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the Cold War had no noncombatants. It made some of us store water in the garage in gallon containers. It made my neighbor never let the gas tank of his car fall below half-full. He planned to escape. It rewrote all the text books I read as a child in elementary school and as a teenager in high school. It made California the most populous state in the nation. The Cold War persists, especially in our anxiety now that it's over. + + + + + + + + I had been born a soldier of the Cold War in the fall of 1948, while Soviet troops and tanks blockaded Berlin and President Truman campaigned for election on his willingness to act on the unthinkable. I was less than a year old when the Soviet Union revealed it had America's atomic secrets by detonating its own A-bomb. In 1949, eagerness to act on the unthinkable became mutual military doctrine. By that January night in 1962, when the CBS network broadcast Serling's "One More Pallbearer," the habits of the Cold War had already acclimated school children, suburban housewives and their husbands on thousands of assembly lines to what E. B. White called "the stubborn fact of annihilation." + + + + + + + + Thirty-five years have passed, and we're only now leaving the perfect shelter the Cold War's megalomania and paranoia built. We were down there on the secret day, probably in late 1991, when our computers and theirs stopped naming Moscow, Novosibirsk, Washington and Detroit as targets for our "multiple reentry vehicles," and theirs. Shouldn't the air-raid sirens that once warned us to "duck and cover" on the last Friday of every month, although now rusted into silence, have sounded the "all clear?" Shouldn't there have been dancing in the streets, and a pretty girl to kiss? Perhaps what Jonathan Schell wrote about in "The Fate of the Earth" -- the embarrassment of the bomb -- prevented President Bush from leading a post-Cold War victory parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. + + + + + + + + The atomic sequence was easy to remember during the monthly drill that sent us sliding beneath our wood-topped steel desks, on our knees and with hands clasped behind our heads as if we were prisoners of war of the Sisters of St. Joseph. First, the flash that would blind you if you looked. Next, the burst of thermal radiation that would set you afire if you were unlucky enough to be outside. Finally, the concussion that would tear you and your home apart. Local TV covered the early tests from the Nevada desert, where stucco houses just like mine were blown to smithereens, and department store mannequins -- just like my mother, father, brother and me -- burned where they stood in clothes from J. C. Penny's. In Las Vegas, an hour's drive from the Yucca Flats testing site, teachers herded school children into playgrounds in the early morning to wait for the ground to shudder slightly under their feet and to watch the crest of the mushroom cloud as it climbed the horizon. The tests became so commonplace -- 100 air tests between 1951 and 1961 -- that the children stopped watching. The principal casualty of the cold and the dark, during our 45 years of nuclear winter, was the imagination. The Cold War gave something in return. Down in the shelter the Cold War provided, parents learned the moral imperative of lying. Governments camouflaged the unthinkable. Kids got a taste for Armageddon. And you found that the list of those who are expendable always begins with your next-door neighbor. The Cold War taught everyone to lie. One of my favorite shows on TV in 1953 was "I Led Three Lives." Richard Carlson played Herb Philbrick, a loving father and husband, a secret member of a Communist Party cell and an undercover agent of the FBI. At the age of 5 I thought it was easy to identify a Communist -- they're men who wear hats in the summertime. Herb Philbrick lied all the time, with the conviction that lying is a moral necessity when the war is ideological and fought in your bedroom, your dad's office and your older brother's classroom. + + + + + + + + In 1962, during the week of the Cuban missile crisis, my parents stood at the kitchen sink after dinner, washing up and listening to the news on the TV set turned up loud. They turned to my brother and me and told us what we should do, if something happened. My brother and I -- he was 16 and I was 14 -- should not try to come home from our Catholic high school. We should go to the school chapel instead, to wait. My parents said they would come for us there. My parents mouthed these lies, and my brother and I quietly repeated them. We knew that we lived at "ground zero," surrounded by Douglas Aircraft, Rockwell International, a Nike missile battery and the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. We knew that the thermal pulse from a 20-megaton fusion bomb would incinerate everything and everyone inside a 23-mile-wide circle. We knew that our parents would not come for us, and that the school chapel was a fit place in which to die. + + + + + + + + Down in the shelter of the Cold War, children acquired the necessary habit of deceit. The Cold War taught us that the function of government is to conceal. In a basement shelter constructed to the specifications of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, father is supposed to give each family member a daily task to perform. There should also be toys for small children. A 24-hour watch should be maintained, with sleeping and waking shifts for family members. Everyone should be prepared to stay in the shelter for 14 days. To break the monotony, it may be necessary to invent tasks that will keep the family busy. Everyone can keep a diary. Someone should monitor the two CONELRAD frequencies (conveniently marked at 640 AM and 1240 AM by the radio's manufacturer) for the latest government reports. Someone should record the reports in a log. The movies told us there are some things the government doesn't want us to know -- giant ants have invaded the city's storm drains, atomic fallout will wake prehistoric lizards the size of office towers and anxious extraterrestrials are already looting the brains of military leaders to keep them from using atomic weapons in space. We learned later that the Defense Department actually spent the 1950s hollowing out a city-sized shelter for government officials beneath a resort in Maryland, and that unsuspecting communities downwind of the atomic tests were radiated with a cumulative 12 billion curies, or 148 times the dose released by the Chernobyl meltdown. + + + + + + + + In