One day, when my grandkids are old enough to understand the idea of nuclear war, I’ll tell them a bomb nearly took me out. It happened on the road to Damascus. Not the Damascus where Saul was blinded by a light from heaven. Damascus, Arkansas.

I grew up in the shadow of the Cold War. In Oklahoma, that wasn’t abstract. At school we practiced nuclear drills, crawling under desks, covering our heads as if a unidesk might save us from concrete blocks flying 150 miles an hour with radiation close behind. It was comforting but futile. It left emotional scars.

So I learned to laugh at it. Like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove, riding a nuclear warhead like a rodeo cowboy into Russian airspace. I’m being facetious, but the anxiety was real, especially the part about total annihilation.

I was at Harding University then, before Karen, before marriage, still a free agent. I spent a lot of time driving west on Highway 36, locally known as West Pleasure Avenue.

If you drive west from Searcy, Arkansas, on Highway 36, you pass through three tiny towns with Hallmark names: Joy, Harmony, and Romance. They have not changed much since 1980.

My buddies and I turned that into a standing joke and, on occasion, a pickup line.

“You want to go out West Pleasure to Joy, Harmony, and Romance?”

And if that did not work, we had a backup. “You want to see a missile silo?”

You could not actually see much. Razor wire. No Trespassing signs. But you could imagine the missile rising out of the ground, flames roiling beneath it. It was just enough danger to make you feel alive. Not unlike taking a date to a scary movie, just enough fear to justify putting your arm around her, all in the name of comfort and protection.

Until one day the danger became real.

Near Damascus, Arkansas, not far from Romance, a technician dropped an eight-pound socket inside a Titan II missile silo. It fell some eighty feet and punctured the missile’s skin, causing fuel to leak. Above it sat another tank. If the contents of those two tanks met, they would ignite. It was only a matter of time. And above it all sat a nine-megaton nuclear warhead (600 times more powerful than Hiroshima)

Like most people, I slept through the night. I woke the next morning, read the newspaper, and realized I was still alive.

Eventually the explosion came. The warhead was blown out of the silo and landed in a ditch some distance away. For a while, no one even knew exactly where it was. That will get your attention.

After that, I stopped taking dates to Joy and Romance.

Recently, Karen and I went back to Arkansas to visit family who had traded California smog for a patch of land in Romance. They have a garden. A pig named Crunchy. Another named Yummy. Chickens: Rhode Island Reds, Plymouth Rocks, Leghorns. A rooster. A goat. The kind of place where life is loud and ordinary and real.

Our grandkids ran through the yard chasing baby ducks and chickens. A rooster with a Messiah complex woke us before sunrise, apparently convinced the sun rose because of him. The grandkids loved it. They woke laughing, ran outside, and took off after a hen across the yard. And it struck me: this felt right.

Watching children and chickens gather and scatter, hearing the racket of feathers and laughter, collecting eggs in the morning light, this is how mornings were meant to feel. Unhurried. Full of living things, not devices.

Most of our mornings are not like that. They begin quietly enough, coffee brewing, light at the window. But it does not take long. Voices rise. Arguments ignite. Lines are drawn. Bombs go off. And that is before we even get to the Middle East. Peace is in short supply in this world.

Maybe that is what I will tell my grandkids when they are old enough to understand the bomb, and all the smaller explosions we live with every day. We spent a generation building machines that could end the world. Now we practice smaller versions of the same destruction with our words, our politics, our fury, our screens.

And yet peace still begins where it always has: with children chasing chickens, breakfast on the table, laughter in the yard, love under an ordinary sky. It is easy to imagine the end of the world. What takes more faith, what takes more courage, is to imagine its renewal.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/command-and-control-trailer/
Here is a video trailer from the PBS series, American Experience. The title of the episode is Command and Control.