Nuclear Warheads Part 2

During my years at Reinhardt, I remember two emergency situations that rattled my mother enough to let me know my life was in danger. The first was April 2, 1957, when at about 3 pm, the sky turned green and a tornado touched down in Oak Cliff. My mother and neighborhood friends had watched the sky and also probably through radio or television learned that the tornado was heading east toward east Dallas. So she and a friend rushed to Reinhardt, found us children, and rushed back home, where we prepared to sit through the storm in our bathtub. Fortunately, the tornado made it no further than near downtown. Many other children that afternoon stayed in the building in tornado drill formations. On the evening of October 22,1961, my mother again became very rattled, telling me when I got home that President Kennedy was getting us into a nuclear war. That night, Kennedy had delivered a televised address announcing the discovery of missile installations in Cuba. He proclaimed that the United States would "...regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response..." He also placed a naval quarantine blockade on Cuba to prevent further Soviet shipments of military weapons from arriving there.

The following is an educational video for children developed by Civil Defense in the early 1950s.