Living through the Cold War

Source of the Cold War map

I tend to forget that I am much older than most Americans and that they don't share my memories of living through the Cold War. I did not suffer in that war in any serious way, but it was an influence for a very long time.

• In school in the 1940's I went through "drop drills" where we ducked under our desks to practice self defense in case there was an atomic bomb attack on Los Angeles.
• In high school, which I started while the Korean War was still being fought, I took ROTC rather than physical education and joined the rifle team, thinking military skills would be likely to be needed at some future date.
• As an undergraduate at UCLA I had to sign a loyalty oath in order to take up a position as a teaching assistant. On one occasion camping in the desert east of Los Angeles, I saw an atom bomb blast. Although it was 200 or more miles away, it brightened the sky as a false dawn before the actual dawn.
• As a graduate student at UC Berkeley I not only had to sign the oath again, but I discovered that the student cooperative boarding house where I got my meals was on the California Attorney General's List of possible subversive organizations.
• On graduating and starting work as a research engineer, I had to obtain a security clearance. On one occasion I was told I could not see a memo that I had written and that I was to explain to a superior because it was then classified beyond my level of clearance. Of course I was working for firms that made a large portion of their funds through defense contracting, although I was working on civilian projects. A machine I worked on was sent to the Soviet Union as part of a traveling computer and electronics show, part of the effort to ease Cold War tensions. I was surprised to learn that a book in which I had co-authored a chapter was translated into Russian and published in the USSR.
• As a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s I discovered that my group was greeted on arrival in country by a headline stating that 45 new CIA spies had arrived disguised as PCVs. The Peace Corps was targeted by Communist groups, including an invasion of the Peace Corps offices. The university at which I taught was closed for a year by a student strike, part of a broad multinational youth movement of the time. I worked for a time on a project that was initiated by a U.S. labor organization later identified as funded by the CIA; the project fell through with considerable damage to the people it was supposed to help. My wife's nursery school had two mothers' groups, one Communist and one Christian Democrat.
• When I joined the World Health Organization in 1970, a colleague took me aside to explain who could be trusted and which were the agents of the USSR in the Department. One Russian colleague was abducted from Geneva and imprisoned in a mental institution in Moscow, apparently for transgressing the security rules of the USSR. The university in Colombia in which our offices were located was occupied by leftest students; the military retook the university in a confrontation in which 14 students were killed, rioting spread to the city and eventually some 25,000 people were arrested and imprisoned in the sports stadium; the university remained closed for a year, during most of which time we too could not reach our offices.
• Returning to the United States and taking a government job working in foreign assistance, I again had to go through the security clearance process. While the development assistance projects that I worked on were not political in any way that I could tell, the priorities set in the allocation of foreign aid to countries and regions must have been. I recall when I was a member of the national committee for IIASA a couple of Russian researchers were thrown out of a Scandinavian country accused of gathering information for the USSR. After the Soviet Union was broken up, I managed a couple of programs funding scientists from the former Soviet Union as part of the response to the ending of Communism. So too, we provided some help to former Warsaw Pact nation scientific administrators interested in learning how we managed research funding here.

I suppose that I was as little involved in the Cold War as might have been possible, but still the events such as the creation of the Berlin wall and the Cuban missile crisis affected me as they did everyone.