Growing Up Gen X Under the Bomb, And Why It Feels Familiar Again

Cold War Kids in Today's Messed Up World - Angry politicians and AI

When I was a kid in the 1980s, the world could end at any minute, and we knew it. We tried not to think about it. But we accepted it.

Growing up Gen X meant living under the shadow of the mushroom cloud. The threat of nuclear Armageddon was always lurking in the background, humming like a Geiger counter of anxiety. Surveys and studies at the time showed that for many children in the U.S., the only thing scarier than the dark or the boogeyman was nuclear war itself. In fact, kids ranked the fear of a nuclear holocaust second only to losing their parents. In the Soviet Union, it was the number one dread.

We didn’t fully understand geopolitics, but we understood enough. We understood that giant mushroom cloud in the sky could ruin your whole day (and everyone else’s, too).

About 1,000 residents in Lawrence, Kansas gathered for a candlelight vigil after the 1983 airing of The Day After, a grim TV movie about nuclear war.

Being a Cold War kid meant mastering the art of dark humor and cautious optimism. We’d joke about duck-and-cover drills (as if hiding under a school desk could save us from World War III), but the anxiety was real.

By the way, sometimes they would just have us lean up against the wall and place a book over our head. Did you ever have to do that?!

Popular culture certainly didn’t let us forget it. In November 1983, a record 100 million Americans, including the President, tuned in to watch The Day After, a TV movie that graphically depicted a Midwestern town obliterated by nuclear blasts. That film traumatized and galvanized a generation; it brought a massive global threat right into our living rooms, making apocalypse feel unsettlingly personal. Everyone fully expected that World War III would break out at any moment and the world would come to an end. As a kid, I avoided the news. I hated school drills.

It’s sad to think we lived with a low-grade certainty that nuclear annihilation wasn’t if, but when. We went on with our lives, but the thought lingered for far too many years.

We saw our fears reflected in blockbuster movies and Saturday morning television. A few unforgettable examples from the 80s you Gen X kids might recall include:

• The Day After (1983): This made-for-TV movie about a nuclear strike on Kansas was one of the most-watched broadcasts ever, leaving viewers (young and old) shell-shocked and sparking national conversations about disarmament. Schools even held discussions the next day. It was that big a deal.

• WarGames (1983): A teenage hacker accidentally nearly starts WWIII. Oops. The film blended Cold War paranoia with the new fear of computers gone awry. Its genius was how it made an unfathomable threat feel local. Suddenly, a kid with a dial-up modem could set the world on fire. President Reagan was so spooked, he ordered an investigation into whether something like WarGames could really happen!
  

• Red Dawn (1984): Ever worry the Soviets might parachute into your backyard? This film answered that and we got to scream “Wolverines!” with the pack of all-American teens fighting off an invasion. It was over-the-top, sure, but it deepened popular fear of an aggressive “Russian bear” coming for us. Red Dawn taught every Gen X kid the proper use of a bunker and a catchphrase for WWIII.

Between movies, news reports, and schoolyard rumors, we marinated in doomsday scenarios. It’s no wonder many of us had recurring nightmares about mushroom clouds. Psychologists warned that a childhood lived under the threat of the bomb could leave lasting scars, and they were right. Yet somehow, we coped by shrugging.

As the Doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction sank in, a weird logic comforted us. If the war to end all wars started, nobody would win, so maybe nobody would be crazy enough to start it. But, there’s always someone crazy enough, isn’t there?

And then, in what felt like a plot twist, the Cold War just…ended. The Berlin Wall came tumbling down in November 1989, almost overnight. Crowds of Germans from East and West spontaneously began dismantling that concrete divider that had split Europe for nearly 30 years. Televisions worldwide showed jubilant people sledgehammering the Wall, dancing and crying atop it like it was an outdoor rock concert for freedom. David Hasselhoff commemorated the historic moment!

For those of us in Gen X, it was as if a decades-long weight lifted. The imminent nuclear apocalypse we’d gone to bed worrying about suddenly felt far less imminent. By the early 1990s, the United States and the crumbling Soviet Union were signing arms reduction treaties and even talking about partnership. We kept our DEFCON nightmares in the attic and looked forward to a future that might actually have one.

I distinctly remember the sense of relief. I turned thirteen in 1989 and as a first generation immigrant I was very tuned in to what was going on thanks to my dad. As a young teenager watching news footage of people chipping off souvenir chunks of the Berlin Wall, I thought, Maybe we really won’t blow ourselves up after all. The existential dread dialed down a few notches. Only a few.

By 1992, even the Doomsday Clock, which was the symbolic gauge of nuclear danger, had been pushed back to a relatively safe 17 minutes to midnight, the farthest from doom it ever had been. The monster under the bed went into hibernation. Or so we believed.

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Déjà Vu

Flash forward a few decades (cue the spooky Unsolved Mysteries theme), and those old nightmares are making a comeback. Flip on the news today, and sometimes it feels like 1983 is on repeat. A major land war in Europe? Check. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 shocked the world and dragged nuclear saber-rattling back into dinner-table conversation. Tensions between Moscow and the West are now at their most dangerous levels since the Cold War, according to experts. Suddenly phrases like “tactical nuke” and “nuclear deterrence” are trending topics again, much to the dismay of Gen X kids.

