The real "Pre-Third" era ended during the administration of the elder George Bush. East and West Germany reunited, a number of Soviet states separated and became independent countries, and the remains the of the Soviet Union instituted democratic and free-market reforms.

Before those changes there was a constant faint overhanging sense of doom. It didn't dominate our thoughts, but it permeated them, a subtle shade of grey running through everything. The preachers on Sunday TV would talk about Armageddon, tying nuclear apcolypse in with the prophecied second coming. Science magazines had articles about the destructive power of our arsenals. Political discussions about reducing nuclear weapons and testing were always close to the front page (while now we rarely hear about them). There were TV shows, movies, and books about life after nuclear war. In the 50s people built bomb shelters. The area that I lived in was supposedly part of a relocation plan if radioactive fallout rendered major East Coast Cities uninhabitable.

An incident that happened to me in the mid-eighties during college summarizes up the mood. A bunch of my friends and I were sitting in one of the dorm rooms just hanging out. We were listening to music from a radio station about 60 miles to the north of us. Suddenly the music stopped and was replaced by the staticy noise of dead air waves. One of my friends shrugged and jokingly said, "Soviets probably just took out the city." For a moment everyone paused, and that shade of fear passed through the room. Then the nusic came back on, and we went back to what we were doing.

There was, in the mindset, a certain inevitability about it. There had been World War I, there had been World War II, and there would be World War III. Human nature guaranteed that sooner or later a mad man like Hitler would come to power again. There were, according to popular myth, two boxes with red buttons, one in the hands of the U.S. President, the other in hands of the Soviet Premiere. Should either one of these men in a moment of anger decide to press the button, Armageddon would begin. There were no such things and everyone really knew that, but the imagery fit with the notion of destruction being only an instant away.

Today we have our own concerns like the terrorist threat and North Korea with a few, limited-range nuclear weapons. It's not quite the same though. If terrorists were to blow up another building or poison the water supply of a city, it would be a terrible thing. If North Korea were to launch a nuclear weapon and take out an island in the Pacific, it would count as the greatest disaster in U.S. history. But under the threat of all-out nuclear war, we had two superpowers with thousands of weapons pointed at each other that could potentially destroy all life on the planet. Not just a human life, not just several thousand human lives, not even just all human life, but ALL LIFE. World War I had been called "The War to End all Wars", World War III would be the end of everything.

For my daughter's birthday last week, I got her the comic book Watchmen. I read "Watchmen" originally around the year when she was born. Reading it was the first time I realized that comic books could be more than mere entertainment. "Watchmen" was a work of art. Yes, it was about men running around in spandex and fighting crime, but it had mature underlying themes about political issues and human relations. The drawings in "Watchmen" weren't there to satisfy teenagers with short attention spans, they enhanced and added depth in ways that words couldn't.

The "Pre-Third" mentality was a significant element of what made "Watchmen" work as well as it did, and it occurred to me as I was giving it to my daughter that it was a mentality that she never had to grow up with. It's one thing to know about it objectively, but another to grow up with and live with it inside of you. She's a smart kid, and I'm certain she will see what I'm talking about, but I wonder if it will have the same impact. There is a lot in "Watchmen" besides the nuclear issues, and hopefully she will still be able to enjoy it. I'm part of nerd society and over the years I've given her a bunch of nerd-related gifts like board games and books. We both liked "The chronicles of Narnia", the Lord of the Rings, and Philip Pullman's books. I would like for this to take as well.