jayeff

I spent my teen years in the east of England. We had US Air Force bases, home to the V-bombers which were constantly on patrol in those days and fields full of missiles on their launchpads. People were quite tense during the Cuban missile crisis because it was well known that our part of the country would be hit very quickly and very hard, because of the strong US presence.

I spent several semesters at school in the US at different times and americans seemed much more concerned about "communism", but in an almost abstract sense, without really knowing what it was, why it was bad, what if any actual danger it represented. Back home, no-one really cared much about communism, communists even had quite a strong grip on several trades unions for a while, but to the extent anyone thought about it at all, the possibility of a catastrophic war seemed more real.

It is likely hard to appreciate now, but even if like me you were born after WW2, my generation grew up missing relatives who had been killed within the previous 10-15 years and people still talked about the war. Rationing continued for the early years of my life. Near where both sets of my grandparents lived were bombed out buildings, often just empty sites, but sometimes the rubble lay untouched well into the 1950's. So the possibility of another war didn't seem at all far-fetched.

And of course we had scandals such as the uncovering of spies like Philby, Burgess and Maclean to keep the topic alive...

If you want to see something which had quite an impact when it was released, look for a docudrama made for the BBC in 1965, called "The War Game". Although it was banned from TV for 20 years, copies circulated freely for viewing privately and in movie theaters. If you cannot find it anywhere else, it is on YouTube in 5 parts.