Salon is bringing the heat.

For most Americans under 40, the dread that saturated the 1980s is indelible. It was part of the fabric of their childhood. One friend recently rediscovered a little booklet of poems and stories she'd written in the second grade. "About half of them," she says, "mentioned nuclear war and how scared I was that I was going to die. The specter of nuclear war absolutely terrorized me when I was young and I think it's to blame for the fact that I had horrible insomnia from the ages of about 5 to 12."

I don't know how widespread this fear was among people my age, but growing up in the late '80s and early '90s I was terrified of nuclear war, and yes, it kept me up at night too. For about a year in fifth grade I couldn't fall asleep; in the dark every plane was a missile, and the skies over NJ have a lot of planes.

I remember knowing at the time, intellectually, that my fear was basically irrational, but being unable to shake it anyway. What ultimately happened is that my fear of nuclear war got mixed up with my fear of dying, a more general, dispersed dread that I've mostly learned to live with.