TOWNSHEND — They slumber beneath the sea; they sleep under 30 feet of concrete. Ready at a moment's notice, they wait.
One would be enough to wipe out a whole city.
Despite the fall of communism, there are still thousands of nuclear weapons in the world, enough to destroy the world.
We came close a few times. I used to know a guy whose father was a crew member on a B-52 bomber that ran fail-safe return flights. The plane, loaded with live nuclear bombs, would fly toward a target in the Soviet Union until its crew got the radio message to fly back home.
One night, they didn't get their usual signal. They kept waiting, and it didn't come.
They were approaching the Soviet Union at breakneck speed. Not wanting to start a nuclear war, they had a huddle in the back of the plane and took a vote. They decided to break the rules and call the base.
They were told to fly back. Someone had forgotten to send the return message.
For a few moments, the fate of the world had rested in the hands of a few airmen in the back of a bomber.
* * *
I have met two other people who told me similar stories.
For years, it seemed inevitable that nuclear war was just around the corner. Most people tried to live in denial. “You'll go crazy if you think about it,” they'd say.
Some people wanted to be the first to die. “If they drop the big one, I hope I die instantly,” they would tell you. “Why would you want to survive? There's gonna be nothing left but giant rats.”
A few people were determined to make it, no matter what. They started building bomb shelters.
I know one guy who wanted to bury a huge, precast septic tank in his yard. “I was going to have a steel hatch on top and a ladder,” he said. “But my wife wouldn't let me do it.”
If you didn't build your own bunker, you'd have to make other arrangements. There were public shelters, but they were pretty much a joke. For years, there was a fallout shelter sign on a burial crypt at the Bellows Falls cemetery - as good a place as any.
I used to have a government manual that showed you how to build your own shelter. You were supposed to dig a hole and drive a large American car over it. Then you could hang out there until the radiation levels dropped. Might be a bit uncomfortable, especially if it rained.
During the Cold War, the world lived in fear; at night, the air was brittle with it. If you had a shortwave radio, you could dial past the warbles and Morse code until you found Radio Moscow English Service: the voice of the enemy himself.
You'd walk outside, look up, and see a satellite crawling across the sky, then wonder if it was one of theirs.
* * *
They say that love is the flip side of fear. If that's true, then I should have learned to love the bomb, but I could never do so.
There were people who did.
I did some work for a guy who served on a nuclear submarine. You could tell he loved the bomb; his eyes shined when he talked about it.
“It was all a balance. Nuclear weapons kept us safe,” he said. He had the smile of someone who had resigned himself to the harsh judgment of fate.
Some people took their fear and ran with it, made a lifestyle of it. They became survivalists. You'd see them at gun shows buying cases of military ammunition.
The whole thing spawned a cottage industry. There were ads in the back of gun magazines for dried food or land in Idaho. There were books that prophesied a nuclear holocaust and urged people to buy shotguns and hoard food.
Today, the Cold War is over, but the nuclear weapons remain. North Korea has the bomb, and Iran might be building one.
We seem to be creeping toward another war. Maybe it's time to start digging.