Originally posted at TomDispatch.
Imagine a secret government facility buried deep in the bowels of a mountain;
a deluxe bomb shelter – encased within dense, almost fissure-less rock – for
top government officials to ride out doomsday.
I did. A lot.
I spent an inordinate amount of time as a child reading everything I could
find about a top secret complex – a White-House-in-waiting, hospital, television
studio, government offices, subterranean reservoirs, and who knows what else
– all entombed in a Virginia mountain. It was difficult for a youngster to
locate much on it in those pre-Internet days, but what I did find out about
Mount
Weather fascinated me.
Looking back, I realize that I was captivated, and perhaps subconsciously unnerved,
by the prospect of World War III. That future conflict was seemingly omnipresent,
looming large in the pop cultural broth in which my brain was regularly bathed.
Red Dawn
and The Day After
offered two possible scenarios for how such a war might be fought – Vietnam-style
in the U.S.A. or as a full-scale nuclear exchange between America and the Soviet
Union. The president of that moment suggested
that we might be spared the atomic devastation of The Day After through
mammoth spending on a space-based missile defense system that, in the cinematic
spirit of the moment, critics dubbed
“Star Wars.” WarGames,
on the other hand, indicated that some combination of dumb luck, a smart computer,
and an impossibly young Matthew Broderick would – at the very last moment –
save the day. (Thanks,
Ferris Bueller!)
And what child of the 1980s can forget that
moment when your last city was destroyed in Atari’s “Missile
Command”?
A survey of 1,000 grammar and high-school students conducted by an American
Psychiatric Association task force from 1978 to 1980 found “the imminent
threat of nuclear annihilation has penetrated deeply into their consciousness.”
Their answers to questionnaires “showed that these adolescents are deeply
disturbed by the threat of nuclear war, have doubt about the future, and about
their own survival,” wrote
John
Mack, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a member of
the task force. I don’t recall being distressed by the prospect myself,
but it certainly caught my attention.
While I was reading and re-reading John Bradley’s lavishly illustrated
coffee-table book, World
War III: Strategies, Tactics, and Weapons, and playing with
my G.I. Joes, TomDispatch
regular William Astore was heading deep into another secret government facility
buried within a mountain, another ground zero designed to withstand (but by
then likely to be incinerated in) a nuclear holocaust. Today, Astore takes us
from his younger days at shadowy Cheyenne
Mountain to the…