Abstract
Reagan, amazing new science-fiction weapons, arms race, talk of war, paranoia about nuclear armageddon, spies, belligerent .foreign policies . . . a sense of deja vu. 1 am reminded of the 1950s, when I was a kid. I am a child of the Cold War; bom in the shadows of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, promised World War 1li some fourteen times to date, had atomic-blast emergency drills and {all-out shelters shoved down my throat before I was tett, was terrified in early adolescence by Nevil Shute's haunting On the Beach. One night dztring the Falklands War I sat hz the loungeroom with my sevetvyear-old son, watching a TV report on the sinking of the General Belgrano; the boy cuddled into me as close as he could and looked into my face to ask me in an afraid, halting voice, was there going to be another World War. 1 said no, but felt he tuas not convinced. 1 hugged him and felt a"ger that he could not grow up innocent. At the same time my mi11d shifted into reverse to another time, another lou1zge-room, a110ther father. My son was me, and I was my own old man. Same question, same concern; deja vu.