⛧
On the War That Never Came
by Noctir (July 2018)
In the early to mid-'80s, U.S. and Soviet relations were lower than they'd been in years. It was the Cold War, but this was another period where it was expected to go hot. I was raised in this environment. The news, TV, movies, radio, everything had this East versus West thing going on. I heard stories about how terrible Russia was, how the people there were like prisoners in their own country, how evil their leaders were, and how they would someday try to conquer us. In my earliest years of school, we were still doing bomb drills. We had to get under our desks and cover our heads, as if that was going to save us from a nuke. I've since read that most of those drills ended in the '60s or '70s, but apparently they lingered in some places into the '80s. Just my luck to be stuck in one of them.
The fear didn’t come out of nowhere. In 1983, the NATO "Able Archer" exercise almost set off a Soviet military response, and Reagan’s “evil empire” speech only poured more fuel on the paranoia. I was too young to grasp all this at the time, but the fear hung in the air. Adults acted like nuclear war could happen any day. That kind of atmosphere seeps into a kid. I can’t even remember when I first started believing the world would end in fire. It was just always there.
I remember all of this vividly. Even outside school, the spectre of nuclear war was always there. I saw The Day After, with that moment when people look up and are blinded by the flash. Countdown to Looking Glass showed society unraveling on live TV. By Dawn’s Early Light had a bomber crew ordered to nuke targets with almost no real understanding of why. These movies didn’t just show war. They painted grim pictures of the end times. The idea that we could all be vaporized in minutes wasn’t just abstract; I genuinely expected it. Even outside those films, mainstream pop culture kept pushing the same stuff. Pro wrestling had Nikita Koloff, the “Russian Nightmare”, among other foreign villains. Then there was Rocky IV, which felt like propaganda. The American hero against an unnatural Soviet monster. I was little when I saw it in the theater, but it hammered the point home. Even though it ended with some sappy peace speech, the whole thing was just about us versus them.
I heard stories about how terrible Russia was, how the people there were like prisoners in their own country, and how their leaders were evil. I heard about people being shot trying to climb over the Berlin Wall or escape other parts of the Eastern Bloc. I accepted all of it because that’s what I was told. I remember when the Berlin Wall came down, and then not long after, the Soviet Union collapsed. You’d think that might have eased some of the tension, but by then the paranoia had already sunk in. I was wired to expect annihilation. The enemy had changed, but the threat stayed the same.
Then came Terminator 2: Judgment Day, in 1991. It talked about a future annihilation of civilization, starting just six years from the release of the film. That scene with kids on the playground, the flash, the fire, everyone turning to ash and blowing away, felt like some kind of prophecy. The thing is, the enemy was no longer the Soviets. The goalposts had moved. Now it was something else. AI and technology taking over. I was maybe 10 years old when that movie came out, so it seemed very real to someone who had already been told this was not only possible but probable. Even in ’93 or ’94, I was in a social studies class where they showed us The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, a 1981 film about Nostradamus. The teacher did not call it a movie. He said it was a documentary. There I was, still young and impressionable, being introduced to the idea that a man from centuries ago had predicted all of this. The film listed a bunch of so-called “accurate” predictions, all nonsense of course, but I did not know that yet. So when it said World War III was coming soon, I believed it. In the film, the enemy was not the Soviets. It was some vaguely defined Middle Eastern or Central Asian power. We had just had the Gulf War, which had not seemed like much at the time, but it lined up well enough. I knew nothing about geopolitics, but it still felt real and just reinforced everything I had already been fed. Doom felt inevitable. I really expected that this was my fate to die in excruciating pain in some nuclear explosion or to suffer like an animal in the ruins of the world after. At times, I even wished it would hurry up, because I thought I had no reason to be alive since this war and nuclear death were inevitable.
By the late '90s, something changed. I was old enough to understand more, and I realized the great war I’d been expecting, the end of everything, wasn’t coming. That was a strange realization. All that fear and dread I’d carried since childhood never paid off. No nuclear holocaust. No collapse of civilization. Just a transition into a sterile, digital, hollow world. Which in some ways felt worse. At least the apocalypse would have had purpose. Dying in nuclear fire would have meant something. What we got instead was just this slow strangulation of the soul in an ever more hollow and empty world. I wasn’t prepared for it. Not just because of my circumstances, but because I had never planned for a future. I never expected one.
Post-apocalyptic imagery was everywhere throughout my childhood and it never felt like fiction. I’m sure a lot of this was amplified by the fact that I was growing up in toxic, abusive situations, both at home and at school. Everything around me seemed dire and I took it seriously. I sometimes wonder if part of me just gave up inside before I was old enough to know anything. It's infuriating to thin about the indoctrination. I was told over and over by teachers, by media, by history books that the U.S. was good and everyone else was evil. That the Americans were always the heroes. Slowly, I began to see through this and to start unlearning all of the lies, to see how the country had instigated most, if not all, of the wars it claimed to be fighting. To understand how it lied about the enemy. That it had done just as many despicable things to its own people as the Soviets had. They were just better at hiding it. That realization hit hard. Everything I’d grown up believing was built on a lie. It reminds me of a Norm Macdonald joke: “It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?”
