GLIMPSES of how Canada worked: a writer's memoir.

24. Cold War fears in 1962, and my opinions

THE COLD WAR WAS A HORROR STORY we lived with every day from 1945 until 1991. Whether it has in fact ended depends on one's interpretation of war. In the 1960s we read and heard about the power struggle between capitalism and communism, two godless ideologies abusing and wasting the world's most precious resource: Human minds. It introduced to us weapons of mass destruction designed and manufactured by the military-industrial complex that US President Dwight Eisenhower had warned against more than once.

He knew exactly what he was talking about because he was the head of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) during World War II.

The Cold War was gearing up insanely as I left the parental and educational cocoons of my first 25 years of life. International relations were going from bad to worse, pointing toward a confrontation which turned out to be the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962. That would be after we married, so my fiance and I talked about how we would find each other if we were not together when worse came to worst.

If our home town experienced the degree of destruction Warsaw was still recovering from when I visited it in 1959 -- all landmarks obliterated, all means of communication and transportation wrecked, all family and friends dead....  If mere survival -- finding water and food -- meant exposing oneself to fifth column snipers by day and bombers every night....  How would we find each other?

Charlie and I selected a feature of Kingston's shoreline on Lake Ontario and pledged to go there and wait at a certain hour on a certain day of each week, forever! 

It's hard to believe we talked like that, but at 25 years of age we were in love and felt we had to prepare to survive, in Canada, WHEN not if, Russian bombs fell on Kingston, especially a nuclear bomb! Today that seems insane. 

Bill had let me vent in an editorial the previous year:

APRIL 29, 1961

"Let's call the bluff

"AMID UNIVERSAL attention to reports of a Russian's flight into space few, if any, sober, reflective opinions have been recorded. The news of the first Sputnik launching on October 4, 1957, was received with some skepticism in the West. Nonetheless, the United States space program was accelerated.

"Since then we have heard of American failures and successes. Twenty-two United States space vehicles are now in orbit around the earth, ten of them transmitting valuable information to scientists. We have heard of no Russian failures, except one incomplete experiment concerning a capsule which carried a 'dummy' into space on May 16, 1960, and failed to return to earth. One silent Russian satellite is currently in orbit.

"Behind Russia's well-publicized successes must lie a certain number of failures.

"The Soviet news agency TASS announced at 2 a.m. EST on April 12, 1961, that Major Yuri Gagarin had circled the globe once and felt fine. The United States space agency tracked a Soviet missile at the time of Gagarin's supposed flight....

"From where was Gagarin launched? Who saw the take-off? One Soviet report states he observed the world through portholes; another, that he saw it electronically. Where and how did he land? How many failures have the Russians had? Did the 1960 flight carry merely a dummy? Have they failed in experiments with human beings? Was Gagarin really in space? Or is it all a bluff?

"The United States hopes to launch a manned space flight this summer. Could the Russians, to ensure their 'first place in the space race' and a propaganda coup, have rigged up an act? Why were they bold enough to report Gagarin's flight before he returned to earth -- unless they had already prepared recordings of a voice and observations supposedly made in space? Did they want us to forget the Congo and Laos for a while?