Parenting & Family Quote by Kary Mullis

Cold War anxiety gets repackaged here as a grimly funny coming-of-age story: the Russians weren’t just a geopolitical rival, they were a formative prop. Mullis frames the Soviet Union as a kind of civic training partner, a convenient antagonist that gave American childhood a script and adults a rationale. The word “fortunate” lands like a dare, forcing you to sit with the uncomfortable possibility that an enemy can be socially useful even when the threat is existential.

The joke turns on the absurdity of “hiding under our desks” as nuclear preparedness. Everyone knows it wouldn’t work; that’s the point. The ritual wasn’t about survival, it was about obedience and emotional management. Duck-and-cover drills functioned as theater: they translated an incomprehensible catastrophe into a chore a child could perform, soothing parents and institutions by manufacturing the feeling of control.

Mullis, a scientist with an iconoclast streak, sharpens the knife with “temerity,” a word you’d use for an impolite guest, not an annihilating superpower. The mismatch exposes the performative bravado of Cold War rhetoric: we treated apocalypse as bad manners and called it realism. Underneath is a critique of how nations metabolize fear into routine, how propaganda becomes pedagogy. He’s also hinting at nostalgia’s moral trap: the era’s clarity (enemy, drills, flags) can feel comforting in retrospect, even though it was built on a permanent background hum of annihilation.