Yes, this was actually shown to elementary school children across the U.S.
If you're old enough you'll remember growing up under the looming threat of nuclear annihilation. We dealt with it the same way we deal with all forms of mortality, a mind-splitting Freudian combo of preparing for it night and day while simultaneously not thinking about it as hard as we could. Mutual Assured Destruction was an insane way to live, and we all knew it. It's no wonder people went mad, the wonder is most of us somehow stayed sane.
I have seen a trend from time to time, admittedly popular among those with the best of intentions, involving bad, wishful assumptions of the past which comport more affably with one's present world view. To wit, those Ruski warheads were overblown, they were practically cardboard cut outs that would have blown up harmlessly in their silos if the nozzles fired at all. Ronnie Raygun hyped the whole deal just to starve the beast and whack welfare. And yes, there's a small element of truth to that, but it's just an element.
Make no mistake, the USSR made working rockets and working bombs. The Cold War had the potential to become very hot, very fast. The exact temperature is classified, poorly, which is to say its widely known to be hot enough to boil off neutrons from dying uranium and plutonium nuclei at just the proper kinetic energy to free their buddies by the trillions and announce that liberation with a thousand brilliant flashes of rads and rays. With enough left over for any pesky allies or long trigger subs who might still want to wade in after our national dick was knocked into the glassy dirt. It almost makes me nostalgic, really, because there were some benefits to the cold war, especially compared to the cold civil war we fight daily here with no end in sight. For starters we never had to fight it and we won anyway.
More on the Cold War below the fold.
Consider WW2, most of the old industrial world along with half of the new locked in combat, factories churning out planes and bombs and ships furiously, to hit their factories making the same stuff. Whole populations rounded up and murdered on an industrial scale using pretty much every means we had been busily perfecting since Moonwatcher symbolically cracked that other, incredibly annoying alpha ape upside his screeching head with a knobby antelope femur. Then, at the very, very end, a group of the wisest quantum sorcerers cast their mysterious spells on the rarest of earths to produce a technological super weapon working on whole new principles capable of leveling entire cities in one stroke. Which was then used to level not one but two cities in the fanatical enemy nation thus ending the war.
If aliens were watching from orbit, they surely realized they could not have written a better script. Except for the sequel, which promised to be literally apocalyptic. For the first time earth's presumably only intelligent species had the power to destroy its own biosphere. This was new, up to then we could put everything we had into it and still leave a healthy population and industrial base standing, enough that a whole new set of all out wars could be waged in a few years if not immediately. We basically existed in a state of perpetual warfare for at least five millennia. There was certainly no reason to think we would stop now. Nor at any time over the next several decades as we lurched from one proxy war to another with plenty of perilous saber rattling and chances for honestly mistaken Armageddons along the way.
Another great thing about the Cold War was we enjoyed all the benefits of being on a war footing. We couldn't really afford to humor know-nothings and corrupt woosayers on a mass scale. Our weapons had to actually work for the deterrent to be effective, the spillover onto scientific progress was astonishing. To this day the United States, falling behind in so many other fields of study, remains the undisputed leader in aerospace and communications. A couple of the crowning achievements therein include walking on the moon and the network you are reading this post on. The economic benefits surpassed the fondest hopes of our original cold warrior-leaders, notably Ike and JFK. As a nation the cold war forged us, it defined us, it became our collective political operating system we ran on for decades. The politics of division were cast aside, briefly, more so than ever before anyway, clearing the way for women and minorities to began an epic, long over due march to legal equality.
In fact wars in general and the Cold War specifically were so damn useful in so many ways that we almost needed it. Or something like it. The "good" exists in contrast to the "bad," much like blue stands out best on a field of red and white. It didn't escape anyone's notice that having a feared enemy has a huge upside, be it in a democracy or totalitarian state. Terrified people tend to make snap decisions, offer them a well defined set of alternatives and they can even be stampeded in the desired direction. When the Cold War finally collapsed another one was waiting in the wings, it had been there the whole time and was now able to harvest the new fruit of racial and economic division.
We have a new cold war raging, a cold civil war, between states and races, between classes and parties. Between science and stupidity. Between unseen scary foreign enemies—who can walk among us, camouflaged with freedom like ideological pod people!—in the form of terrorism and apple pie. In some ways it's even better: These new enemies are either totally imaginary, or at the very least fall far short of their Soviet counterparts who really could have reduced the country to smoking radioactive ruin in a single lazy summer day. Like the real Cold War it opens up the Treasury to defense profiteering galore, but unlike the real deal none of that stuff has to work all that well, hell it doesn't have to work at all; there's no assurance of complete destruction.
It's unclear which side of this cold civil war will win. And it may sound crazy, but in some ways I'd take the old cold war over the new one any day. As dangerous as MAD was, both sides were relatively rational, they understood what could happen. That's not nearly as clear in this case. Worrisome indeed, because in the end both cold wars share one big bug/feature in common: We damn well better hope it doesn't boil over into the real thing or it will be right outside your door.