In fact, only a few days ago, Vladimir Putin discussed renewing the Russian nuclear arsenal as well as expanding it. Russia and the US together possess around 90% of all nuclear weapons, and China is about five years behind. For the first time in history, there will be three equalized nuclear superpowers holding leverage over the world. The balance of fear has never felt more fragile.

Elsewhere, age-old conflicts and new threats churn. Long-running Middle East tensions constantly flare up. And headlines continue to speculate about further strikes to prevent Iran from getting nuclear capabilities. The specter of nuclear proliferation is back in our minds.

“Are we on the brink of World War III?” is a question people seriously ask on social media. Even the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has set its iconic Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight, the closest ever to apocalypse, citing the war in Ukraine and rampant geopolitical conflicts as prime reasons. In other words, the global anxiety meter is creeping up again. Conflict hot spots around the world carry the very real threat of escalation.

As a card-carrying Gen Xer, I can’t help a bitter chuckle here… did we learn nothing the first time?

To be clear, today’s situation isn’t a carbon copy of 1985. The players and context have changed (a little), there are more than two superpowers in the mix, and new kinds of threats (like cyber warfare and pandemics) complicate the picture. Yet the feeling is unnervingly familiar. When I see my own teenager scrolling social media and stumbling on news clips about nuclear brinksmanship, I recognize the worry in their eyes. It’s the same worry I felt watching WarGames on VHS. My oldest son asked me, “Dad, could there really be a nuclear war?” I almost checked the calendar to be sure I hadn’t time-traveled back to the 80s. I think the craziest thing is most of these leaders have been around since then!

The New Fear

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, there’s a new kid on the existential dread block. Artificial intelligence.

Back in the 80s, AI was the stuff of sci-fi thrillers. Think of the self-aware computer in WarGames or the ominous SkyNet in Terminator. Those were fictional cautionary tales, but here in the 2020s, AI is very real and advancing faster than a hungry Pac-Man. And guess what? It’s giving us a whole new flavor of fear (with a strangely familiar aftertaste).

Why fear AI? For starters, experts warn that ultra-advanced AI could potentially pose a catastrophic risk if mismanaged. Even, in a worst-case scenario, an “extinction-level” threat on par with nuclear war. No, that’s not a movie tagline. That was the consensus of hundreds of tech luminaries who signed a public statement in 2023 urging the world to make AI safety a global priority. When the folks who build the AI are basically saying “this could end us all” in the same breath as pandemics and atomic bombs, it’s hard not to get a little jittery.

Beyond sci-fi doomsday scenarios, there are more immediate AI worries. For example, autonomous weapons that might make “kill decisions” without human oversight, or AI-hacked systems that could launch missiles by mistake. Even short of that, the proliferation of deepfakes and algorithm-driven disinformation could spark conflicts in a way that wasn’t possible in the 80s.

In the Cold War, we fretted about miscommunication between superpowers. Now, we have to fret about misinformation going viral at light speed, possibly gumming up the delicate machinery of global peace. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists explicitly added disruptive technologies like AI to its list of existential threats, right alongside the nuke and climate boogeymenen.

Hey Gen X, don’t you find it darkly amusing that WarGames might have been ahead of its time? We’re essentially worried about a real-life WOPR with a mind of its own. Crazy times.

Of course, we haven’t totally lost our sense of humor about these things. Leave it to Gen X (and our meme-savvy successors) to respond to AI angst with a joke or two. If you peek into online forums, you’ll find plenty of wry quips like, “I for one welcome our new AI overlords” … masking genuine concern. It’s the same coping mechanism we had during nuclear drills. We laughed about it, because the alternative was to cry, or rock back and forth under a desk.

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Writing this, I can’t help feeling how surreal it all is. The fears I had as a kid, of bombs and end-of-the-world alarms, are back on the menu, just served in updated packaging. The protagonists have changed, but the plot feels stubbornly the same. We’re once again living in a world where humanity’s amazing ingenuity also threatens to undo us, whether in a mushroom cloud or a rogue algorithm.

Does this mean we should all despair? Not necessarily. That’s not the intent here. But I’m curious what you think? Are we in greater danger today?

One thing a Gen X upbringing instilled in me is a certain resilience, a sense that yes, the world can be terrifying, but we’ve navigated this psychological minefield before. We learned to carry on with life even under the darkest clouds. We made ironic music, cracked jokes about apocalypse, and got on with our homework and our lives, all while fully aware the sky could fall any day. That resilience is a strength we shouldn’t underestimate.

Today’s challenges are real and serious, but we aren’t powerless. The very fact that we’re openly talking, and nervously joking, about these fears is a good sign What it means is we haven’t become numb. People want to prevent the worst, whether by arms control treaties or AI ethics guidelines, and that desire is our first line of defense.

In the movie WarGames, after nearly starting Armageddon, the supercomputer concludes, “The only winning move is not to play.” That lesson sank in for a while. Let’s hope it sticks around this time.

History has a way of resurfacing the same nightmares until we truly address their causes. So here we are, eyes wide open again, cautious but determined. As a Gen X survivor of the last doomsday scare, I’ll offer this piece of wisdom to anyone listening. Keep calm, live life, but pay attention. The world may be a scary place, but it’s also one we’ve saved before, and can hopefully save again.

If nothing else, living through the 80s taught us that life’s too short (especially if the bomb drops) not to laugh a little.

Thanks for reading and Stay Rad!

~ John