The Happy Hooligans of the North Dakota Air National Guard were tasked with defending against them. “North Dakota and Minnesota wereon the front lines.” But then the Russians developed their own.” As the weapons proliferated on both, the possibility of widespread attack increased: “They had enough bombs to go around.”īy 1954, the equation had swung toward a definite “yes.” “If they were headed for Washington, D.C., Soviet bombers would approach from Siberia over the North Pole,” Markus says. “Until then, we were the only ones who had the bomb. “Was Fargo-Moorhead actually a target for Russian bombers?” the historian asks. His post at the historical society, though, opens the doors to the day-to-day fears of his parents’ generation – summed up in that one particular room in his basement, built of corrugated metal encased in a foot of concrete. Markus, who’s pushing 40, is too young to have lived through the planet’s obsession 60 years ago with what seemed the looming shadow of imminent warfare. He’ll share the podium at the Hjemkomst Center with Roger Stenerson, who’ll recount his experiences with the aboveground nuclear tests of the early 1950s – the region’s last man standing who has personally witnessed the atomic bomb. It’s a handy dose of reality, though, for the program director of the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County as he prepares for “Atomic Age: Declassified,” a parlor talk Tuesday, Aug. “My wife says that I’m the only guy who, given the choice of a house with a garage or a fallout shelter in its basement, would pick the shelter,” he confesses. Historian Markus Krueger has a fallout shelter in his home in south Moorhead.
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