Peace on the brink of war: after home bunkers and duck-and-cover drills, Americans were braced for war in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

• Author: Pont, Jonathan
• Position: Times past

STUDY YOUR TRIGONOMETRY. FURNISH your family's bomb shelter. Scan the sky for enemy warplanes. Those were homework assignments for a generation of high school students. The big test came in 1962.

That October, U.S. spy planes spotted about 40 nuclear missiles being installed by the Soviet Union in Cuba, the Caribbean island 90 miles south of Key West, Florida. With a range of about 2,000 miles, the missiles could have hit much of the U.S. Already engaged in the Cold War with the Soviets, America was now on the brink of nuclear war.

The Soviets chose to base the missiles in Cuba, their ally, to counter the U.S.'s dominant arsenal. The U.S. had already placed missiles in Turkey, adjacent to the Soviet Union.

Despite the unprecedented peril, the nation didn't seem as anxious as it had been during a decade of Cold War jitters. In the 1950s, America was in the grip of a nuclear scare, holding duck-and-cover drills and building bomb shelters, much as people today are buying gas masks and stocking up on antibiotics.

President John F. Kennedy outlined the situation in Cuba and defined U.S. goals in a televised address on October 22, 1962.

Our policy has been one of patience and restraint, as befits a peaceful and powerful nation, which leads a worldwide alliance.... We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would ashes in our mouth--but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.

THE FEARFUL '50s

America had been living with a serious nuclear threat since August 1949, when the Soviet Union first tested an atomic bomb. In the following decade, the U.S. government encouraged measures known as civil defense to protect civilians in the event of a nuclear war.

Civil defense became a part of daily life. Bert the Turtle, a sort of Barney for the nuclear age, taught school children to "duck and cover" under their desks if a bomb hit. Teens and adults scanned the skies for enemy aircraft. In 1954, much of the country underwent a bombing drill, simulating nuclear attacks on Washington, D.C., and elsewhere that "killed" 12 million people.

As the arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union heated up, ducking and covering no longer seemed to be enough protection from the radioactive fallout of an atomic blast. Many Americans began to literally dig in, constructing their own bomb shelters in the basements of their homes or in their backyards. Writer Kenneth...