Some years ago, when I was editor of a now-defunct newspaper in El Paso, Texas, my wife and I bought a house with a deteriorated, spider-filled, filthy, underground fallout shelter in the backyard. It made me shudder, not because of its appearance, but because it represented past fears of the Soviet Union perpetrating radioactive death with nuclear bomb explosions. The Soviet Union’s description? Dictatorial, imperialistic, communistic, death-dealing and evil.
The context was the Cold War that did have hot-and-bloody outbursts. It was between the Russian-led Soviet Union with its allies and the United States with its allies and lasted from roughly the end of World War II to 1991. At stake were liberty, a decent world and maybe even humanity itself. While the fallout shelter would likely have saved no one, its mere existence symbolized the alarm embedded in what was happening.
But despite political conflicts and errors of varied kinds, our democratic nation and others hung in there. The Soviet Union, at one point running out of money if not cruelty, adopted a well-intentioned leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who instigated reforms and negotiated a nuclear-control deal with President Ronald Reagan. East Germany’s Berlin Wall came down. The Soviet Union started crumbling. At last, it was done, and now, as the Cold War has just mercilessly returned owing in part to our own laxities, we must hang in there again. We must deal seriously with the murderous, clever Russian President Vladimir Putin, now in the act of viciously squashing innocent, courageous Ukraine.