October 1945, the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff produced a secret paper on the "strategic vulnerability of Russia to a limited air attack." The plan the JCS outlined was the destruction of the 20 largest Soviet cities by atomic bombs. The targets included Moscow, Gorky, Novosibirsk, the Baku oil fields and Tashkent. Just 10 weeks after Allied victory in World War II, U.S. military planners were picking targets for World War III. + + + + + + + + Down in the shelter, we learned that our suburban neighborhood had become a defense production facility, an atomic proving ground, a staging area for prisoners of war and part of a continent-wide Area 51. We learned that our government must simultaneously contemplate some awful truth and conceal it from us. We've come up from the shelter to find ourselves in an episode of "The X-Files." The Cold War gave us a sick fondness for apocalypse. The world ends, over and over, during the years of the Cold War. In "Dr. Strangelove," fools and mindless machines do it. In "On the Beach," drifting fallout does it. In "When Worlds Collide," a rogue sun passing through the solar system does it. In "Beneath the Planet of the Apes," we and the gorillas do it to each other. For American diplomat George Kennan, in his 1947 article in Foreign Affairs announcing the Cold War doctrine of Soviet containment, the end of the world would come with the unleashing of "Russian-Asiatic" hordes upon a defenseless West. Kennan wrote less than two years after the liberation of the Nazi death camps. It took less than two years for the Cold War's fondness for apocalypse to turn the builders of Auschwitz into defenders of the Western tradition and the tens of thousands who defended Stalingrad into a barbarian horde. + + + + + + + + Just between 1984 and 1991, according to a rough tally kept by Professor Paul Brians at Washington State University, publishers in this country and England produced more than 300 novels and short story collections on the theme of atomic holocausts. The stories range from fictionalized accounts of Hiroshima victims to survivalist tracts on the benefits of post-atomic depopulation. These stories satisfied a need to nervously pick at our common nightmare and validate its essential deception -- that someone else would die ... millions of others would die ... but not us. + + + + + + + + Jonestown, Waco, the Gulf War and Oklahoma City are the little apocalypses we lingered over. At Jonestown, bodies were strewn on the ground like the dead at Nagasaki. At Waco, the wood-sided buildings burst into flames with the thorough suddenness of an atomic detonation. In the Gulf War, oil fires simulated the post-atomic sky predicted by Carl Sagan and the theorists of nuclear winter. At Oklahoma City, we watched all our pre- and post-atomic holocaust stories at once: the office building scooped out by a terrorist bomb as the prelude to Armageddon, the tiny victims blown apart, the hollow triumph over a conspiratorial state with its terrible secrets, and survivalists forging a new, purer nation in the rubble. + + + + + + + + Down in the Cold War shelter, we told ourselves these stories over and over until we learned to domesticate our horror. But we're leaving the shelter with a permanent taste for apocalypse. Helpfully, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are ready with the Apocalypse. The Cold War taught us who to shut out of the shelter. In 1961, the federal Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization published "The Family Fallout Shelter" -- a homeowner's guide to atomic survival, printed on flimsy newsprint paper and costing 10 cents. The OCDM advised that a contractor-built shelter would cost about $1,500. That was 10 percent of the cost of a house in my Los Angeles suburb. Dad could build a shelter in the basement, using plans in the OCDM guide, for less than $500. Only no Southern California tract house has a basement. According to the OCDM, assured survival from the effects of fallout was for the wealthy and people who lived somewhere else. + + + + + + + + My parents never considered buying or building a fallout shelter, nor did any of our neighbors. A shelter dealer in Downey, across the street from the Rockwell plant, sold prefabricated, fiberglass pods for burial in suburban backyards in 1961. No one I knew bought one. + + + + + + + + In 1995, Lisa Lishman of Starkville, Miss., posted a comment at a display of post-bomb photographs of Nagasaki at the Exploratorium in San Francisco: "I first became aware of the atom bomb and the idea of nuclear war when I was about 8 years old, that was around 1980 in the middle of the Cold War. On route to school (I was in third grade) I used to cut through an abandoned parking lot where rows of round, concrete portable fallout shelters were lined up for sale like used cars, bright price tags dangling from the air vents on their roofs. My friends and I learned to make a game of it. We'd climb inside one and play war. Whoever was left outside the shelter after the 'bomb' (usually a water balloon) was 'nuked.' You had to be quick and tough to secure a place for yourself inside before there was no more room." + + + + + + + + My family's mission, if the Cold War flashed into atomic brilliance, was to die with a minimum of fuss. My parents' lives were about other forms of survival, not the kind procured with a deer rifle behind 16 inches of cinder block and concrete. + + + + + + + + Down in the shelter, some of us debated who to let in and who to keep out. Survival meant -- above all -- your survival, and that meant, as the literature of apocalypse pointed out, killing anyone who wanted your water, food, women and weapons. Billy Graham counseled otherwise, but he understood that, in wartime conditions, it would be difficult to pass judgment on what a man did to protect his family. + + + + + + + + During the Cold War, the atomic battlefield was everywhere. The impossible decisions of battlefield commanders -- who should live, who should die -- were handed to every husband and mother. Every choice in the shelter calculated a risk to someone. Sheltered in the Cold War, we learned to regard some of us as dispensable. We were reassured that our worst impulses, acted on now, would have value in the post-apocalyptic society. I learned in the shelter that I ought to have been shut out of it. Feb. 24, 1997 + + + + + + + + D. J. Waldie's first book, "Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir," was published by W. W. Norton last July. He is a public official of the city of Lakewood, Calif.