - )
Posted by: azrebel | July 05, 2011 at 01:23 PM
So I was young and stupid, reb. Now at least I'm not young anymore.
Posted by: Rogue Columnist | July 05, 2011 at 01:29 PM
I think there is a documentary out or being produced about that Soviet officer. It's the world's good luck he didn't follow protocol (fully knowing the SNAFUs of soviet technology). That the old farts in the Kremlin thought Reagon was enough of a nutjob to try a first strike says more than I can say. Gorby showed the world his bark was worse than his bite, no one was paying attention.
Also, the Grand Canyon Caverns has a nice stock of CD supplies and was also designated as a fallout shelter.
Posted by: eclecticdog | July 05, 2011 at 02:11 PM
From Soleri, in Ambition Defict.
"This is happening because America is in the midst of a profound religious reawakening."
I have been saying this since 1949!
Posted by: cal Lash | July 05, 2011 at 02:40 PM
Jon, would be interesting to know what brought this "Nuke" on.
Nostalgic Martini's?
How's the next big novel going?
Posted by: cal Lash | July 05, 2011 at 02:49 PM
It's not surprising that your devotion to the GOP waned in direct correlation with your inclination to be scared shitless.
Posted by: Jacob Hughes | July 05, 2011 at 02:52 PM
I was 14 in October 1962 sitting in a class at Sunnyslope High when the history teacher announced we were being sent home because the Cuban missle crisis appeared headed to nuclear armageddon. Normally I would have been happy to get out of that place but that pleasure was counterbalanced by my shaking knees and short breaths.
I grew up watching those films of nuclear tests in Nevada and New Mexico. Over and over I'd watch those dummies getting blown away in a firestorm. I scratched obsessively at my own skin to see if there might be a loose splinter. Somehow, it was more fascinating than disturbing to know the elements of human frailty as long as I wasn't the one getting vaporized.
Thinking back, I wonder how we squared that existential dread with all the silliness and inanity of post-war America. Later, I guessed it wasn't really that difficult. Indeed, one made the other possible since life can't be just one thing or another. Maybe it explains why even though we don't have a similar dread today, we're also not nearly as happy or confident about the future.
The fallout shelter business hatched a lot of insoluble ethical puzzles. Would you let your next-door neigbhors in even though there wasn't really enough food and water for them? And how long would you have to stay down there? What would it be like to live in a post-holocaust wasteland? The more I thought about it, the less I wanted the adventure.
There was a ray of light in 1963 when JFK signed a test-ban treaty with the Soviets. This was the beginning of detente, and it promised to highlight the difference between two Cold War hawks, JFK and Goldwater. One was calm and the other was scary in his apocalyptic bombast. Later, the war in Vietnam channeled that dark strain in the American psyche and we stopped worrying about nuclear war almost entirely.
Civil rights and the counterculture along with the Vietnam war changed everything. We went from a nation united in fear of the Soviets to a nation at war with itself about our primal identity. Who are we anyway? If we don't all think and feel alike, what good is it being an American? I feel this wound today like it was still 1968. That external cosmic enemy became the sty that distorts everything we see. There are sorrows of the empire and sorrows of the flesh. In this land of plenty, that is the curse of too much.
Posted by: soleri | July 05, 2011 at 03:14 PM
One outcome of the scary times of the cold war is that we have many fellow citizens who go on living their lives in their "sheep" mode because they are convinced that our country (Empire) will end in one big, temporarily painful, flash of light. Why worry about issues if in the end, poof, it's over. When I try to explain to them that it is more likely that death to our empire will come from the bleeding of a thousand cuts over a long period of time, they look at me with glazed eyes, dreaming of the white flash.
The population has been Hollywooded into a trance. Really bad people are taking advantage of this trance.
Posted by: azrebel | July 05, 2011 at 04:21 PM
"There are sorrows of the empire and sorrows of the flesh. In this land of plenty, that is the curse of too much."
Et tu, Brute
Posted by: cal Lash | July 05, 2011 at 04:36 PM
The Cold War was a fiction established to prepare a generation of children for Hollywood movies based on the comic book heroes of childhood.
Marvel is the puppet master. Think about it.
Posted by: Captain America | July 06, 2011 at 03:43 AM
Wait, didn't the US win the cold war? Didn't the nineties triumphantly confirm the model of democracy and capitalism everywhere? How come fear and loathing returned with such a vengeance? Was there some kind of horror vacui horroris? Fear of losing it all?
