Nuclear Attack!!!

So the entire 50s decade was under the cloud of the cold war. The US and Russia had reached the point of MAD (mutual assured destruction). In some histories of this period they show kids hiding under their desks in case of a nuclear attack…we did not do that, I think our teachers understood that immediate vaporization would not be prevented by the thickness of a desk top.

There was a civil defense siren mounted on a pole at the fire station about one block east of the elementary school. It was tested every Monday at noon.

Unfortunately, it would go off at odd times (e. g. 11:34 PM) and scare us all. It wasn’t clear to me what we were to do other than pray.

Dad understood the concept of strategic bombing and he convinced me that if there were a nuclear attack, Beaumont, Port Arthur and Orange would be prime targets because of the multiple refineries in the ‘Golden Triangle’.

Sputnik in 1957 pumped things up a bit by replacing bombers (relatively slow and easy to detect) with missiles against which there was no real defense.

The primary US bomber in the early 50’s was the Convair B-36 Peacemaker.

A huge bomber with six pusher reciprocating engines as well as four jet engines, the B-36 could deliver a nuke to the Soviet Union. We saw a lot of them fly over us, leaving contrails. These were phased out for the jet powered B-47 and B-52.

Side Story: We would go as a family to the drive in movies. One movie in Beaumont was the South Park Drive in on the south side of town between the Lamar Tech campus and the Mobil refinery.

One night we were there watching a ‘love’ movie. Love movies did not hold my interest like a war movie, a western or an airplane movie. I was in the back seat only half watching the movie. Behind me the process units of the refinery were cranking out petroleum products. Suddenly, there was an intense light that illuminated the sky, the drive in and all of the parked cars. This was exactly how a nuclear explosion was depicted in the civil defense movies that we saw. I braced myself for the inevitably shockwave but was pretty sure I was going to see Jesus up close and personal in a blink of an eye. The light faded and went out and there was no shockwave. Whew. It turns out that a meteorite had hit the atmosphere over the Texas Louisiana border. This was a humdinger to cause that much light.