Almost Armageddon: a personal history

The fear that’s been buried for a couple of decades, albeit not very deeply, resurfaced with the bizarre demand from U.S. President Donald Trump to his military that nuclear testing be resumed. “Because of other countries’ testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our nuclear weapons on an equal basis.”

Whatever the hell that means. America stopped testing its weapons 33 years ago. As usual, Trump is unconcerned with implications or consequences.

The man is a boomer. But apparently, he’s never lived life the way all other boomers have. We grew up with the spectre of entirely possible nuclear war looming over us.

My mother would not let me drink milk for most of the 1950s. Nuclear bomb testing had contaminated it with Strontium 90. An American study, the Baby Tooth Survey, had documented the poison in children’s baby teeth. At the age of seven, I knew enough about the nuclear bomb to be terrified.

Winnipeg was small enough then that there was a daily noon siren. We small children thought it was to let us know it was lunchtime, but there was a more sinister reason. In the event of nuclear war, that siren would sound — and not stop. The daily ritual, I learned later, was a test to be sure it worked.

So when the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded, I and the rest of my 12-year-old classmates realized full well the implications. We also knew the school’s preparations were laughable: when the bell rang in seven or more short blasts, we were to hide under our desks or scramble to an interior wall and curl up in foetal position. We practised it daily.

I secretly planned to bolt and run home down the lane, to be with my mom when we died horribly, but with luck, instantly.

We’d seen the images of mushroom clouds, the pictures showing the gruesome aftermaths of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We knew there was no hiding. Trump apparently either doesn’t know or doesn’t care.

As nuclear testing continued, I became a teen with peace symbols sewn on my jeans and protests a key part of my transition to adulthood. In university in Ottawa, my friends and I carried long-stemmed flowers to protests in front of the American embassy, over their nuclear testing at Alaska’s Amchitka Island.

Disappointed we could not insert the flowers in the barrels of military rifles held at parade rest by the embassy guards because they weren’t carrying rifles, we just gave them each a flower.

Our protests failed, of course. The last, biggest test in U.S. history, in 1971 at Amchitka, was a five-megaton underground blast, almost 400 times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb. (The military, which had killed some 900 sea otters in two earlier tests, at least had the good grace this time to relocate several hundred survivors, then an endangered species due to hunting and— well, radiation— to the Pacific Northwest prior to the explosion.)

In 1963, the Cuban scare, combined with mounting radiation levels worldwide, finally brought about a partial test ban treaty — no above-ground testing. A 2023 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists paper says then-president John F. Kennedy signed that treaty after being shown the results of the Baby Tooth Survey.

In 1996, a comprehensive (no testing at all) treaty was developed and signed by 71 nations. It has never taken effect, because China, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Russia and the United States, all of whom signed it, have never ratified it. Three nuclear powers — India, Pakistan and North Korea — didn’t even sign it.

When I joined the CBC newsroom in the late 1970s, I was told a handful of reporters and announcers would go, along with civic officials, to the nuclear bunker somewhere underneath Portage Avenue, tasked with communication to the public, in the event of a strike.

There was a file with instructions we were to follow, listing who would be sent. If the bunker survived and if radio signals even worked, we were the official public broadcaster. We knew we would be talking to the dead.

When Chornobyl happened in April 1986, the first the West heard of it was elevated radiation happening very suddenly over Eastern Europe. The thought, never deeply buried, surfaced: the event. I had a new senior producer who, I was sure, wasn’t yet aware of his Armageddon responsibility. I told him to dig out the file at the back of his cabinet. He read it and went pale.

Since then, there’s been China, North Korea, Putin and his Poseidon bomb, which would detonate underwater off an enemy coast and supposedly engulf entire cities in liquid radiation. All still ready to threaten the existence of the entire planet — to do what? Rule over a giant cinder in space until they, too, die of radiation poisoning?

At least climate change won’t matter a tinker’s damn.

Substack columnist (spoutingoff.substack.com) Judy Waytiuk, doesn’t lie awake at night obsessing over nuclear war. She knows there’s no point.