Parkland, Florida: The Craziness of Today – and of 60 Years Ago

At church on Sunday, our minister told of walking around the church’s school last week and finding all of the classrooms dark, with their doors closed.  For a second he was confused, and then he remembered they were having a lockdown practice.  He said the kids were even told to sit with their legs up, so somebody wouldn’t see anybody in the room if they looked under the door.

Kids having to prepare like that is horrible.  What kind of a world is this becoming?  And yet, as I thought of hat, I thought back more years than I like to think, to when I was in second or third grade.  We didn’t have crazy shooters back then, but we had practices, too, for other crazy things.  I don’t have a clear recollection of it myself, but what school children were doing back then, and I am sure I was, too, was practicing for what to do in case of a nuclear attack.  Hide in the hall; hide under the desk.  It all seems sort of silly now.  But it didn’t at the time.  And looking back at it, it wasn’t silly to worry, even if hiding under our desks was.

Obviously, nuclear war never happened, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a near thing a couple of times.  The Cuban missile crisis, of course.  Soviet and U.S. tanks facing each other down at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin in October of 1961 in a crisis that some think was even more dangerous than Cuba.¹

And maybe the closest of all: September 26, 1983.  Stanislav Petrov worked at an early-warning facility near Moscow, monitoring missile launch areas in the United States.  On September 26, Stanislav Petrov’s screen flashed that a missile had been launched from the United States.  It didn’t seem right, so he reported a fault in the system.  But then his screen showed more missiles being launched, and the system reported: “Probability of attack, 100%”.  Ground radar would pick up the missiles in ten minutes.  They would strike in twelve.  If they were really coming, Russia needed time to respond.  But Stanislav Petrov still didn’t think the system was right, so he again reported it was a malfunction.  And then he waited.  For 15 minutes.  Nothing happened.  It was a malfunction.  The Soviet early-warning system had been fooled by the sun’s rays reflecting off clouds over North Dakota.

Stanislav Petrov’s story was not reported until 1998.  It was, after all, nothing the Soviet Union would have been proud of.  But I thought of it when our minister told of how children today practice for what to do if a crazy person gets into their school – and I remembered how we had prepared for craziness 60 years ago.
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¹ Frederick Kempe, Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth (2011).