vice | Are you scared of getting nuked? If you asked me that now, I'd say,
“Not hugely.” But if you had asked me that when I was around ten, I
would have been sobbing before you even finished the question.
I don't know what kids are afraid of these days—if it's just kidnappers
and internet pedophiles or they still think Al-Qaeda is going to blow
up a middle school in Evansville for some reason. When I was a tyke in
the early-90s, though, the big three were killer bees (hand at knee),
drive-by shootings (hand at collarbone), and nuclear annihilation (hand way the fuck up here).
Didn't matter that the Cold War was effectively over and all those
hydrogen bombs, which had been trained at my head since birth, were
still out there and possibly in less reputable hands than even the
Russians. Besides, I had an entire back catalog of prime
nuclear-proliferation cinema to learn my fate from. As soon as the NORAD
computer would freeze up during chess and mutually assure the
destruction of Omaha,
my friends and I would see a flash brighter than a thousand suns, and
those of us who weren't turned into disintegrating skeletons would swell
up like Akira monsters and slosh like chili across
the windshield of the first car that hit us. That's how we were going
to go out. Provided, of course, we hadn't already died from AIDS.
It didn't help learning that the actual results of a for-real nuclear
explosion are way worse than Hollywood has the special effects to
depict. A lot of mainstream accounts of Japan's bombings, like those in
John Hersey's Hiroshima, sort of soft-pedal the body horror
that acute radiation poisoning causes, but they are nevertheless full of
preteen nightmare fodder. Melty-faced Jason Robards doesn't hold a
candle to trying to guess what it feels like turning into a shadow, a permanent shadow, tattooed on the side of a building.
Once you dig a little deeper, you realize the human shadows were the lucky ones.
