I can't seem to turn the news on lately without hearing someone tell me how "9/11 was when we lost our sense of safety and security."

Who's "we", kemosabe?

I have to say, up front, that I think there's something a little disturbing and histrionic about our fascination with 9/11. It was a tragedy, absolutely, and to the people who lost loved ones in the attacks, it's a tragedy that will never wane. But the unprecedented contemplation of the national navel this week... I don't know. It just bugs me.

It bugs me when they say "we lost our sense of security and safety" and have to live in fear now. We did? And we do?

If you thought the borders of the United States somehow granted us magical protection from harm and 9/11 jolted you out of your naive innocence, then you're just deluded. You didn't lose your sense of security; you lost your comfortable illusion of security. I grew up during the Cold War, when the 1,500+ ICBMs of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces were no more than about fifteen minutes away at any time. This wasn't the unformed dread of some bearded guy in a cave in Afghanistan planning to knock down a few buildings; this was over a thousand ballistic missiles armed with nuclear weapons, multiple nuclear weapons in many cases, to say nothing at all of the Soviet Navy's SLBMs or Tu-26 Backfire bombers carrying out "kamikaze" attacks. This would not have resulted in the loss of a few thousand people. This would have resulted in the loss of a few tens of millions of people, probably a few hundreds of millions of people, and the general collapse of anything resembling modern technological civilization.

Remember those days? Remember being taught to hide under your school desk? Remember people building fallout shelters in their back yards? Remember civil defense shelters? Remember how it felt when we deployed Pershing II missiles to Europe? Remember when the imminent introduction of neutron bombs appeared to coat the slippery slope toward nuclear immolation with Teflon? Remember when the cornerstone of US nuclear strategy was the principle of Mutual Assured Destruction? Remember when nuclear strategists argued that hardening the civilian population would actually destabilize deterrence? Remember when acronyms like MAD and ABM and ICBM and MIRV and FOBS weren't just alphabet soup nonsense but really stood for really serious shit? Remember when the movie Fail-Safe scared the crap out of you because it could happen?

There's your insecurity for you. How quickly we forget.

Experts can argue about when the Cold War really ended. The USSR fell apart in 1991, and one could argue that the real Cold War was over before even that, when the Soviets withdrew the bulk of their SSBNs from launch stations off the coasts of the United States. But just for the sake of discussion, let's say that the Cold War and the possibility of a spasm nuclear exchange between the USA and the USSR ended in 1991. 9/11 happened in 2001. Unless you were younger than ten years old at the time of 9/11, you lived at least part of your life under the specter of full-scale nuclear war with the Soviets. Against that backdrop, claims that 9/11 destroyed our sense of security seem just a little overwrought to me.

I'm not arguing that the Cold War was good. I'm not arguing that nuclear war against the Soviets was ever likely (though at times, such as during the Yom Kippur War or the ghastly Soviet misinterpretation of a NATO military exercise in the 1980s, we got close). The entire Cold War was a horrid waste of resources and lives, and we'd all have been better off if saner heads had prevailed, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. But they didn't. And the reality was that for many years, both we and the Soviets were armed to the teeth, and all we needed was one accident, one misreading of intention, one madman, to burn down the whole world. And we knew it.

So you'll pardon me if your "loss of safety" doesn't move me very much. I feel far, far more secure now than I ever did during the Cold War, thank you very much. I'll take my chances with a terrorist armed with a box cutter. That's something I might be able to do something about, in the unlikely event that said terrorist ever conceives the notion that a yokel like me in the rural Arizona countryside is worth attacking. But a MIRVed SS-18 cold-launched out of a silo in some grim Soviet ICBM complex? Nothing I can do about that but wait for the end.