Um.....did you grow up on the same planet I did?
I wasn't even old enough for the actual duck and cover drills in school (which I presume didn't extend past the 60s) yet plenty of the omnipresent fear of nuclear war with the Soviets filtered down to kids...you had the "Day After" on TV in 1983, etc.
What a snide question. Are you now an expert on MY childhood?
Duck and Cover in case of nuclear attack was still being taught as late as 1985, or at least it was in my elementary school in TN; in fact, we got some of the old Civil Defense training, such as was suitable for children our age. By the time I was in a California high school, though, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the USSR was on its last legs; nobody thought that duck-and-cover would be useful in a CD role (though it was still taught for earthquakes only)
I did the Air Raid drills. Stand Up, pull out your chair, and duck under your desk with your head on your knees and hands over your head.
That was grade school in the 50's. Somehow I related them to the Russians.
It seems they were as regular as fire drills are now, maybe 4 or 5 a year.
In junior high and early high school, the Kruschchev 'we will bury you' and personal bomb shelter era were frightening for me, and I definitely, even as a kid, was aware of the probability of annihilation.
I think the the Sputnik orbits in 1957, Sputnik 1 in Oct, and Sputnik II with the dog (Laika) in November shocked the US and bred the anxiety that Russia could deliver nukes. The first manned space orbit, Yuri Gagarin in April 1961, increased the tension that Russia may be technologically superior, and that increasing tension culminated in the Cuban missile crisis in October, 1962.
During the latter, I truly thought I was on the earth for the last days. That was lump in the throat, knot in the belly time. In school nobody really seemed to want to say anything, but it was obvious we were all convinced we were going to be blown off the face of the earth. They were an eerily silent, gut-wrenching couple of days.
It still is a very vivid memory for me, all these years later, on the same scale of my first hearing of the Kennedy assasination which happened a year later.
longjack
In my area we were doing the duck under your desk drills until the mid 70's.
I grew up in south Florida, and was 12 in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis, but have absolutely NO recollection of any drill in public school where you go underneath your school desk and cover your head, like that's going to save you from a nuclear blast. I've always assumed that when people talk about this exercise, it's one of those things you hear about and think you remember, but I can assure everyone that I never came across it. Also, even during those several days when the crisis was at its height, life was normal except for restricted access to maybe the seaport (where I found out many years later some military was based, but never saw a single military unit in town and we were a mile away) but people didn't go to Port Everglades anyway unless you worked there. In fact, I was out on the streets selling newspapers after school in those years, and probably saw more people and events than average. Lots of what people think they remember just didn't happen (at least in my part of south Florida).
On 11-22-1963 we were in the Bay of Florida looking for a U-2 plane Castro had shot down when we got the news that JFK had been assassinated. We were sure we were at war with the Soviets.