Preexisting fissures in the American fabric were maybe not such a problem until the interstate highway system, domestic air travel and massive population increases came along. People still have to learn how to live together. Maybe I'm delusional and asking too much. It's natural to want to have a private castle one can retreat to if the frictions of an inhomogeneous population become too much. The Big Sort is purportedly "tearing us apart". A troubling development but there could be a benefit. The notion of a big family under Reagan was always bullshit.
From the guy who predicted today's "low-intensity conflicts":
"He asks, rhetorically, if even ethnic cleansing could be a preferred scenario. "No," he says, "my name is not A. Hitler.""
And on nukes:
"It's not simply a joke when I say that it would be good for the peace process if Syria were to get nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons have done more for peace and saved more lives than anything or anyone else."
-- Martin van Creveld, Israeli military historian
Posted by: AWinter | July 06, 2011 at 05:11 AM
AWinter, What you think about Jared Diamonds work.
Posted by: cal Lash | July 06, 2011 at 07:22 AM
Growing up during the same period as you Jon, the threat of nuclear war did not effect my psyche except for the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was more unsettled by racial tensions and riots.
The US military and federal government were largely seen to be as much of a threat in my city as nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Mistrust for federal authorities arose from the consequences of the passage of prohibition, the behavior of the FBI, and the red baiting of the McCarthy era. Barry Goldwater was also viewed as a fringe candidate of the far right.
Posted by: jmav | July 06, 2011 at 08:27 AM
cal,
haven't read his book yet, it's on my list. He's cautiously optimistic about our civilization, though I wonder how much power and wisdom we really have to decide our future.
Hope you're surviving the dust storm:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vQMuwRjI6s
Posted by: AWinter | July 06, 2011 at 11:17 AM
Wonder what surprises await us as the future unfolds? Will the hazards be man-made planetary degradation? Will they come in the form of a "haboob" in global financial systems? Or will the nuclear loonies like Achmendini-whatsis precipitate a Mid-Eastern armageddon that puts us back on bicycles? No doubt that propeller-heads somewhere have put probabilities on these. Makes a mere u-boat attack seem like a pimple!
Posted by: morecleanair | July 06, 2011 at 12:06 PM
Looked like the Sonoran desert of the fifties yesterday.
Posted by: cal Lash | July 06, 2011 at 01:19 PM
So was the dust storm really as bad as the media are portraying it?
Posted by: Rogue Columnist | July 06, 2011 at 03:30 PM
No. It was probably the worst one in a couple summers, but by no means was it anything so far out of the ordinary to warrant the attention it is getting. However, with media hype and short-term memories as they are, it was apparently the worst storm ever.
Posted by: westbev | July 06, 2011 at 04:08 PM
It was as big as we have had for sometime but not as big as I have observed since 1950. The media was what was out of proportion. You know we did away with science in AZ and we have set an official day for the monsoon to begin. "And the dogs sat around the campfire and debated whether man ever exited or not." Simak 46
Posted by: cal Lash | July 06, 2011 at 05:18 PM
The Chinese are not our debtors, they are our creditors. Great post otherwise. Sent here from Reality Based Community blog, pleased to learn of your great blog. Thanks for your work.
Posted by: JMG | July 08, 2011 at 08:41 AM
JMG, mea maxima culpa. Thanks for the catch. This is the peril of working without the crusty old copy editors of newsrooms past.
Posted by: Rogue Columnist | July 08, 2011 at 10:09 AM
The Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station is being refitted with parts from China.
U.S. Military clothing (e.g. boots, hats) is made in China.
Our future as a nation is being made in China.
Posted by: Huang He Li | July 08, 2011 at 11:42 AM
China is making too much of our junk, especially that which is available in Walmart. However, the DoD by law must purchase military uniforms from domestic producers (from textile to final sewing).
Going out and finding American made goods is a damn chore; interestingly, if you do find American made goods they aren't nearly as expensive as one would think.
Posted by: phxSUNSfan | July 08, 2011 at 12:06 PM
In parts of Arizona we were subjected to the fallout from the atomic testing in Nevada. Even today folks who develop certain kinds of cancer and can prove residence are eligible for a government award.
Truly, we have experienced some scary times.
Posted by: Pat Fairfield | July 20, 2018 at 08:15 AM