I'm the same age as you, and I grew up in Southern California.
Most of my peers didn't expect to survive to be adults, as you said.
We weren't generally freaked out about it. We laughed grimly when we had earthquake and nuclear drills in school, both of which consisted of the same thing: getting under our wooden desks. We were completely surrounded by primary nuclear targets. A major oil refinery was a couple of miles away.
I believe it's safe to argue that the most dangerous time in the cold war was in the first half of the 1980s. The Cuban Missile crisis in 1962 was a very close call, but we were really on and off the edge for most of 10 years in the late 70s and early 80s.
Yet most everyone feels far less safe today than we felt then.
How we feel about safety is rarely connected to how safe we actually are.
I believe that unlimited information and communications is making us insane. How many tens of thousands were killed by gas attacks in the late 70s and early 80s in the middle east? We knew it was happening, but we didn't see it, as we do today.
I won't go into this theory more now, I've posted it a number of times in greater length, so it's available in my post history.
Most of my peers didn't expect to survive to be adults, as you said.
We weren't generally freaked out about it. We laughed grimly when we had earthquake and nuclear drills in school, both of which consisted of the same thing: getting under our wooden desks. We were completely surrounded by primary nuclear targets. A major oil refinery was a couple of miles away.
I believe it's safe to argue that the most dangerous time in the cold war was in the first half of the 1980s. The Cuban Missile crisis in 1962 was a very close call, but we were really on and off the edge for most of 10 years in the late 70s and early 80s.
Yet most everyone feels far less safe today than we felt then.
How we feel about safety is rarely connected to how safe we actually are.
I believe that unlimited information and communications is making us insane. How many tens of thousands were killed by gas attacks in the late 70s and early 80s in the middle east? We knew it was happening, but we didn't see it, as we do today.
I won't go into this theory more now, I've posted it a number of times in greater length, so it's available in my post history.