The coronavirus pandemic is pretty bad as catastrophes go. It has killed more people in the United States than the number of U. S. soldiers killed in World War I. It has had a heavy economic impact and we do not know how quickly the country will recover from the economic downturn. It has had a psychological impact in that people are asked to stay home and they are rebelling against that because it disrupts their lives too much, whatever may be the dangers of contagion. It leaves everybody with the feeling of how vulnerable we are to the almost invisible world of microbes. And the situation is getting worse rather than better. What if this turns into a general panic, with people roving the streets to attack who knows what? I have been told that Periclean Athens survived a plague and life went back to normal. I am not so sure that will happen this time around. The Black Plague changed the European economy and may have been responsible for the end of feudalism.

But this pandemic, I would insist, has not been the scariest time in the past hundred years, dating back to the last pandemic, the so-called “Spanish Flu”, which was, in fact, of American origins. That “honor” is to be reserved for the Cold War which was waged between the United States and the Soviet Union from, let us say, the time of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri in 1946, which all but declared it, the President of the United States sitting behind Churchill at the time, to 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and Reagan had arrived a few years before at what amounted to a Soviet surrender arrangement with Gorbachev, the details of which have not yet been made public. During that 43 year long war, the United States also lost as many soldiers as it had in World War I, if you add together Vietnam and Korea, two wars in which the United States and its allies engaged with Soviet or Communist proxies, and also add in the dead among our allies that resulted from other proxy wars in Africa and South America (remember Chile? Remember the Bay of Pigs?). Worse than that, during the Cold War. we were under the threat of most of us dying as a result of a nuclear exchange in which both sides would destroy one another within thirty minutes of launching. “The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists” was posting how close we were to midnight on its monthly cover and, according to its editors, we came within one minute of midnight. The talk was of “Better Red than Dead” and children were taught to hide under their desks to avoid bomb blast and many of us who were children at the beginning of the Cold War dreamed about atomic attacks and their aftermath.