It was early 1984, and I was 23 and in graduate school in New York City, at what was then called the W. Averell Harriman Institute for the Advanced Study of the Soviet Union. I was immersed in everything from the Russian language to the study of nuclear strategy. I was working on a graduate degree in political science, but my actual field was what used to be called “Sovietology.” We were in a Cold War, and I was studying the enemy.
I was young, and like a lot of people, I was scared. I was a brash conservative Cold Warrior, and I talked a good game about facing down the Soviets at that young age, but I was hardly in denial about the dangerous global situation. Even to me, it seemed that the United States and the Soviet Union were headed for an inevitable showdown over … well, over something.
By that point in 1984, the Americans had overthrown a bunch of Marxist thugs in Grenada, called the Soviets an “evil empire,” announced a missile defense plan, and held nuclear command-and-control exercises. (The public didn’t know about that last one.) The Soviets had shot down a South Korean civilian airliner, walked out of arms talks, called the international situation “white hot,” and reacted to those American exercises by considering whether to go on alert for a retaliatory attack. (Neither the public nor the U.S. government knew about that at the time.)
Relations between the superpowers were almost nonexistent. We had all watched The Day After, the made-for-TV movie about nuclear war that had gained the largest audience for a television movie in history up to that point, and we were certain it was going to happen. Even President Ronald Reagan saw the movie in a special White House screening and wrote in his diary that it was “very effective” and left him “greatly depressed.”
Then came the day I thought I’d died in a nuclear strike.
I lived in a graduate-student dorm on the Upper West Side, and I woke one morning to a thunderous roaring noise. The whole building was shaking. I sat up and I was blinded. I thought: Well, this is it. Someone screwed up. God have mercy on us.
Actually, the person who screwed up was me. My dorm was right under the approach across upper Manhattan for LaGuardia Airport, and some commercial-airline pilot had apparently dragged it in a little low over my building. My window faced east and I had sat up and looked right into the rising sun. I was fine, if a bit disoriented. I wasn’t going to die that day, and neither was New York City.
But I really thought it was possible, and at the time, so did millions of other people. Huge protests against nuclear arms were taking place in North America and Europe, where polls showed growing fears of a final clash between the superpowers.
I was one of the last generations to live under the omnipresent Cold War fears of sudden and total annihilation. (I was perhaps more aware of it than most people, because I grew up next to a Strategic Air Command nuclear-bomber base. I once asked my parents how they felt during the Cuban missile crisis, and my father stoically said: “Well, your mother was pretty scared.” Mom ratted Dad out later: “Don’t let him kid you. He was plenty worried.”)
For decades until the late 1980s, we lived with this fear and we just got used to it, as if signs for fallout shelters and songs about nuclear war and nuclear-bomb drills in schools were part of a normal American life. The Soviets lived pretty much the same way, and Soviet kids, it turned out, had the same nightmares we did about nuclear bombs killing them and their parents.
This is why we were all glad to let it go after the fall of the USSR in the 1990s. Human beings cannot, and should not, have to live this way.
And yet here we are again. I’ll have more to say about how we got here in The Atlantic soon, about how we came to rely on nuclear weapons, how we managed to forget about them for a quarter century, and why we’re back to parsing the strange formulations of nuclear theology.
But I wanted to say here in the newsletter: I know a lot of you are worried. I am too. If you’re an informed and engaged reader—as The Atlantic’s readers are—there is no way to avoid feeling anxiety about the biggest war in Europe since 1945. This conflict threatens to engulf not only Ukraine but NATO, which would draw in 30 more nations and bring four nuclear-armed powers (France, Britain, the U.S., and Russia) to the battlefield. Only someone, to steal a phrase from a colleague, with “nerves of steel or brains of lead” wouldn’t be deeply concerned.
I also wanted to tell you, however, that you cannot let such worries overtake you. It’s okay to disengage for a bit from the news. I won’t try to soothe you by denying that the situation in Europe is bad. It’s very bad, and it will get worse as Vladimir Putin, in the wake of a gigantic strategic blunder, will continue to kill thousands to avenge his humiliated ego. He may yet decide to provoke NATO into war.
But for now, this isn’t 1984, with tens of thousands of weapons on high alert. It’s not 1962, with only days or hours to make epochal decisions. So far, despite Putin’s murderous spree, deterrence seems to be holding, with NATO and Russia staying at arm’s length from each other. President Joe Biden and the NATO council are determined to help Ukraine without sparking a larger conflict, and the Russians, for all their insanely bellicose rhetoric, might be thinking about a settlement now that Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities are out of reach.
There is more pain and misery yet to fall on the heroic people of Ukraine, but as I write this, Ukrainian forces are actually regaining some ground—an amazing feat that I would not have foreseen in the days before the outbreak of the war. I’ve made some good predictions over the years, along with a few misfires, but I don’t feel too bad about guessing that the Russians would win this war quickly; I think most international-security experts would have said the same thing, and we’re all astonished not only by the performance of the Ukrainian armed forces but by the staggering incompetence, terrible planning, and plain stupidity afflicting the Russian military.
Still, while we might not yet be in World War III, we’re now clearly in a second and very intense Cold War, and we will be for as long as Putin rules Russia. This is not like a Cold War with the old Soviet Union, where we had to fight a global empire trying to take over the world with a revolutionary ideology. No, this time it might even be worse: All of our lives are in danger because of a small group of old men—and one old man in particular—who have adopted crackpot messianic theories about Russia’s role as a liberator of Eurasia.
Compared with Putin and his mystics and priests, the old Soviet Union was a rational and predictable enemy. It might even be the weirdest nostalgia of all to say that the Soviets were a more worthy adversary than this bunch of cranks and gangsters, and that I’d much prefer to be dealing with the old Politburo than the petty germaphobe running the Kremlin now.
With that said, there are responsible people in our government—and, I still believe, in Russia—who don’t want to lose control of an already bad situation. Putin, a vain and insecure man who is used to luxury and power, doesn’t want to die any more than you do. He’s willing to murder a lot of innocent people to soothe his outrage, but I still think we’re going to get through this. And if we do, the suffering of the Ukrainians might even lead us to a better world, but that’s a long subject for another day.
The point is not to let fear consume you the way it did so many of us nearly 40 years ago. It’s no way to live—and it’s not necessary. Be aware of current events, but don’t spend your day with them. Follow the news, but don’t be obsessed by it. Don’t fall into doom-scrolling on the internet. Say a prayer for peace and for the people of Ukraine, if you’re the type. (I am.) And have confidence that one deluded dictator’s schemes are, sooner or later, going to end badly for him.
Perhaps most importantly, if you’re feeling these anxieties, know that it’s perfectly normal, and that you’re not alone. For some of us, it’s even the second time around on this ride. That first rodeo wasn’t fun, but we all learned back then that fear is insidious and debilitating. We don’t need to make that mistake again. Living our lives and remaining calm while letting diplomats and political leaders do their job without undue panic is how we got through all of this the last time, and we’re going to need that kind of steadfastness even after this current war is over.
In the meantime, I’ll do the worrying for both of us, and I’ll be the first to let you know if I think things are getting worse. Hang in there.
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