By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I often worry about how young folks today will adapt and respond after enduring two very difficult years of COVID-19 existential dread. Then I remember how in response to the threat of a nuclear apocalypse, my own generation evolved from hiding under our desks to speaking out in a concerted effort to confront and reduce the risk.
Seventy-five years ago, atomic scientists who built the first nuclear weapons developed a provocative metaphor to measure how close humanity is to destroying itself. They called it the “Doomsday Clock,” identified midnight as the time of global annihilation, and each year have adjusted the clock hands to show how close we are to that dark moment.
In 1947, when the clock started ticking, it was set at seven minutes to midnight. When I was in school in the mid-60s, 70s, and early 80s, the clock setting averaged about eight or nine minutes before midnight, but got as close as three minutes to midnight in 1984. Why?
It was the Cold War era. Back then, nuclear family meant not only mother-father-child, but also a domestic unit regularly confronting the stark reality that on a moment’s notice, the nuclear weapons of the United States and the Soviet Union (now Russia) could obliterate the world.
I still recall the regular civil defense training our educators taught us in grade school. We practiced ducking under our desks in the event of a nuclear attack. We also received basic instructions on where to go and what to do after our sturdy desks had “shielded” us from the initial blast. These subterranean nuclear havens were known as “fallout shelters” or “bomb shelters.”
Archived hometown Ogden, Utah newspapers indicate that there was one in my own St. Joseph’s grade school basement. The ever-prepared Holy Cross nuns in charge stored away four days of food for 400 students as well as a 300-gallon water tank. The good sisters also took a 16-hour course to get themselves certified in operating and monitoring radiological equipment.
Even my Trappist monastery sanctuary in rural Huntsville could not escape from the nuclear reality. In December 1971, the Ogden Standard-Examiner published an article describing how the monastery had converted a corner of their basement honey production facility into a licensed shelter. The monks stocked the place with the usual provisions as well as a lot of wheat and about five tons of honey.
The monastery also had a short wave radio available, and a bulldozer on hand to reinforce the thick cement walls with dirt as needed. Fr. Bartholomew Gottemoller, in charge of the monastery honey operations, explained, “God wants us to live in this world as long as He destines us, and He wants us to take all the precautions we can to preserve life. Of course, we are unafraid to die, but in case of an attack, you’d do all could to survive.”
By the time I was in high school, educators took a different approach to the atomic question—more stark but more realistic. As President Jimmy Carter pursued a SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation) treaty with the Russians, our history and civics teachers challenged us to consider what would really happen during a nuclear war. It was sobering.
Eventually, in 1983, a television movie called The Day After terrified the county and the world with realistic depictions of destruction inflicted on average folks living in Kansas during a fictional nuclear war. While studying at Notre Dame, I helped organize a conference of Catholic college students exploring the question of whether there could be “Justice in a Nuclear Future.”
I wrote an op-ed for the school newspaper, The Observer, citing the famous words of the poet Robert Frost: “Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.” We asked the conservative Notre Dame student body to vote for a bilateral nuclear freeze during a referendum. They did, with almost 80% support.
I do not claim a cause-and-effect relationship here, but it is true that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the United States and Soviet Union negotiated and signed START (Strategic Arms Reduction) treaties. For a brief time, the Doomsday Clock was set way back, to 17 minutes before midnight.
Unfortunately, it did not last.
In January 2022, in the midst of a second COVID-19 pandemic winter of lockdowns, deaths, viral spikes, and social disunion, the Doomsday Clock was set at 100 seconds before midnight. Rachel Bronson, president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said the clock “continues to hover dangerously, reminding us about how much work is needed to be done to ensure a safer and healthier planet. We must continue to push the hands of the clock away from midnight.”
It can be done.
It took almost thirty years—including during the entirety of my school days—for our nuclear threat education and response strategy to evolve from “hide under your desks” to The Day After to arms control treaties. I look forward with hope and anticipation to the evolutionary journey on which today’s “pandemic generation” will take us in the next decade or two as they battle their own Doomsday Clock.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, was published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.
