Any Americans ask their parents/grandparents what they were thinking during Cuban Missile Crisis?

I was alive, trained in "duck and cover" What a joke.

There was not general common knowledge of atomic bombs and their widespread effects like there is today.

Nor how monstrously big they have gotten with special lethality.

Or how monstrously small.

The times were very different. Red scare was everywhere especially after they orbited Sputnik. This was before the Cuban missile crisis. You can imagine what that did.

People still went to work, but when they came home they worked on their bomb shelters. Everyone did where I lived.

I was only 12 when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened, but I remember it clearly and I was smart enough to know what the implications were. I was scared to death. I listened to JFK's speech and realized he wasn't being his usual cool, funny self and saw that he was deadly serious. That frightened me in itself. Then, our parents and our teachers were acting calm but clearly as nervous as hell. Kids pick up on vibes very easily and I knew that, if JFK, my mom and dad, and my teacher were afraid, that this was the real deal and I should be afraid too. I understood there was a very high chance that nuclear war would occur. And I clearly remember, walking home from the toy store, one afternoon that October and thinking, "It's so unfair that all of us kids have to die before we ever get the chance to live just be cause the adults, in the world can't get along." It was a dark and scary time and I think it's really when the innocence of my childhood ended. I understood that really bad things could happen and I couldn't control one bit of the outcome.

My husband's father worked for civil defense.

He hired a large construction crew to come out to the house and build a bomb shelter. And stack it with all of the latest equipment and supplies for the time.

Even his wife didn't really know what was going on because her husband was at work and could not call home.

The neighbors knew where he worked and were majorly freaked out

Clearly Americans would have known about the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

It must have been scary times indeed, I didnt know sputnik has scared americans that much.

Anyways I predict with the way things are going we might have another similar situation

Teacher's didn't give out homework that day because
the treat of war was very real. I thought it was great
because we didn't have homework to do that night. Our
family was glued to the news that night. I was an optimist
and felt things would work out and they were. I not the
optimist I was in my youth things today concern me more.

Not an American, but here in England I once asked someone born in 1941 about the events of Oct. 1962, and he remembers it vividly, he said they were all really frightened, and taut with tension.

My uncles were just kids, they said they were all freaking out and kept watching the southern skies (over the barn) for incoming nuclear bombs. Of course they were ready to duck and take cover, like they were taught in school.

That's hard to imagine. Little kids should not be terrorized like this.

Little kids hell. You do not understand. The entire world leaned over the edge of a cliff.

And almost fell off.

And then Kennedy was murdered.

There were other incidences, less well known, that occurred as well.

1967 War.