Then came 9/11 and more wars in the Middle East. While they were real wars, it wasn’t anything cataclysmic. Instead of WWIII and the end of humanity it all represented another step in the steady decay and decline of the modern world. I don’t know if I’m alone in this. Maybe others my age didn’t internalize it the same way. Maybe I saw it all too clearly, or maybe I was just too damaged to know better. Younger people may not understand it at all. Though even now, people are still being fed dread and doom every day. They feel empty in different ways. Sometimes I still think the nuclear holocaust would have been better, preferably back when I was still a child. Just to wipe it all out. This entire disgusting, parasitic mess of humanity, including myself.
The fear didn’t come out of nowhere. In 1983, the NATO "Able Archer" exercise almost set off a Soviet military response, and Reagan’s “evil empire” speech only poured more fuel on the paranoia. I was too young to grasp all this at the time, but the fear hung in the air. Adults acted like nuclear war could happen any day. That kind of atmosphere seeps into a kid. I can’t even remember when I first started believing the world would end in fire. It was just always there.
I remember all of this vividly. Even outside school, the spectre of nuclear war was always there. I saw The Day After, with that moment when people look up and are blinded by the flash. Countdown to Looking Glass showed society unraveling on live TV. By Dawn’s Early Light had a bomber crew ordered to nuke targets with almost no real understanding of why. These movies didn’t just show war. They painted grim pictures of the end times. The idea that we could all be vaporized in minutes wasn’t just abstract; I genuinely expected it. Even outside those films, mainstream pop culture kept pushing the same stuff. Pro wrestling had Nikita Koloff, the “Russian Nightmare”, among other foreign villains. Then there was Rocky IV, which felt like propaganda. The American hero against an unnatural Soviet monster. I was little when I saw it in the theater, but it hammered the point home. Even though it ended with some sappy peace speech, the whole thing was just about us versus them.
I heard stories about how terrible Russia was, how the people there were like prisoners in their own country, and how their leaders were evil. I heard about people being shot trying to climb over the Berlin Wall or escape other parts of the Eastern Bloc. I accepted all of it because that’s what I was told. I remember when the Berlin Wall came down, and then not long after, the Soviet Union collapsed. You’d think that might have eased some of the tension, but by then the paranoia had already sunk in. I was wired to expect annihilation. The enemy had changed, but the threat stayed the same.
Then came Terminator 2: Judgment Day, in 1991. It talked about a future annihilation of civilization, starting just six years from the release of the film. That scene with kids on the playground, the flash, the fire, everyone turning to ash and blowing away, felt like some kind of prophecy. The thing is, the enemy was no longer the Soviets. The goalposts had moved. Now it was something else. AI and technology taking over. I was maybe 10 years old when that movie came out, so it seemed very real to someone who had already been told this was not only possible but probable. Even in ’93 or ’94, I was in a social studies class where they showed us The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, a 1981 film about Nostradamus. The teacher did not call it a movie. He said it was a documentary. There I was, still young and impressionable, being introduced to the idea that a man from centuries ago had predicted all of this. The film listed a bunch of so-called “accurate” predictions, all nonsense of course, but I did not know that yet. So when it said World War III was coming soon, I believed it. In the film, the enemy was not the Soviets. It was some vaguely defined Middle Eastern or Central Asian power. We had just had the Gulf War, which had not seemed like much at the time, but it lined up well enough. I knew nothing about geopolitics, but it still felt real and just reinforced everything I had already been fed. Doom felt inevitable. I really expected that this was my fate to die in excruciating pain in some nuclear explosion or to suffer like an animal in the ruins of the world after. At times, I even wished it would hurry up, because I thought I had no reason to be alive since this war and nuclear death were inevitable.
By the late '90s, something changed. I was old enough to understand more, and I realized the great war I’d been expecting, the end of everything, wasn’t coming. That was a strange realization. All that fear and dread I’d carried since childhood never paid off. No nuclear holocaust. No collapse of civilization. Just a transition into a sterile, digital, hollow world. Which in some ways felt worse. At least the apocalypse would have had purpose. Dying in nuclear fire would have meant something. What we got instead was just this slow strangulation of the soul in an ever more hollow and empty world. I wasn’t prepared for it. Not just because of my circumstances, but because I had never planned for a future. I never expected one.
Post-apocalyptic imagery was everywhere throughout my childhood and it never felt like fiction. I’m sure a lot of this was amplified by the fact that I was growing up in toxic, abusive situations, both at home and at school. Everything around me seemed dire and I took it seriously. I sometimes wonder if part of me just gave up inside before I was old enough to know anything. It's infuriating to thin about the indoctrination. I was told over and over by teachers, by media, by history books that the U.S. was good and everyone else was evil. That the Americans were always the heroes. Slowly, I began to see through this and to start unlearning all of the lies, to see how the country had instigated most, if not all, of the wars it claimed to be fighting. To understand how it lied about the enemy. That it had done just as many despicable things to its own people as the Soviets had. They were just better at hiding it. That realization hit hard. Everything I’d grown up believing was built on a lie. It reminds me of a Norm Macdonald joke: “It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?”
Then came 9/11 and more wars in the Middle East. While they were real wars, it wasn’t anything cataclysmic. Instead of WWIII and the end of humanity it all represented another step in the steady decay and decline of the modern world. I don’t know if I’m alone in this. Maybe others my age didn’t internalize it the same way. Maybe I saw it all too clearly, or maybe I was just too damaged to know better. Younger people may not understand it at all. Though even now, people are still being fed dread and doom every day. They feel empty in different ways. Sometimes I still think the nuclear holocaust would have been better, preferably back when I was still a child. Just to wipe it all out. This entire disgusting, parasitic mess of humanity, including myself.
Last Updated: You are Visitor #: