Pretending to Survive

Children have been playing at war for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks believed that war games taught strategy and friendship. The Mongols, who once had the greatest army in the world, encouraged their young sons and daughters to play at war so that they would be prepared for the real thing when they became adults. War games taught children to think of war as something heroic, exciting, and fun. They helped adults to recruit young people into the military and to gain support for real wars around the world. For hundreds of generations, children played at war using sticks for guns and swords. They built fortresses with old wood and clay. They learned how to flank each other’s armies and they built stretchers to carry each other out of harm’s way.

Then, in 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, in Japan. The new bomb could kill thousands of people in seconds, with thousands more dying from radioactive poisoning in the days and weeks that followed. No one had ever seen anything like it. Now, whole populations could be killed without soldiers even having been sent to fight. Instead, bombs could be launched from the other side of the planet. Over the next five years, a new possibility of catastrophic war arose between the United States and the Soviet Union, which had its own nuclear weapons. Both sides aimed their bombs at each other using missiles that could travel around the world and wipe out entire cities. Everyone was scared.

Living in the “nuclear age” changed how children played war games. Now they pretended to be hunting spies who were selling nuclear secrets to the enemy. They built bomb shelters and filled them with canned goods in case they had to hide underground for the nuclear winter that would come after the radioactive fallout had blocked the sun and dropped the temperature of the earth’s surface. Sometimes they pretended to live in post-nuclear cities, turning empty lots and unused buildings into spaces filled with radioactive zombies. They even pretended to bury their dead, like Christopher and LJ do with their dinosaurs in The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963.

In some ways, these games were like the ones children had always played. They helped kids to imagine nuclear war as a reality, and to pretend as though there was something they could do to defend themselves. These games helped children to feel like they could be heroes in a war without battles. At the same time, these games were different. There were no enemy soldiers to fight against (since the Russians who had launched the bombs were on the other side of the world). There was also no way to win these games. Instead of pretending to fight, children pretended to survive.

About the Author

Margaret Peacock is a professor of history at the University of Alabama and author of Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War.